Cognitve Linguistics and Neurolinguistics

Being a biological system unit and disseminator of social algorithms, a human being can only realize its integrality and achieve its systemic unity through existence in the sign system. The objective, imperative novelty and uniqueness of the biological system of each new person, subject the existing sign system to disobjectivity, transforming it into a substratum for interpretations (semiosis) during  cognition process. Only one elementary triadic sign system (a sign (or representamen) – an object (or semiotic object) – an interpretant (or interpretant sign) already puts the entire sign system in a subordinate position to the interpreter, and makes a search for mechanisms of cognitive evolution aim at the interpreter, rather than at the sign system (including knowledge existing in the sign system), as an opportunity to influence actuality through her interpretants. Numerous problems in psychology, previously generated by these processes, and applied psychology (in particular, existential psychotherapy and transpersonal therapy), which receive answers in part from neurobiology, today get the most conceptual answer from the constructivist approach to cognition, placing the problematics of semiotics in a dependent position. Not only the specificity (type, character) of the sign system should be taken into account in one`s organized cognitive activity depending on her ontogeny, but the content of the sign system itself must be distilled through the human substance in order to become a substratum for her Cognitive ontogenesis (including, for the purpose of indirect influence on the interpretant).

This research paper confers the importance of lullabies being sung to children, commencing from the pre-linguistic stage of language acquisition until the end of the first few years of the infancy.  Thus, this report deals with the contributory linguistic factors that lullabies bear in triggering the language acquisition of infants apart from the first language cues that they receive and perceive through the speech that the adults use to communicate with them. The intention of this is to determine the whole-scale linguistic significance of lullabies, which are a universally shared experience within the human race. This once again investigates whether lullabies are mere sleep inducing melodies or whether they possess distinctive traits that reinforce language cues to the highly absorbent infant brain. The research was conducted using two methodologies: Questionnaire in Sinhala language was issued to twenty eight mothers, who have children until the age of three years, to provide personal and authentic responses, and a linguistic analysis of a Sinhala lullaby was done using the linguistic knowledge of the researcher. However, there could be different theories regarding this since actual baby brain image in the presence of lullabies was absent in the course of this research. Consequently, the results reveal that lullabies enrich the child linguistic development and thereby suggest the necessity to diverge the linguistic eye on lullabies as a rich resource which evokes and feeds diverse linguistic skills. Lullabies do not reach the heights as parentese do, but they are a rich resource which ensures informal education of an infant’s first language. Hence, this research outlines the value of incorporating lullabies to communicate with children and assertively recommends their usage.       

KEYWORDS: enrich, language acquisition, linguistic development, lullabies, speech

Herzlich bedanken möchte ich mich bei allen, die zur Durchführung und Fertigstellung meiner Dissertation beigetragen haben. An erster Stelle möchte ich mich bei Frau Prof. Dr. Claudia Riemer, Leiterin des Fachs Deutsch als Fremdsprache der Universität Bielefeld, bedanken, die durch ihre wissenschaftliche Betreuung und ihr Interesse an meinem Forschungsprojekt das Zustandekommen dieser Arbeit maßgeblich gefördert hat. Sie nahm sich trotz räumlicher Distanz zwischen Bielefeld und Sofia der Betreuung meiner Arbeit umfassend, bis ins wissenschaftlich-theoretische wie redaktionelle Detail und immer motivierend an. Prof. Dr. Karin Aguado vom Fachgebiet Deutsch als Fremd-und Zweitsprache an der Universität Kassel danke ich ganz besonders für die fachkundige Beratung und emotionale Unterstützung während der Zeit meiner Promotion. Weiterhin möchte ich mich sehr bei Herrn Prof. Dr. Göran Kauermann von der

Cognitive Science: From Foundations into the Future (online event)
Congress

Gerhard Preyer (Key Speakter))
Consciousness and Mental Representation

The Polish Society of Cognitive Science invites its members and supporters,  as well as all those interested in interdisciplinary research on the mind and cognition, to the 13th Congress of the Polish Society of Cognitive Science, which will be held as an online event on September 23-25/2021. We encourage you to register and send abstracts of your talks with the section marked.

