Growing into Language: Developmental Trajectories and Neural Underpinnings 0192849980, 9780192849984

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Growing into Language

Growing into Language Developmental Trajectories and Neural Underpinnings LI LI A N A T O L C H I NSK Y AND RU T H A . B ER M A N

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman 2023 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022946566 ISBN 978–0–19–284998–4 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents Acknowledgments Prologue

1. Brains for language (and everything else)

vi vii

1

2. Language for recollection

38

3. Language for actuality

75

4. Language for (im)possible worlds

114

5. Language for imagery

149

6. Language for reflection (on language)

187

7. Language for literacy and literacy for language

225

Afterthoughts Glossary I: Terms related to brain sites and functions Glossary II: Terms related to brain sites and neuro-imaging techniques References Author Index Subject Index

265 278 288 294 327 338

Acknowledgments The authors are grateful to the following for help with preparing the manuscript for submission to the publishers: Simon John Cook, who served as our main copyeditor, Sarah Winkler for help with copyediting and tracking down references, Vera Rusyanov for her work on references, and Ittamar Erb with indexing. We would like to thank the team at OUP for their patience, their professionalism, and good will, particularly Julia Steer, Vicki Sunter, and Sam Augustin Durai Ebenazer, our project editors. Thanks, too, to Pancho Tolchinsky and Catalina Estrada for help with the graphic design of the figure. We are grateful to our respective partners, Eduardo Landsman and Yaacov Yaar, for their support and wisdom throughout the process of producing this work. And to our mentors, colleagues, and students, without whom this book would not have materialized.

Prologue “Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.” Edward Sapir, 1921, p. 235 “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.” Proverbs 18:21 We embarked on this endeavor to show how language develops ‘beyond age five,’ from childhood to adolescence and subsequently.1 Psychologists and linguists, like parents, have always been fascinated by the appearance of a child’s first words and how rapidly children turn into talkers, so much so that umpteen books have been written on their early language. Ours is a book on older users of a language. It deals with how schoolchildren and adolescents employ language in different communicative settings and for different purposes—to tell stories, engage in conversations, speculate about the future, speak metaphorically, make jokes, reflect on language structure, and even write academic essays. The miracle of early language is so amazing that many philosophers and linguists regard it as an innate endowment, a gift that must be in the genes. How can language be a learned behavior given what they call ‘the poverty of the stimulus’?2 Parents almost never speak in complete sentences, they constantly repeat themselves, they often don’t correct their children’s mistakes. Besides, children, like grownups, say things they have never heard before. We will argue, instead, that there is abundant evidence that poverty of input makes children poor language users, while the opposite is true—a rich linguistic environment makes for better talkers and writers. In other words, the idea of language as an inborn, genetic endowment needs to be modulated by external factors of environment and culture—ambient language(s), home background, schooling, socio-economic circumstances, and so on. Across the book, we invoke both internal and external factors as interacting in language development: genes, environment, and the nature of the task. These involve what speakers inherit by being human, the sociocultural habitat in which they are raised, and the purposes for which they use language, like writing a diary, chatting at the family dinner table, or deciding if two words mean the same. The authors of this book are linguists, originally trained in both structuralist (European) and formal (American) linguistics. For the last fifty years—yes, we are pre-boomer women—we have attempted to explain how language outputs change

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with age. Over the years of our scholarly careers, each of us has framed an approach to language development in the context of general cognitive development. Rather than taking either domain—language or cognition—as prerequisite for the other, we conceive of them as in constant interaction, supporting one another along the lifespan. However, until recently, references to cognition and affect were rather vague, and the brain—the site of cognition and emotion—was largely missing from inquiry into language development. Current advances in neurobiology have enabled us to integrate the brain for providing a deeper explanation of (some of the) developmental changes we observe in the use of language. For example, why is storytelling such an addictive activity? Why do adolescents develop such a peculiar vocabulary? Why are metaphorical meanings grasped before ironic ones? How is it that 7-year-olds are unable to define what is a word, even though they have been using all kinds of words (appropriately) since the age of 2? How is it that children write before they read? To achieve our goal of illuminating language use and development helped by neurobiology, our book begins with an overview of the properties of the working brain, stressing that the capacity to learn and memorize as well as to predict and correct errors remains plastic at least into, possibly beyond, late adolescence. The fact that crucial developments take place in nearly every aspect of language use after early childhood justifies the scope of our inquiry. This initial overview on the behavior of the brain, what it does or does not enable us to know and do with language, provides the setting for the rest of the book. Subsequently, (in each of Chapters 2 to 7), we comment on the neurobiological underpinnings of particular facets of language use, and the skills children need to develop to express themselves adequately in different realms of experience. The next three chapters move along a timeline: Chapter 2 tracks language usage in the world of past experiences, how people recount events for telling stories in the narrative genre; Chapter 3 looks at how people wield language in the actual world of the present, for interacting with family and peers or describing entities and presenting arguments; Chapter 4 considers the ways people reflect on possible worlds and alternative eventualities in the future. We then move to the clusters of linguistic and cognitive abilities required for different domains of language use. Chapter 5 takes us to the world of imagery, where people speak idiomatically, in culturally fixed ways, combining words that make no sense on the surface, like saying that someone who died kicked the bucket— a domain where people communicate by implication, indirect speech acts, and figurative usages. Chapter 6 traces how people use language to talk about language, how language is turned from a means of communication to an object of reflection. Finally, before moving on to our concluding ‘Afterthoughts,’ Chapter 7 tackles the world of literacy, from digital texting to academic essays, where people use writing and reading as a way of thinking—and we distinguish between script-literacy as mastering the

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physical elements of a writing system and text-literacy as being able to handle different types of written discourse. Each of the six usage-based chapters (2 to 7) opens by surveying what philosophers, cognitive scientists, and/or historians have had to say about the targeted domains, proceeds to outlining the linguistic means of expression that characterize them and their neurological underpinnings in the brain, and concludes with the developmental trajectories that children and adolescents traverse in each of these realms of experience. Running across the book as a whole are several motifs. (1) Development: A key theme is development—in the sense of language change in the life of individuals.3 In line with mainstream linguistic approaches, we agree that before age 5 every normal child is a linguistic genius. The book that heralded the coming of age of developmental psycholinguistics some fifty years ago (Brown, 1973) ended its study when the three children whose speech was recorded had not yet reached four years of age. Other studies claim to show that by age 3, “children have acquired the basic phonological, morpho-syntactic, and semantic regularities of the target language, irrespective of the language or languages to be learned” (Weissenborn & Ho¨hle, 2000, p. vii).4 Here we aim to show that, at each point in development, children (and adults, too) need to cope with different problems of verbal communication, for which they constantly need to develop fresh strategies of adaptation and diverse forms of expression. For example, texting peers requires (linguistic) survival strategies that differ from those for conversing at a family dinner table or answering a question in class—and each of these has its own characteristics among grade-schoolers compared with teenagers. Optimal development of an organism depends on its adaptation to varied surroundings rather than solely on a full-blown final environment (Lehrman, 1953), so that all species of organisms have evolved to adapt to their unique niches at each point in development. Here we attempt to convey to our readers how children and adolescents adapt to particular niches at different points in their development, by relying on recent advances in neurobiology that demonstrate brain plasticity and the lengthy development of executive functions.5 Four main time spans can be identified in language development in general. Starting with moving into language from birth to 3 years, children cross to a psycholinguistic frontier at late preschool age (around 4 to 5 years). Subsequently, at around age 6 to 12 years, they ‘go conventional,’ adapting to the norms of the ambient society in their use of language as in other domains. Later still, around ages 13 to 19 years, young people shift to increasing autonomy and individuality of expression, with adolescence a watershed in the transition from childhood to adulthood in linguistic proficiency as in sexual maturation and social behavior.6 In going ‘beyond age 5,’ our book focuses on the latter two stages. (2) Neurobiological perspectives: We adopt a neoconstructivist approach (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992) as a distinctive framework in neurobiology that shapes our view of the relationship between genetic endowment, brain structuring, and

