Language Competence Across Populations


Book Description

This unique, edited book bridges studies in language disorders and linguistic theory with timely contributions from leading scholars in language development. It presents an attempt to define Specific Language Impairment, relating it to children of normal and disordered language capabilities. The chapter presentations examine language development across a variety of populations of children, from those with Specific Language Impairment to second language learners. The contributors discuss criteria for the definition of SLI, compare and contrast SLI with profiles of children with other disorders and dialects, and offer a comprehensive look at the Whole Human Language, which ties together spoken and signed languages. Methodological concerns that affect the credibility and generalizability of the findings are discussed and controversies between opposing linguistic approaches to language acquisition are presented. The conceptual thread that gradually reveals itself as the chapters unfold is a theoretical issue of central importance to cognitive theory, as well as to our understanding of the biological correlates of language--it concerns the variability that linguistic competence can manifest in children under different biological conditions and life circumstances. Language Competence Across Populations: Toward a Definition of Specific Language Impairment is an essential volume for advanced students and scholars in linguistics and psychology who have an interest in language acquisition and language disorders, as well as for the clinical professionals dealing with children with language impairments.




Against the Written Word: Toward a Universal Illiteracy


Book Description

If the Gutenberg Bible is the alpha, Against the Written Word is the OMEGA. “Wielding the satiric tone of a Gen-X Jonathan Swift or leftist Andy Kaufman . . . Svenonius is an engaging companion . . . and he lands some scathing blows, as when he links internet porn to contemporary Christianity by noting that both are ‘anti-intellectual, patriarchal, have an elitist or outsider self-image, and are aesthetically garish.'” —Publishers Weekly Against the Written Word is the most important, most revolutionary book produced since the advent of the printing press; the book that will liberate readers from reading, writers from writing, and booksellers from peddling their despicable wares. This book ushers in a new era of freedom from reading and all its attendant bedfellows such as Enlightenment thinking and the mass alienation wrought by the phonetic alphabet. Against the Written Word will be a tremendous best seller and simultaneously the last book that anyone will read. With nineteen essays ripping, shredding, tearing apart all the bugaboos that haunt humanity nowadays, Against the Written Word is a must-read for any aspiring radical or would-be gnostic who has a penchant for words, thought, clothes, intoxicants, music, art, expression, etc. The work is presented in a range of writing: essays, screenplays, lectures, sci-fi stories, and manifestos, with topics that include “the rise of incorporated man,” “tourism as the neoliberal mode of military occupation,” a workshop on songwriting for the purpose of suggestion and mind control, and many more. This handsome, illustrated book will correct the paucity of thought that characterizes the modern bookstore, and will practically sell itself. It will call out from the shelf to ingratiate itself to the unsuspecting everyday book browser, who will be hooked and then hungrily consume it. Infected with a wild-eyed evangelism, they will then proliferate it amongst their friends and acquaintances. These new readers will disseminate it, and so on; soon this slim, innocuous volume will define an epoch and steer thought from here on out. The bookseller will be surprised and pleased to find that it will be the only book they need to stock. Against the Written Word will be dominant in a manner the market has not seen since the Bible tore up best-seller lists in the Middle Ages or Mao’s Little Red Book wowed the critics in Red China.




Common Place


Book Description

Common Place is about how we can develop community and create convivial and sustainable places in the face of disjointed and fast-placed growth. It offers strategies for reclaiming and improving our neighborhoods and cities, which today are increasingly dominated by fear and disintegration and the automobile. Douglas Kelbaugh offers here a personal, passionate statement of how architecture and urban design can enrich our lives. At the heart of the book are summaries of eight design workshops, or charrettes, each consisting of five days of brainstorming by university students, community leaders, and design professionals. The charrettes apply design concepts to real problems such as housing, transportation, and suburban sprawl. Thousands of hours of creative effort have produced a blueprint for the Seattle region that is pertinent to other regions. Bridging academic theory and on-the-ground practice, Common Place is an indispensable book for designers, planners, city officials, developers, environmentalists, and citizens interested in understanding and shaping the American metropolis.







Toward a New Legal Common Sense


Book Description

In a period of paradigmatic transition, Toward a New Legal Common Sense aims to devolve to law its emancipatory potential.