The details are available on the website

https://zjazd-ptk.umk.pl/pages/main_page/

We are already looking forward to your participation!

The Polish Society of Cognitive Science

L'importance de la compétence en lecture des élèves au primaire, les approaches sociolinguistiques et le contexte de la langue française au Québec relèvent encore des débats importants: le statut du français en contexte d’immersion, les interactions entre les élèves à l'école et l’enseignant, le développement d'une langue seconde, la compétence orale, investissement social, et le lien entre l’identité et la culture.

Plusieurs chercheurs Canadiens se sont déjà penchés sur la réussite éducative et l’intégration socioscolaire des élèves des niveaux primaire et secondaire issus de l’immigration. Le rôle de la compétence en lecture des élèves des niveaux primaire et secondaire en lien avec leur réussite scolaire a été le sujet fondamental dans diverses études. La prévention des difficultés à l’école primaire maximisant les apprentissages socioscolaires au début de la scolarisation (Poulin et Brodeur, 2010) et la prévention des difficultés d’apprentissage en lecture chez les enseignants de maternelle (Brodeur et al, 2005) démontrent également l’importance de la compétence en lecture chez les élèves fréquentant l’école. Il devient donc pertinent d’explorer les facteurs ou les conditions favorables contribuant à la socialisation, l’adaptation et la réussite scolaire de ce publique. De viser à connaitre l’impact du côté socio-culturel et identitaire de l’apprentissage du français langue seconde(langue de la scolarité) en contexte français du Québec sur la réussite scolaire et socialisation des élèves allophones des niveaux primaire-secondaire, c’est-à-dire en lecture/écriture. L’étude aura comme objectif de donner un aperçu du parcours socioscolaire ainsi que les facteurs clés liés à la réussite scolaire.

Mots-clés : compétence en lecture- français langue seconde- réussite scolaire.

La neurolinguistique générale est sensée correspondre à la mise à niveau de la sémantique générale que Alfred Korzybski avait de nombreuses fois mentionné comme devant se produire en moins d'une génération après son décès (survenu en 1950), et qui en découle naturellement lorsque la barrière mentale causée par la certitude non justifiée que la réalité physique ne peut pas être confirmée avec certitude et ne peut pas être objectivement comprise est enlevée. Il est intéressant de noter que l'analyse qui conduisit à la présente mise à niveau, fut exécutée dans les années 1970, soit dans les délais prévus par Korzybski, même si elle ne fut complètement documentée que beaucoup plus tard dû au temps requis pour localiser l'ensemble des références formelles qui étaient nécessaires pour la confirmer.

A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling elements. In computational applications, GW architectures recruit many distributed, specialized agents to cooperate in resolving focal ambiguities. In the brain, conscious experiences may reflect a GW function.

For animals, the natural world is full of unpredictable dangers and opportunities, suggesting a general adaptive pressure for brains to resolve focal ambiguities quickly and accurately. GW theory aims to understand the differences between conscious and unconscious brain events.

In humans and related species the cortico-thalamic (C-T) core is believed to underlie conscious aspects of perception, thinking, learning, feelings of knowing (FOK), felt emotions, visual imagery, working memory, and executive control.

The C-T core has many anatomical hubs, but conscious percepts are unitary and internally consistent at any given moment. Over time, conscious contents constitute a very large, open set.This suggests that a brain-based GW capacity cannot be localized in a single anatomical hub. Rather, it should be sought in a functional hub – a dynamic capacity for binding and propagation of neural signals over multiple task-related networks, a kind of neuronal cloud computing.

In this view, conscious contents can arise in any region of the C-T core when multiple input streams settle on a winner-take-all equilibrium. The resulting conscious gestalt may ignite an any-to-many broadcast, lasting 100–200ms, and trigger widespread adaptation in previously established networks.

To account for the great range of conscious contents over time, the theory suggests an open repertoire of binding1 coalitions that can broadcast via theta/gamma or alpha/gamma phase coupling, like radio channels competing for a narrow frequency band. Conscious moments are thought to hold only 1–4 unrelated items; this small focal capacity may be the biological price to pay for global access.