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experience, and is relevant to learning cultural objects such as writing or mathematics. This highlights several properties of the development of brain structures toward increasing specialization, a growing capacity for attending to different aspects of a task in parallel, and greater skill in anticipating outcomes based on previous experience. Other important neurobiological factors in language learning and use are the hierarchical organization of the brain that enables cognitive control and its long-lasting power for learning, as an enduring capacity that motivates our interest in language development beyond early childhood. (3) Form and function: Following psycholinguists like Karmiloff-Smith (1979, 1992) and Slobin (1973, 2001), our concern is with the interrelations between linguistic forms and their discourse functions rather than with either one or the other. By linguistic forms, we refer to the structural elements of language—morphemes, words, clauses, sentences. And for us as linguists, rather than pedagogues or purists, grammar refers to the principles that govern how people actually use language when they speak and write rather than rules of correct usage.7 Across languages, grammatical forms fall into different interacting structural domains: Phonology—how the sounds of a language, its consonants and vowels, its intonation patterns and tones, are pronounced and how they are combined to form words and groups of words; Morphology—how words are built up in a language from elements like roots, stems, prefixes, and suffixes; and Syntax—how words are combined together to form phrases, clauses, and sentences.8 We approach the grammatical structures of language and its lexicon (people’s mental word-stock, their vocabulary) in functional terms: we query how linguistic forms are employed in different communicative contexts and for varied purposes. That is, our concern is with authentic use of language. (4) Language knowledge and language use: A well-known distinction popularized by Chomsky-inspired linguistics is the dichotomy between so-called competence and performance. Performance, the way people naturally talk in different circumstances, is considered as the external realization of an underlying competence. The performance facet of language may contain hesitations, mistakes, or speech fragments, whereas competence is viewed as intact, reflecting the system of formal principles known by “an ideal speaker-listener, in a homogenous speech-community” thus “unaffected by [performance limitations]” (Chomsky, 1965, p. 3). We reject this dichotomy since for us, what people know about their language is not only manifested in its use, it is also shaped by how they use it for different purposes.9 People cannot know, and children cannot learn, a language without using it, and the more and better they use it, the richer and deeper their knowledge of it. Besides, how we use language is affected by the social situation of communication (at home or school, with friends or colleagues, in intimate personal contact or formal settings).10 Language use also depends on the particular genre of discourse—conversations, jokes, stories, lectures, essays, scientific articles, etc. Genre has a powerful impact on how people speak or write. From a young age,

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children employ language differently in conversing with friends (the genre of peer talk), when telling a story (the narrative genre), or when expounding on a topic (an expository genre). Comprehension (interpreting what a person hears or reads) and production (formulating what a person says or writes) are both facets of language use—though some mistakenly identify comprehension with competence. From early childhood throughout the lifespan, comprehension typically precedes and exceeds production (Campbell et al., 1982; Keenan & MacWhinney, 1987). People understand more words than they produce in their own speech or writing (their receptive versus productive vocabulary), and we all understand complex syntactic constructions that we might never ourselves produce. This book deals mainly with production, since comprehension studies are typically experimentally structured and deal with isolated linguistic forms rather than text-embedded usage in authentic contexts. We are interested in the unconsciously internalized knowledge that speaker-writers recruit when they use language to chat (orally or by texting), to argue, or to analyze a topic. But we also consider the fact that people can bring this unconscious knowledge to the surface by explicit mention of analytical features of their language by means of meta-linguistic commentary (Chapter 6). This might take the form of a child saying “I know why elephant is such a long word, because an elephant is big and a mouse is small”; and a high-school student will recognize that a word that sounds the same may have different spellings (Chapter 7), different meanings, and different syntactic functions (e.g., the verbs RODE, ROWED, and the noun ROAD).11 (5) Literacy: Becoming literate is an integral part of later language development, both to be a fully functioning member of one’s community and as a factor that changes people’s knowledge and perception of their language. We challenge the typical opposition between language acquisition as a natural process and literacy as an instructional outcome: language is neither strictly natural nor is learning to read and write strictly instructional, suggesting that we may need to reassess the notion of natural processes. Individuals raised in literate societies of today need to adapt to constantly changing communication technologies so as to participate actively in their sociocultural environment. At the same time, literate people need to adapt to the socio-cultural and rhetorical conventions of their culture.12 In many traditional cultures, a good story must carry a moral; in food-gathering societies, narrators telling a story about a quest will provide details of the route taken by the participant(s), highlighting the script of paths in expeditions aimed at finding food. In contrast, narrators raised in goal-oriented Western cultures will describe the same situation in terms of the endpoint goal of the protagonist(s), showing culture-bound differences in what people consider relevant or important to convey to others. This variation is also developmentally modified, since the content of texts produced by younger children in a given society differs from that of their

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elders, affected both by their shared socio-cultural background and by the cognitive boundaries of their world knowledge. We show that, with age, narrators shift to more abstract and esoteric topics, for example by describing conflict in terms of physical fighting to disagreements in principle, by talking about theft of concrete possessions to plagiarizing of ideas. And we also query how such variation is affected by different rhetorical traditions (Continental versus Anglo-American, say) that shape language use for academic purposes in the context of globalization and the homogenizing impact of the internet.13 (6) Filtering by language: Language development is filtered by the set of lexical and grammatical options provided by the particular language that is being acquired (Berman & Slobin, 1994, pp. 517–533). Learners of English face a different task from learners of the same age and background acquiring Hebrew or Spanish as a first language. This does not mean that it is more difficult to become a native speaker in one language than another; on the contrary, the path to becoming a proficient speaker in one’s first language follows a similar timeline in Zulu or Portuguese, in German or Turkish. But the way speakers formulate their ideas in the domains of our concern here (telling a story or a joke, arguing about the current state of affairs, or relating to future possibilities) will depend on the particular lexical elements and grammatical structures of their native language. The idea of filtering can also refer to an individual’s perspective in using language in different circumstances. The situations we talk or write about do not present themselves to us as pre-encoded verbally. The same experiences, events, and ideas are filtered by speakers’ world knowledge and the perspective they select for talking about a given state of affairs. Two people might respond completely differently to being in isolation during the COVID-19 pandemic: Speaker A: “It was a welcome time-out from the hassle and bustle of my ordinary life”; Speaker B: “It sent me into a state of total claustrophobia.” Besides, how we encode the world verbally depends on the linguistic choices we choose to make. This is because “different lexico-grammatical choices can be mobilized to realize the same rhetorical goals equally convincingly” (Chang & Schleppegrell, 2011, p. 148). People can and do use different words and grammatical constructions to express the same idea.14 A puzzle here is how, if at all, language development is affected by whether a language has dedicated grammatical means for marking a given conceptual distinction. For example, English has two different forms for talking about situations that are in process at the time of speaking as against habitual states of affairs: compare ‘she is talking Russian/she talks Russian’ (Chapter 3). But not all European let alone South-East Asian languages make an overt distinction between the two. The same is true of the difference between hypothetical and counterfactual conditional sentences: If you tried harder, you would succeed/If you had tried harder, you would have succeeded (Chapter 4). Does this mean that speakers of some languages do not understand the difference between what is going on right now or what is generally true? Or between a possibility that can still be realized (you could