Toward a General Theory of Action


Book Description

This new edition introduces the social science audiences of a new century to one of the classic highlights of the mid-twentieth century. This is the most general statement of the general theory of action as it was developed by its principle exponent, Talcott Parsons, and his close collaborators who formed the core of the fabled department of social relations at Harvard University. Toward a General Theory of Action is an extremely ambitious formulation of the ingredients, dimensions, and ranges that determine human behavior. Parsons and Shils enunciate principles that are at the core of contemporary social science preoccupations-including the precarious balance between social integration and conflict. The volume is at once universal in intent and highly personal, an expression of Parsons' thought, one of the most notable sociological theorists of the century. Finally, the book symbolizes the interdisciplinary impulse that typified a widespread belief in the unity of the sciences. This edition includes the collaborative group's introductory statement, Richard Sheldon's essay on the theoretical and philosophical status of the general theory of action, and "Values, Motives and Systems of Action" by Parsons and Shils. Guy Swanson, writing in the The American Sociological Review, noted that "Parsons and Shils have performed a major service in clearing away many old controversies, in showing the reasonableness of a behavioral foundation for general theory in social science as a whole and in sociology in particular, in clarifying the interrelations among many concepts, and in the insightful interpretation of particular pieces of data." It is testimony to this book's continuing significance that it continues to generate new lines of research and writings.




Toward a European Nation?


Book Description

This text presents the work of scholars from all over Europe who examine processes of integration and disintegration at the level of nation states, federations, regions and Europe overall.




Toward an Understanding of Europe


Book Description

For the earnest student of Europe, this unique work brings together a basic review of essential segments of intellectual thinking. In this volume, pertinent conceptual relationships, substantial relevant particulars, and an array of specific mechanics are all intertwined and used as a focus to examine the ongoing complex European integration process. By defining important parameterizations, this text develops a paradigm probing the current-day international activities which are rapidly leading to meta-national European supra-nationality. The most basic substantive of the integration process is the collective various peoples of Europe with their individual diversities. The origins of these collective diversities, the defining historical nationhood precedent, is herein examined, revealing the essential elements of individual identities, ethnologies, linguistic collectivities, and other antecedents imputing elements which compose the substance and stuff today coalescing into tomorrow's future harmonized European identity. This book is unique as it traces from many different origins the elements that are merging Europe into one collective future. This book sketches a process of onward integration as a continuation of what has happened in the past. This argument is augmented with many time lines, definition martial, and historical presentation, making it easy for the reader to grasp straightforwardly the wide-ranging substance out of which a single whole is being constructed. As a cognitive dynamic, movements such as the Nordic League, European Union, and EFTA as well as many other entities have been noted-- movements each in their own way, all contributing to an overall integrated Europe. As the more prominent initiative, the European Union with its diverse and constituent parts is carefully presented, as well as its unique decision-making process which is working to focus singular interests into collective benefits. Integration is an inevitable byproduct of continentalization, itself a sub consideration of globalization. The time and perhaps the gestalt of the end result of this activity is not known; however, with a comprehensive overview the motion is clearly identifiable, and the direction unequivocally certain. The Single House of Europe is being built of very different elements. This book defines these elements in terms of a paradigm for understanding the process of integration, the process that is rapidly forming the new Single House of Europe.




Engaging Currere Toward Decolonization


Book Description

This timely volume uniquely illustrates how currere can be applied to the process of decolonizing subjectivity. Centered around the experiences of one black woman from the third world, the text details the theoretical underpinnings of Currere towards Decolonizing (CTD), and walks the reader through the autobiographical analysis involved in dismantling cognitive colonization. Conceived as a four-part autobiographical process of remembering, identifying, imagining, and decolonizing, the method of CTD is demonstrated as a means of recognizing and reflecting on how the colonial project has been internalized, and of gradually dismantling the psychological, affective, and material impact of colonization. Using both theoretical and experiential standpoints, and intersecting with notions of anti-blackness, linguicide, and Africana womanhood, the volume moves curriculum theory urgently towards anti-colonial mechanisms that disrupt the colonizing process. This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in curriculum studies, post-colonialism, and Black studies more broadly. Those specifically interested in interpersonal psychoanalysis, as well as gender and third world studies, will also benefit from this book.




Nationalism And Policy Toward The Nationalities In The Soviet Union


Book Description

This book examines Soviet nationalities policy from the 1920s to the present. Tracing nationalities policy to its roots in Bolshevik efforts to arrest the decay of the Russian Empire, Dr Simon looks at the evolution of Soviet policy, analyzes the reactions of non-Russian peoples to the policies and discusses the forms of expression and the goals of