Visuotopical maps in cortex specialize in features like color, retinal size, motion, object identity, and egocentric/allocentric framing, so that a binding coalition for the sight of a rolling billiard ball in nearby space may resonate among activity maps of LGN, V1-V4, MT, IT, as well as the dorsal stream. Spatiotopical activity maps can bind into coherent gestalts using adaptive resonance (reentry). Single neurons can join a dominant coalition by phase tuning to regional oscillations in the 4–12 Hz range.

Sensory percepts may bind and broadcast from posterior cortex, while non-sensory FOKs may involve prefrontal and fron- to temporal areas.

The anatomy and physiology of the hippocampal complex suggest a GW architecture as well. In the intact brain the hippocampal complex may support conscious event organization as well as episodic memory storage.

A global workspace (GW) is a functional hub of binding and propagation in a population of loosely coupled signaling elements. In computational applications, GW architectures recruit many distributed, specialized agents to cooperate in resolving focal ambiguities. In the brain, conscious experiences may reflect a GW function. For animals, the natural world is full of unpredictable dangers and opportunities, suggesting a general adaptive pressure for brains to resolve focal ambiguities quickly and accurately. GW theory aims to understand the differences between conscious and unconscious brain events. In humans and related species the cortico-thalamic (C-T) core is believed to underlie conscious aspects of perception, thinking, learning, feelings of knowing (FOK), felt emotions, visual imagery, working memory, and executive control. Alternative theoretical perspectives are also discussed. The C-T core has many anatomical hubs, but conscious percepts are unitary and internally consistent at any given moment. Over time, conscious contents constitute a very large, open set. This suggests that a brain-based GW capacity cannot be localized in a single anatomical hub. Rather, it should be sought in a functional hub-a dynamic capacity for binding and propagation of neural signals over multiple task-related networks, a kind of neuronal cloud computing. In this view, conscious contents can arise in any region of the C-T core when multiple input streams settle on a winner-take-all equilibrium. The resulting conscious gestalt may ignite an any-to-many broadcast, lasting ∼100-200 ms, and trigger widespread adaptation in previously established networks. To account for the great range of conscious contents over time, the theory suggests an open repertoire of binding 1 coalitions that can broadcast via theta/gamma or alpha/gamma phase coupling, like radio channels competing for a narrow frequency band. Conscious moments are thought to hold only 1-4 unrelated items; this small focal capacity may be the biological price to pay for global access. Visuotopic maps in cortex specialize in features like color, retinal size, motion, object identity, and egocentric/allocentric framing, so that a binding coalition for the sight of a rolling billiard ball in nearby space may resonate among activity maps of LGN, V1-V4, MT, IT, as well as the dorsal stream. Spatiotopic activity maps can bind into coherent gestalts using adaptive resonance (reentry). Single neurons can join a dominant coalition by phase tuning to regional oscillations in the 4-12 Hz range. Sensory percepts may bind and broadcast from posterior cortex, while non-sensory FOKs may involve prefrontal and frontotemporal areas. The anatomy and physiology of the hippocampal complex suggest a GW architecture as well. In the intact brain the hippocampal complex may support conscious event organization as well as episodic memory storage.

Zusammenfassender Überblick über die Entwicklung der Intelligenz bei kleinen Kindern das mit der Entwicklung der Neokortexverbalenbereiche durch die Beherrschung der Lesefähigkeit zusammen fällt, und des Zustands der Entwicklung der Alphabetisierung von Kindern in der Welt.

Aksen didefinisasikan sebagai “perbezaan individu daripada segi nada suara, sebutan atau pemilihan perkataan. Aksen juga bermaksud cara percakapan bagi sekumpulan manusia atau penduduk di sesuatu tempat. Setiap tempat mempunyai cara percakapan yang berbeza dan inilah yang membuatkan seseorang itu dapat mengagak di manakah asal seseorang berdasarkan aksen mereka.