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still succeed) and one that is no longer possible (you didn’t try hard enough so you didn’t succeed)? We doubt that this is so. On the other hand, “if a linguistic form is highly accessible, its functional development may be accelerated” (Slobin, 2001, p. 624), so that having an overtly available form may make a given distinction conceptually more salient for speakers in general. Here we are left with what we find to be still a largely unresolved puzzle. Slobin’s path-breaking study on universal and particular in language acquisition (1982), comparing the linguistic performance of children aged 2 to 4 years, native speakers of four different languages (English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish), showed that the 2-year-olds were all alike in their verbal abilities, and clearly less proficient than the older children. Yet all the speakers of English were linguistically more like one another, and more like adult English speakers, than were the Italian, Turkish, or (then) Serbo-Croatians. This insight has led us to avoid an Anglo-centric bias to argue that the factors of age (development) and target language (typology) interact across the lifespan in moving from initial to advanced states of linguistic knowledge and language use. The children and young people that populate our book are generally so-called mainstream students raised in Israel, the U.S., and Spain, although throughout we also give examples from other languages. They are typically-developing children and adolescents, who do not suffer from internal disorders or language-related physical disabilities. We recognize the critical importance of atypical development for shedding light on language knowledge, development, and use (Thomas & Karmiloff Smith, 2003). But the present volume would have doubled in size had we given this domain its due. Finally, the book is dedicated to the late Annette Karmiloff-Smith—colleague, teacher, and friend. Our approach is largely inspired by her ideas on development, her contributions to neuro-constructivist thinking, and her neither nativist nor empiricist conceptualization of human cognition. She is sorely missed by us both and would have been an invaluable consultant at all phases of our work on this book.

Notes 1. Taken from the title of Karmiloff-Smith’s (1986a) chapter ‘Some fundamental aspects of language development after age 5.’ 2. The term was coined by Noam Chomsky in his 1980 “reply to Piaget.” 3. The natural sciences distinguish between ontogeny—the origin and development of an organism usually from the time of fertilization of the egg to adulthood across the lifespan—as against phylogeny—the study of the evolutionary development of groups of organisms based on shared genetic and anatomical characteristics. This perspective is beyond the scope of our undertaking, nor do we take into account diachronic linguistics, concerning changes in a given language across time.

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4. This led to (re)naming the field ‘language acquisition,’ in the view that language is acquired naturally, without special instruction, rather than ‘language learning,’ which implies some instruction or conscious learning rather than spontaneous progression of knowledge. 5. Executive functions are the cognitive processes necessary for selecting and successfully monitoring behaviors that facilitate the attainment of chosen goals, in the form of mental abilities like working memory, flexible thinking, and self-control. 6. Across the book, where chronological ages are mentioned—e.g., 12 months, age 3;6, 15 to 16 years—these are gross approximations somewhere around the average or median age range for a given phenomenon as documented in research on language development around the world. When mean age includes year and months, the two values are separated by a semi-colon (e.g., 6;8 = six years, eight months). 7. The term entered English from Old French grammaire via Latin from Greek grammatikē (tekhnē) ‘(art) of letters,’ from gramma, grammat- ‘letter of the alphabet, thing written,’ with grammar one of the three pillars of Medieval scholarship, together with rhetoric and logic. To this day, many identify it with ‘correct usage’ (whatever that means), taking the classical languages as models, and considering the vernaculars of everyday speech beneath the dignity of formal study. In modern linguistics, in contrast, grammar refers to the structural aspects of language, how linguistic elements are built up into larger units, from morphemes to words and on to phrases, clauses, and up to full sentences (again, whatever is meant by common terms like ‘word’ or ‘sentence’). In fact, the notion of sentence is largely an artifact of formal grammars or linguistic scholarship rather than a viable construct for actual usage in speech (Halliday, 1989) or even in writing (Chafe, 1994). 8. For example, the English word elephant can take the grammatical inflection -s to form its plural, and the derivational suffix -ine changing it from a noun to an adjective elephantine. 9. This dichotomy has been queried on several grounds. The sociolinguistic William Labov (1972a) remarks: “It is now evident to many linguists that the primary purpose of the [performance/competence] distinction has been to help the linguist exclude data which he finds inconvenient to handle …. If performance involves limitations of memory, attention, and articulation, then we must consider the entire English grammar to be a matter of performance” (pp. 109–110). 10. Some researchers (e.g., De Busser & LaPolla, 2015) go so far as to argue that the extralinguistic environment has an effect not only on how language is used in different circumstances, but also on the grammatical structure of languages. 11. Words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like road, rode, rowed, or write, rite, and right, are called homophones; words that are spelled the same but have more than one meaning, like watch, adder, battery, are called homonyms. 12. Unlike in ancient times, we use the term ‘rhetoric’ in its contemporary sense, to apply to the linguistic and stylistic resources utilized by a speaker/writer for organizing and delivering a piece of discourse. 13. A leitmotif of our work is the distinction between grammatical forms as required by the structural constraints of a given language (its phonology, morphology, and syntax)

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and rhetorical options that people select out of this repertoire of forms when expressing themselves in speech or writing. 14. Perhaps Lewis Carroll put this best in Through the Looking Glass (1871, pp. 364–365). “‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master—that’s all.’ ”

1 Brains for language (and everything else) The little boy is nearly 14 months old. His parents are ecstatic: Juan talks! He produced a few sounds squeezed together, something like ‘awhe’ that sounded like agua, the Spanish word for water. Yet his parents are so convinced of the inevitability of language development that if some months pass without new outputs from their child, they will begin to worry. In fact, Juan was able to communicate with others even earlier: he could show he wanted to reach an object by pointing, he could babble using meaningless but language-like syllables, and would show anger or pleasure by facial expressions and body language. But, as parents know intuitively, linguistic discourse is something else. In developing a language, children appropriate a system of elements called speech sounds that combine in endless ways to convey meaning in increasingly diverse contexts. Communication enabled by language is at once highly regulated (not every combination of elements is meaningful) yet open-ended: people can talk and write about anything conceivable. Children learn early on what combinations are meaningful in the ambient language and, over time, come to use language for different purposes and in different scenarios. This transforms the way people think and use language in a virtual cycle, an ‘iterative bi-directional interactivity’ between thinking and using language.1 Learning a language means entering this cycle. Before they start school, normally developing children have mastered much of what there is to know about their language.2 However—and this is the leitmotif of this book—they will continue building and crucially changing this knowledge until their teenage years and beyond, in constant interaction with others. What do parents consider their child’s first word? Any sequence of sounds s/he produces that resembles a known word, like the English doi for ‘doggie,’ the Spanish wawa for agua ‘water,’ or the Hebrew aba for ‘Daddy, man.’ These expressions—though far from conventional adult terms in pronunciation or the entities they apply to—reflect the uniquely human ability of matching strings of sounds to meanings. This huge cognitive and communicative leap occurs at around age 1 year, from 8–9 months to around 18 months, among typicallydeveloping children. (For our use of the term ‘age,’ see note 4 in the Prologue.) This marks the beginning of a long and fascinating journey connecting words to worlds, first referring to objects in everyday surroundings, like kabo ‘pig’ in the Kaluli language of Papua New Guinea. As they grow older, the way children

Growing into Language. Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman, Oxford University Press. © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.003.0001

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talk changes similarly in different cultures: their pressed-together sounds become increasingly like words in the ambient language(s); and by age 2 years, children will combine these items into utterances that express desires (gimme ball, more milk), complaints (sore tummy), and descriptions of states of affairs (allgone baby milk, thassa big ball).3 By late preschool, children will be able to string utterances together to tell stories (Ronny hit me, so I told the teacher, and she said he’s a naughty boy), subsequently to discuss abstract possibilities in the future (I don’t know when Daddy will come, but he told me he’d bring me a present from his trip), to use language for metaphor, for writing and reading, and the many other activities performed by literate members of their speech community. These three facts—(i) emergence of speech at similar ages in different languages and parts of the world, (ii) unstoppable (non-pathological) development in a predictable direction—from words via word-combinations to extended discourse, and (iii) use of speech that is attuned to a specific language environment and to particular communicative intentions—indicate that language development is part of our maturation as human beings, that it has a genetic underpinning. Yet, we will argue, language development is at the same time strongly dependent on the environment. And it also depends on the task facing a language user—quarreling with a classmate, taking part in family get-togethers, telling a story, or writing an essay. Elizabeth Bates (1979) put it clearly: “The form of the solution [to the problem of behavioral universals] is determined by the interaction of three sources of structure: genes, environment, and the nature of the task” (p. 17). Genes and environment provide the material and relevant inputs to solving the task, while socio-cognitive growth and experience with language use provide the rest of its solution. Our view, then, encompasses both internal and external factors impinging on the developing organism. The goal of this book is to shed light on when and how the environment influences language development and how genetic, environmental, and task-related factors interact beyond the early stages of language acquisition. After reading this chapter you will be acquainted with: • our motives for taking a neurological perspective on language, to understand the genetic and neurological capacities underlying language use and development, by means of a short journey through the parts of the brain that learn language; • how researchers have argued for the biological component of language acquisition—such as by proving the existence of a critical period, an age limit for the capacity to acquire language natively; • the fact that much of the brain’s functioning is not accessible to conscious control, by considering the processes of priming and relearning;

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• the neuro-constructivist approach, as a distinctive framework in neurobiology that supports our view of the relationship between genetic endowment, brain structuring, and experience; • the main properties of the developing brain: (i) its increasing specialization; (ii) its growing capacity for parallel processing; (iii) its functioning as an anticipatory machine based on sensory-motor experience; (iv) its hierarchical organization enabling cognitive control; and (v) its long-lasting capacity for learning, a characteristic that motivates our interest in later language developments well beyond early childhood; • the crucial changes that take place in learning and use of language in four distinct periods of life: from birth to 3 years, when children move into language; age 4 to 5 years, as a psycholinguistic frontier between early and later language acquisition; age 6 to 12, when children ‘go conventional’; and age 13 to 19, when young people become autonomous and (sometimes) creative individuals.

1.1 A neurobiological perspective on language In 1969 the psychologist Eric Lenneberg proposed that “the development of language in children can best be understood in the context of developmental biology” (p. 635). He advanced the hypothesis of a limited time-span in which brains are uniquely attuned to acquiring language (or languages in the case of early bi- or multi-lingualism). He defined this as a critical period for native-like acquisition of language, occurring during the first few years of life. Subsequent research has extended the idea of biological determinism in relation to a critical period for native language acquisition in various ways (Knudsen, 2004). The discovery of Genie, the feral child who hobbled into a Los Angeles county welfare office in 1970, provided unhappy evidence for Lenneberg’s critical period hypothesis. At age 13, having been deprived of language input, Genie did not talk, and efforts to teach her to do so proved largely futile (Curtiss, 1977). Other sources of evidence also point to a critical period after which native language acquisition is inhibited (J. L. Locke, 1997). The psycholinguist Elissa Newport (1990) applied two such methods to test biological determinism. She examined what happens to the language of deaf or hearing-impaired children who lack early exposure to spoken or signed language;4 and she observed development of a second language (L2) in children who lacked early exposure to the L2. Her analyses of how language develops—in children exposed to American Sign Language (ASL) from birth compared with those who learn it only later, and in children who acquire English as a native language compared with those who start learning it later in life—revealed what most of us have realized at some point in our lives: if one starts learning a

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new language after school-age, it will be very difficult to be taken as a native, even after years of study. A different picture emerges from a third way of testing claims for a critical period: by examining the consequences of brain damage. The so-called ‘lesion method’ is a traditional research strategy in neurology and neuropsychology.5 Analyzing how mental operations break down after brain injury allows researchers to identify the operations that underlie cognitive processes. When applied to brain-damaged adults, this illuminates how brain structures relate to functions within the neurocognitive system (Stiles et al., 2012). For example, autobiographical memories from an individual’s personal history, which are supported by brain structures that underlie storytelling (as discussed in Chapter 2), are limited in brain-damaged patients to memories acquired up to or shortly before the onset of their injury (Young & Saver, 2001). When applied to children, the lesion method may shed light on questions of neurocognitive plasticity and developmental adaptation (Stiles et al., 2012). If researchers can demonstrate that other areas of an injured brain can make up for the damage incurred only when the injury takes place at an early age, they will have proved that there is a critical period limiting compensation, as a sign of brain plasticity. When lesions occur in specific areas in the left hemisphere (LH) before or just after birth, a time of special readiness for acquiring language, children show marked deficits in acquiring their initial vocabulary (Stiles et al., 2005). These early impairments are no longer noticeable by around age 5 years, suggesting that the immature brain can compensate for such deficits. In contrast, adults with damage in similar language areas show considerable language impairment with variable, often at best only moderate, recovery (Damasio, 1992; Lazar & Antoniello, 2008). Raja Beharelle (Raja Beharelle et al., 2010) compared right-handed adolescents who had sustained pre- or perinatal left-hemisphere strokes with their intact siblings. They used functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, to examine the brain activity of participants performing a category fluency task, i.e., naming items in a certain category (like animals or foods). Healthy adolescents showed strong activity in left and less in right hemisphere (RH) structures. In contrast, on the same task, patients with early injury mobilized activity either in the right or in both hemispheres, with marked individual differences. It seems that our brain finds different ways to compensate for damage. These and related findings undermine the constraining role of the critical period of brain plasticity. It turns out that language learning is enabled by a biological readiness at several anatomical sites, and that this learning capacity is improved by the required experience at the right time. Where this is not the case, as in late exposure to sign language for deaf children, or a new target language for L2 learners, the brain alters its capacity to learn from experience. But this capacity does not disappear: it changes. L2 learners may not attain a native-like level of command, but