The role of age encompasses a wide area of linguistic research dating ever
since the studies of Wernicke’s and Brocca’s area as well as Chomsky’s LAD and Lenneberg’s
Critical period hypothesis, and up to more contemporary cognitive research concerns in the
past couple of decades. Even though there have been contradictory understandings of the
role of age in the process of language acquisition, it has always been, and still is, an
intriguing and important part of neurolingusitic investigations. We know that the human
brain is ageing and that there are assumptions that in certain period of life we are more
capable to acquire and perfect a language than in others. This issue becomes even more
complex if we consider the process of second/foreign language acquisition and its neural
roots. This paper focuses on presenting some of the most influential and important theories,
discussions and conclusions related to language acquisition in general as well as
second/foreign language acquisition. Through research explanations and examples the
author tries to distinguish in what fields is the role of age the most influential, and of course
in which way and to what extent.

A sentence completion task, first introduced by with English speakers, is employed here with Italian to explore the issue of interactivity of different levels of processing in sentence production. In a series of three experiments, we tested the effects of three variables on the number of subject-verb agreement errors. Like Bock and Miller, we found that mismatching singular and plural features between the subject head noun and a local noun in a complex NP increased the number of errors. It was also found that ambiguous morphophonological marking on the subject noun increased errors. The most striking result was that the preferred interpretation of the complex NP had a significant influence. Singular heads, normally taken to denote several tokens, such as the label on the bottles, tend to induce incorrect plural verb completions. This is in contrast to the findings for English speakers and raises the question as to whether the construction of subject-verb agreement is a purely syntactic process in all languages. A modified version of a model of syntactic encoding is proposed that can satisfactorily deal with the number mismatching effect and crucially the presencelabsence of semantic effects on verbal agreement in different languages.

The present event-related brain potential (ERP) study investigates mechanisms underlying the processing of morphosyntactic information during real-time auditory sentence comprehension in French. Employing an auditory-visual sentence-picture matching paradigm, we investigated two types of anomalies using entirely grammatical auditory stimuli: (i) semantic mismatches between visually presented actions and spoken verbs, and (ii) number mismatches between visually presented agents and corresponding morphosyntactic number markers in the spoken sentences (determiners, pronouns in liaison contexts, and verb-final "inflection"). We varied the type and amount of number cues available in each sentence using two manipulations. First, we manipulated the verb type, by using verbs whose number cue was audible through subject (clitic) pronoun liaison (liaison verbs) as well as verbs whose number cue was audible on the verb ending (consonant-final verbs). Second, we manipulated the pre-verbal context: each sentence was preceded either by a neutral context providing no number cue, or by a subject noun phrase containing a subject number cue on the determiner. Twenty-two French-speaking adults participated in the experiment. While sentence judgment accuracy was high, participants' ERP responses were modulated by the type of mismatch encountered. Lexico-semantic mismatches on the verb elicited the expected N400 and additional negativities. Determiner number mismatches elicited early anterior negativities, N400s and P600s. Verb number mismatches elicited biphasic N400-P600 patterns. However, pronoun + verb liaison mismatches yielded this pattern only in the plural, while consonant-final changes did so in the singular and the plural. Furthermore, an additional sustained frontal negativity was observed in two of the four verb mismatch conditions: plural liaison and singular consonant-final forms. This study highlights the different contributions of number cues in oral language processing and is the first to investigate whether auditory-visual mismatches can elicit errors reminiscent of outright grammatical errors. Our results emphasize that neurocognitive mechanisms underlying number agreement in French are modulated by the type of cue that is used to identify auditory-visual mismatches.

Description of the mechanics of conceptual thinking stemming from interaction sequences between the limbic system and the verbal areas of the neocortex. Description of the rise of the attention level to full active awareness when a feeling of uneasiness due to a verbal stimulus is triggered by the amygdala, followed by an active cogitation process involving the verbal areas of the neocortex, ending in the strengthening in the neocortex by the hippocampus of a synaptic network corresponding to a modified verbal sequence that removes or reduces the feeling of uneasiness that initiated the sequence. Description of the generalization ability stemming from the use of articulated languages, acquired by education, from which emerges conceptual thinking and the collectively intelligible mathematical language that also develops to various degrees in some individuals by education. Description of the mathematical thinking mode whose engrams have been located in the neocortex in areas that do not overlap the verbal areas.