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they are still capable of learning another language, although with marked individual differences. Besides, when the anatomical site in charge of enabling language learning suffers damage during the critical period, other brain sites are recruited to accomplish the language-learning task. That is, there are other potential brain organizations for implementing language after early LH brain injury, a fact that reflects substantial plasticity. These and related evidence for early plasticity of the brain in the face of changing environmental input has led researchers to talk about a sensitive rather than a critical period in emerging neural organization and associated behavior during the life span. In Section 1.4.1, we show how learning-associated input shapes patterns of connectivity and refines the neural systems in the brain, making them more specialized for processing particular inputs. As learning proceeds, patterns of connectivity intensify, and functions within a region become more specifically defined. The end of the sensitive period may thus signal the end of the learning process itself, the stabilizing of a neural system once expertise is acquired in a skill area (Johnson, 2005). Current research on L2 learning, based on more than two million learners of English as a second language, proposes extending the sensitive period to age 17–18 (Hartshorne et al., 2018). The study also indicates that early L2 learners are not superior to adult learners overall, rather they cope better with different facets of the task: early learners outdo adults in pronunciation, but adults are better with syntactic features like word order. This difference has to do with differential attention to elements of the new language: children grasp multiword strings, guided by their intonation, whereas literate adults tend to process L2 input word by word. The advantage of early learners, then, is not simply due to the decline of a sensitive period, but also to differences in how they learn (Havron, 2017). Then, too, the advent of technologies that enable researchers to look inside the living human brain has radically changed the way we think about brain development. They demonstrate that not everything that is crucial about language reaches maturation during the early years, calling into question the conviction of the bulk of research on child language that to this day is largely confined to the speech of infants, toddlers, and preschool children, often no later than age 3 years (Brown, 1973; Weissenborn & Ho¨hle, 2000). Against this background, we now proceed to how the functioning of our brain supports lifelong learning and use of language.

1.2 Unconscious steering Although our brain regulates the type of attention we pay to the world, control of this attention usually escapes conscious access. For example, we do not attend to sounds that our brain cannot process, although they may be accessible to our dog or cat. Similarly, adult speakers of European languages cannot process the clicks of

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Bantu languages since they are not part of their world, but they may be discernable to infants born into non-Bantu speaking environments.6 The worlds that we experience depend on the typically unconscious processing capabilities of our brain, which change as a consequence of development and differing inputs from the environment. Every domain of experience—speech, space, time, number—undergoes both macro and micro changes in processing capabilities; and so does the world as we perceive and understand it. Imagine you have read a story about rabbits and are then asked to write the word hair. You would likely write HARE. Reading about rabbits (interaction with input from the environment) has prepared your brain to focus on the “rabbit” meaning of hare, activating a word pronounced the same but spelled differently from the one elicited. Or imagine you once learned the lyrics of a song by heart, but now can only remember a bit of it. Inability to retrieve something does not mean that it is completely gone from your long-term memory. Later on, relearning it will be much quicker because your previous learning of the song has modified your current ability to learn it. The rabbit and the song examples illustrate the psychological phenomena of priming and relearning (Bargh & Morsella, 2008). Priming is the activation of certain associations and memory, even without awareness of what evokes them; relearning refers to the facilitating effect of previously learned material. Both demonstrate how specific input from the surroundings may change further perception of and interaction with the environment, and how these changes occur. As an instance of priming, the activation of HARE instead of HAIR for readers of the rabbit story came about without awareness.7 Similarly, for relearning in the song example, although the learning processing was explicit (through successive rehearsals), what remained of it (retained in long-term memory) was stored implicitly. Part of what we do, think, and feel can be brought into consciousness and, in some cases, can be named and verbally explained. Yet most of what we know about our language has not been explicitly taught, and its use is not consciously controlled. Our brain processes different kinds of input—music, pictures, written and spoken language—through our senses. And we depend on this processing for understanding the world and ourselves. But the brain “runs its own show,” so to speak. Decision-making, planning, predicting, learning, and also forgetting run deep in our neural inner cosmos, accounting for the way we move in space, grasp objects, solve problems, approach people, and—our main concern—use language to talk, read, and write. We process features of our language that are implicitly deposited and stored in our brain after non-conscious rehearsal. Eagleman (2011) put it well: “Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot” (p. 4).

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Consider, for example, a common behavior during language use. When people chat, tell a story, or give directions, they often make changes in their speech, whether a word (1) or part of a sentence (2). (1) Turn right at the first the third corner (2) Turn right then don’t turn right better not These self-repairs usually improve the message that speakers are attempting to convey and the resulting expression is comprehensible, even though the adjacent strings of words may not strictly follow the rules of grammar—as in (1) and (2). People are usually surprised when they hear the repairs they have made and are hard put to explain them, although they can identify them when asked to judge what other people say. Yet linguists and psychologists have found hidden treasures in studying how speakers identify, produce, and explain self-repairs, correcting their speech output as they go along. From 6 to 7 years of age, children can detect different kinds of speech repairs, but explicit control and provision of verbal explanations for these repairs take until adolescence to acquire. With age, children develop increasing awareness about different aspects of language (see Chapter 6). For example, they will recognize that, in the case of hair/hare, the same string of sounds has two different meanings and is spelled in two different ways. Yet numerous features remain inaccessible to consciousness, while some require the intervention of the written modality to be accessed. In Chapters 6 and 7, we discuss how formal instruction modifies children’s linguistic input, enabling them to reflect on language and promoting metalinguistic understanding.

1.3 The brain that does language—along with everything else Alkmaion Krotonietes, Pythagoras’s young disciple, was the first to suggest that the brain is the locus of our mind, whereas Aristotle believed the heart to play this role. Nowadays, scholars and lay-people alike recognize that we think with our brains.8 We can even explain why certain tasks—like producing a sentence with several dependent clauses or composing an essay that makes sense from beginning to end—are more demanding than others. What are the properties of this device that generates the human mind? How does it do language? And how do these properties explain what Thomas Suddendorf (2013) defines as “the peculiarity of the human mind: … our open-ended capacity to create nested mental scenarios and our deep-seated drive to connect to

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other scenario-building minds” (p. 276). To address these questions, we align with the neuro-constructivist view that understanding cognitive development requires knowing how the neural substrata supporting mental representations are shaped (Westermann et al., 2006). Recent decades have seen impressive advances in techniques for pinpointing the structural and functional characteristics of the brain at different space and time scales, at rest and when performing various tasks. Some approaches, under the umbrella-term neuro-emergentism, address developmental concerns by means of imaging procedures to clarify the bases of language and cognition in the brain (Hernandez et al., 2019). Of these, neuro-constructivism focuses on factors that impinge on the emergence and development of representations in the brain—as patterns of neural activation that contribute to the individual’s adaptive behavior in the environment. This means that development of neural systems is constrained by multiple interacting factors, both intrinsic and extrinsic, that affect the developing organism (Westermann et al., 2006). Although cast in a different terminology, this conceptual framework echoes a major theme of the Swiss epistemologist Jean Piaget back in 1936, that cognitive development—the development of intelligence in Piagetian terms—proceeds as an interaction between biological endowment and environment (Piaget, 1952). For Piaget, cognitive structures are neither innate nor the unconstrained result of experience; they are constructed interactively. Two biological processes, present in every living organism—assimilation and accommodation, and the equilibrium between them—explain both cognitive growth and cognitive stability. • assimilation is the process by which an aspect of the environment (a perturbation, a new object, or novel situation, say) is integrated, combined with, or absorbed into an existing scheme (physiological, metabolic, muscular, sensorimotor, perceptual, reflexive, etc.); • accommodation is the process by which a scheme or structure (physiological or cognitive) is modulated or transformed to subsume an as yet not assimilated aspect of the environment; • equilibration is the process by which a given cognitive or biological organization—as a result of processes of assimilation and accommodation— reaches a new form of organizational stability. Neuro-constructivism recaptures the interactions proposed by Piaget. It conceives of development as a path or trajectory shaped by interacting constraints at different levels of the organism, from genes to cultural settings. Neural activity yields behavior that modifies the physical and social environment, leading to new experiences and invoking new patterns of neural activity. Cognitive development can

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be characterized in essence as mutually induced changes between the brain and the mind. This view calls into question two ideas rooted in twentieth-century linguistics and cognitive science: David Marr’s (2010) notion of independent levels of description and the idea that language learning and use is supported exclusively by prespecified brain regions that respond selectively to verbal input. Marr, a British neuroscientist who worked on vision, conceived it as an information processing system that can only be understood if analyzed at the following three levels: • computational: what does the system do, what problems does it solve? • algorithmic (or representational): how does the system do what it does, what representations does it use, and what processes does it employ? • implementational (or physical): how is the system physically realized, what neural structures and activities implement the system? Marr’s levels of analysis underlie the common distinction between behavioral, psychological, and biological levels which, in marked contrast to a neuroconstructivist view, has permeated the study of language development to this day. In 2012, thirty years after the publication of Marr’s Vision, his coauthor Tomaso Poggio added two further levels to explain how processing systems function: a level of learning and development and a level of evolution. Poggio (2012) argued that it is not enough to know how transistors and synapses work, and which algorithms are used for computations; we also need to understand how a child can learn the algorithms and how these learning mechanisms emerged in the course of evolution. Development in the individual and evolution in the species must both be taken seriously to understand the functioning of end-state organisms, or of any processing system for that matter. The second idea that is queried by neuro-constructivism is of specific areas of the brain that support language. From a neuro-constructivist view, circumscribed regions of the brain have a biologically determined readiness to process a certain input (in this case language) rather than a fixed prespecified function (Elsabbagh & Karmiloff-Smith, 2006). With development, thanks to interaction with specific inputs, this initial readiness becomes increasingly specialized. Again, development is necessary to understand an end-state, in this case, the specialization of cortical regions to perform a particular function. Below we discuss the anatomical and functional properties of our information processing system and illustrate how these properties may vary developmentally. Figure 1 displays the brain sites we mention in the rest of this chapter, as detailed in Glossary I and II.

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CEREBRAL CORTEX Lateral view of the Left Hemisphere

Medial Prefrontal Cortex

Perisylvian Region Precuneus

Broca’s Area

Wernicke’s Area

Inferior Frontal Gyrus

Temporoparietal Junction

FRONTAL LOBE Perfrontal Cortex Inferior Frontal Cortex TEMPORAL LOBE Superior Temporal Gyrus PARIETAL LOBE Posterior Parietal Cortex OCCIPITAL LOBE

Superior Temporal Sulcus

Cerebellum

Medial Temporal Fusiform Gyrus Lobe

Perisylvian Region

Figure 1 Major language-related sites in the human brain. Source: Figure created by the authors, based on an image by Taleseedum/stock.adobe.com

1.4 Fundamental properties of the growing brain Five developmental properties characterize the functioning of the brain: (i) increasing specialization; (ii) growing capacity for parallel processing; (iii) predictive capacity based on sensory-motor experience; (iv) hierarchical organization for cognitive control; and (v) long-lasting power for learning. The brain is not a static entity, its processing capacities may vary across short periods of time (as in priming and relearning), or across the course of our lives. One such variation concerns the brain’s degree of specialization, since certain functions are performed in circumscribed areas of the brain. We have seen that if a brain area ready to process language is damaged early in development, other areas can compensate. Over time, however, the brain’s cortical areas become more specialized in the stimuli they are able to process and less accessible to compensation from other areas.9 Along with its increasing specialization, the brain develops the capacity to work in parallel on different aspects of the same stimuli. This enables us, for example, to attend at one and the same time to the sounds, meanings, and grammatical features of words and to the content of language-driven interactions. Different cortical and subcortical regions are activated, revealing a distribution of work for language processing. This distributed processing enables functional connectivity, a joint state of multiple brain elements (axons, neurons, areas, etc.), to support a task across various brain regions (Pessoa, 2014).

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Both macro and micro variations in the brain’s processing capabilities are due to interactions that are at one and the same time internal and external to the organism. Memory keeps track of these interactions and improves the brain’s predictive capacity. It facilitates human goal-directed behavior, enabling us to detect errors, improve our predictions, and modify our actions. Every interaction between organism and environment through the sensory organs is registered in the cerebral cortex as sequences of electrical and chemical signals. These implicit sensory-motor schemas that the cortex forms across the life span are the basic building blocks of human knowledge (Gilboa & Marlatte, 2017).10 Even the more abstract and explicit human abilities (like creating mathematical models or constructing linguistic theories) stem from these early and less explicit forms of sensory-motor organization. The cortex is hierarchically organized, with some regions controlling others. Control is exerted bi-directionally: top-down from the goal or expected state of affairs to the actions and perceptions these require, and bottom-up from sensory inputs to these same actions, perceptions, and anticipated goals. These respectively feedforward/feedback processes enable our brain to minimize errors of prediction and facilitate reaching our goals. Finally, justifying the scope of our inquiry, the capacity to learn and memorize, and to predict and correct errors, remains plastic at least through and possibly beyond late adolescence. This plasticity provides long-lasting opportunities for experience to shape development. Below we portray the working brain in the light of these five facets of its functioning.

1.4.1 Increasing specialization The year 1835 saw the translation into English of Franz Joseph Gall’s On the Functions of the Brain and of Each of Its Parts: With Observations on the Possibility of Determining the Instincts, Propensities, and Talents, Or the Moral and Intellectual Dispositions of Men and Animals, by the Configuration of the Brain and Head. The long title is self-explanatory. The atlas of the brain traced by Gall (1835) contained thirty-seven instincts, propensities, and talents localized following the bumps and uneven geography of the human skull. In 1861, Paul Broca identified a region of the brain that serves to articulate speech. Subsequently, Carl Wernicke detected the part responsible for receptive speech, and Gustav Fritsch and Eduard Hitzig discovered that stimulating different parts of the cerebral cortex produces movement in different areas of the body. A vast gulf separates Gall’s phrenological approach, based on the surface shape of the skull, and Broca’s approach from the inside, based on postmortem autopsies of individuals suffering from speech impairments. Gall’s method led nowhere, whereas Broca’s furnished the first anatomical proof of the localization of brain function, and remains to this day the most popular method for inquiring into the

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relation between brain and behavior. Both approaches paved the way to theories of localization, countering the then accepted view of brain equipotentiality proposed by Karl Spencer Lashley (1950) that all areas of the brain are equally able to perform a given task. The views of early neurologists like Broca and Wernicke provided an undisputed model for the location of language in the brain. It located human language in the left cortex around the Sylvian fissure, with Wernicke’s area in the left superior temporal gyrus held to be responsible for comprehension of speech, and Broca’s area in the left inferior frontal gyrus (lIFG) to support language production. In this division of labor between the frontal and temporal regions, the arcuate fasciculus was seen as connecting the two areas. More recent behavioral studies show that the cortex starts out highly interconnected in the young infant, and that localization and specialization of brain function occur only gradually (Huttenlocher & Dabholkar, 1998; Johnson, 2001). Increasing specialization means a growing selectivity of the regions performing a particular function. As cogently depicted in Karmiloff-Smith’s (2009) metaphor, “one version of evolutionary psychology … maintains that the human brain has evolved into the equivalent of a Swiss army knife in which each innately specified module is exquisitely adapted for each specific, independent function …. (The analogy ignores the fact that most users of the Swiss army knife actually employ for all purposes only a few of the numerous special-purpose tools)” (p. 56). In the case of language, lateralization indicates a specialization of structures in the left rather than the right hemisphere—like processing utterances said out loud or copying a written passage. Language is predominantly processed by the LH in most rightand left-handed people early in life.11 Even breastfed babies activate perisylvian brain areas in the LH when listening to their mothers’ speech (Dehaene-Lambertz et al., 2002). This suggests that the infant cerebral cortex has already differentiated functional areas, one of which is ready for language perception. In newborns, as in adults, listening to speech activates a set of temporal lobe areas mainly in the LH. Yet adulthood reveals a developmental shift in functional connectivity, with increasing lateralization to LH predominance. Children show a strong connectivity between hemispheres, mainly among superior temporal regions, whereas in adults connectivity is stronger inside the LH, between the frontal and temporal regions (Friederici et al., 2011). The change from bilateral toward increasingly lateralized representation applies to speaking, too. Imaging studies from childhood to adolescence reveal changes from a bilateral to an increasingly lateralized representation in the premotor area of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) (Holland et al., 2001; Lidzba et al., 2011). Importantly, the major changes in lateralization occur in the case of more complex tasks like story processing that are mastered in middle childhood. Studies suggest that, although some degree of hemispheric specialization is present in younger children, it is less well defined than later in life (Vannest et al., 2009). Further, improved

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linguistic abilities are associated with increased lateralization of language functions in the LH. For example, between ages 7 and 12 years, better syntactic skills are related to an increase in lIFG activation and a decrease in right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG) activation (Nuñez et al., 2011). To pinpoint the significance of brain lateralization, some researchers have proposed a ‘laterality index,’ measured as the difference between the number of activated pixels (units of special resolution) in the LH and RH divided by the total number of activated pixels. Computations indicate that the cognitive function with the highest lateralization indexes in the LH is language (Schmidt et al.,1999). The increased lateralization of language in the LH with age correlates with growing myelination of the corpus callosum (CC), a connecting structure of the two cerebral hemispheres. The size of the corpus callosum increases up to the mid-20s with a more rapid growth rate in the early years and slower growth in subsequent years (Pujol et al.,1993). The CC plays an important role in skilled reading and develops differently in literate versus illiterate individuals, demonstrating that literacy is a factor in brain lateralization (see Chapter 7). In sum, brain activation during language use moves from bilateral early in life to unilateral, predominantly left, in young adults. This asymmetric organization of the brain is modified by experience, with greater LH lateralization for language an index of maturation. Why, in default circumstances, does one region and not others take on certain functions? Little is understood about this issue. In the case of auditory speech, nerve cells in the area situated on the STG have more synapses in the left than in the right hemisphere; but why this asymmetry? Most of the wiring in the brain is specified by genetic programs, yet its final wiring also depends on sensory information from input during early childhood. Arguably, in normal circumstances, Broca’s area may become specialized for language processing not because it is specifically designed for language, but, in part at least, because it possesses computational properties particularly suited to dealing with the domain (Elman et al., 1996). Thus, a domain-relevant region becomes domain-specific over developmental time (Karmiloff-Smith, 1998). It may initially compete for processing certain inputs, but its particular computational properties will ultimately take over. That is, specialized brain networks are the emergent outcome of progressively changing processes that interact dynamically, with environmental input over time eventually giving rise to the fully structured adult brain. Experience-dependent plasticity appears to be a hallmark of the human brain. But this does not mean that the neonate brain is a blank slate with no structure; nor does it mean that any given part of the brain can process any inputs. These two insights are particularly relevant to our concept of development since, in non-pathological situations, while brain regions become progressively specialized, some may become repurposed in the course of development (Wolf, 2018). This happens in learning to read and write, when regions genetically designed for

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processing the shape, size, and serial ordering of objects undergo repurposing to process written language (Dehaene, 2007). In this case, the human genetic endowment that constrains the structuring of the brain shapes our experience, which in turn reshapes our brain. The interconnectivity within the brain explains its capacity to work in parallel—to handle different aspects of a given task or situation concurrently.

1.4.2 Parallel processing Claims against a localist view of the brain can be traced to Freud (1953), who called for a dynamic approach to brain activity and psychological processes. This approach was countered by Penfield and Rasmussen, who in 1950 dazzled the scientific community by showing how electric brain stimulation at a specific point in the motor cortex produced aphasic symptoms such as naming difficulties, showing that not all words are equally difficult to retrieve. Localist theories of the brain like theirs argue for the modularity of mind, which conceives of cognitive domains including, obviously, language, as separable and functioning independently of one another.12 In this view, language acquisition and use are due to domain-specific mechanisms (unique to, say, language) rather than domain-general (common to different cognitive domains, such as perception or classification). An innate language module is posited as functioning independently of other cognitive modules, and even within language different domains like phonology, syntax, and semantics are conceived as largely independent of one another (Chomsky, 2005; Fodor, 1983). However, as Pinker (1995) points out, “pinning brain areas to mental functions has been frustrating” (p. 314). The simplest way to think about the relationship between brain areas and cognitive or linguistic functions may be to assume a one-to-one correspondence between area and function (Pessoa, 2014), but in fact the same brain regions participate in many functions and many functions are supported by various regions.13 So it makes better sense to look at entire networks or patterns of coactivation than at one specific area of the brain in order to characterize the relations between brain structure and mental functions. Technological advances have enabled neuroscientists to look inside the living human brain at work, using different methods. Neurophysiologists use techniques from chemistry, physics, and molecular biology to study the properties of neurons, ganglia, and networks by the recording of signals from entire neuronal arrays up to a single cell. Neuroimaging techniques, like fMRI, serve to identify what parts of the brain are active in performing a certain task (see Glossary II). Besides, modularity views that predominated in the twentieth century were based largely on single-word understanding and production of wordcombinations. When more advanced language processing is observed by means of

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current technologies, the picture that emerges is much closer to the views proposed by Freud and Lashley than to those of localists (Hagoort, 2019). Many more cortical regions are implicated in language processing than previously assumed. Current models of language processing emphasize the multiple networks (regions in the brain that reveal functional connectivity) that participate in parallel when using language. Language processing occurs at an amazing rate. We readily produce and understand two to five words per second, spanning multiple utterances in different types of verbal interactions. This means that both linguistic and extra-linguistic information must be recruited without delay. Knowledge about the situation, input from gestures and body language, world knowledge, and information about the speaker all provide feedback that needs to be exploited on the spot to produce and interpret a message, fed by the fast-acting brain system in combining the sounds and meanings of individual words. Moreover, effective communication, spoken or written, also requires distinguishing between known and new information, between what is said and what is implied, and integrating individual utterances across stretches of discourse. The rIFG enters the picture to differentiate between shared knowledge that functions as background to the content of a message as against new information that is its main point. The right angular gyrus integrates the content and meaning of each utterance into the communicative situation. The meaning of an utterance often depends on the context in which it is produced, the mentalizing areas of the brain—regions involved in understanding ourselves and others in terms of mental states, such as feelings, desires, attitudes, and goals—are activated when making such pragmatic inferences (Hagoort & Levinson, 2014). In what follows, we say that the LH handles such and such information, or does this or that, and the RH something else. But in fact, the distributed nature of language use and of brain functioning in general means that: Information is constantly being conveyed between the hemispheres and may be transmitted in either direction several times a second. What activity shows up on a scan is a function of where the threshold is set: If the threshold were set low enough, one would see activity just about everywhere in the brain all the time. But at the level of experience, the world we know is synthetized from the work of the two cerebral hemispheres, each hemisphere having its own way of understanding the world—its own ‘take’ on it. (McGilchrist, 2019, p. 10)

The brain is extraordinarily densely interconnected inside itself. It has been estimated that there are more connections in the human brain than there are particles in the known universe. With tens of billions of neurons, each having up to ten thousand connections, the brain is a massively interconnected device that enables parallel processing: it deals with different issues concurrently.

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Think of a task like writing a shopping list. While your brain is guiding the movement of your hand to draw the letters, it is at the same time concerned with spelling the words (STEAK or STAKE), also anticipating the next item on the list, all along observing the typical layout of a list—each item below the one before—as well as thinking about what you need for tonight’s dinner. Management of different facets of a task under time constraints is possible because of parallel processing, and also (perhaps mainly) thanks to the helpful role of memory, in this case, of previous experience with writing a shopping list. Like most writing activities, it has the character of a rewriting or reconstruction rather than producing from scratch in a vacuum. For anything we do—grasping objects, opening cans, singing songs, or signing documents—we not only compute features of the current situation (such as size, shape, and weight of the object to grasp), but retrieve from memory stored patterns for performing the same task.14 As with brain specialization, parallel processing follows a developmental path. Immature brains with less accumulated experience have more difficulty in working simultaneously on different aspects of a task. For example, when producing a text, proficient writers can work in parallel on spelling, ideational content, sentence structure, and overall text organization. But this is simply not within the capacity of inexperienced writers, like young schoolchildren: they may show some regression in one aspect of text construction at the expense of improvement in another. A nice illustration of this trade-off comes from narrative development, a topic we detail in the next chapter. In telling a story, the characters that play different roles must be identified, initially by lexical referring expression (say, the little girl, those old guys), but once introduced can also be referred by a pronoun (she, they). Preschool children cannot attend to story content and simultaneously make unambiguous reference to its characters. When children first use pronouns and other expressions to refer to the participants in their narrative, the thematic content may be impoverished. Inexperienced narrators may refer to a single protagonist when telling their story, omitting mention of other characters and the events they figure in. Whatever current model is adopted to explain the activity of the brain, neural connectivity is the key to how our mind works. This critical aspect of brain organization is what enables it to operate in parallel on different features of the same object and different aspects of the same task, whether verbal or other. All such processing is memory-dependent.

1.4.3 Predictive and memorizing capacities based on sensorimotor information We noted that the cerebral cortex is the site where all our higher mental functions take place. The cortex learns and remembers through the sensory organs every

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interaction between the organism and the environment and between the layers of which it is made. Cortical neurons receive sensory information to form perceptions of the outside world, to gain command of movements, and to handle internal information via feedback and feedforward mechanisms between the different layers of the cortex. Sensory information is registered in different organs: The retina senses light, the cochlea senses sound, and the soma (=body) touch. However, the cortex as such does not actually convey light, sound, or touch. Rather, registers of our senses are translated into sequences of electrical and chemical signals, the only type of input that our cortex understands. The thalamus is in charge of translating these time-based stimuli bottom-up from the sensory receptors to the cerebral cortex in the form of action potentials, through which neurons transport electrical signals. These involve only a brief change in voltage across the membrane due to the flow of certain ions into and out of the neuron. There is, in fact, no difference between a pattern that enters a neuron from the optic nerve or via the somatic sensory nerve: vision appears different from smelling or hearing due to the schema that the brain constructs from these inputs, the way they are modeled by the brain. We are surrounded by constantly changing sensory data, so that recognizing and completing existing patterns is a more effective way of processing incoming information than constantly building new patterns. The cortex thus functions as an anticipation machine that generates predictions, detects anomalies, and produces actions on the basis of past interactions between the organism and the environment. Predictive contexts enable learners to generate internal error signals that supplement the information received from the environment and facilitate learning. Romberg and Saffran’s (2010) study provides evidence for this process early in development. Infants were repeatedly shown a brief video on the left side of a screen, and learned to gaze to the left, anticipating a reward. After several such trials, the reward was shown to the right of the screen, yet the infants continued to predict the reward on the left. After a second unexpected trial, however, they updated their predictions and became less biased to the left. That is, infants appear to update their predictions based on what they see, but not on a single counterexample. This ties in with what we discuss in Chapter 4: our brain constructs the future based on the past. This property of the brain is essential for keeping track of changing data, and helps in information-processing tasks. It could also explain why people are so single-minded, tending to discount information that undermines their past choices and judgments, due to our so-called ‘confirmation bias’ (Kappes et al., 2020). Most changes in the sensory organs come from our own behavior, not from the external world. Changes occurring in your vision right now arise from the movement of your eyes rather than the words you are looking at. The cortex builds and learns a sensorimotor model of the world from which behavior is generated

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in the form of schemas that constitute the building blocks of human knowledge. These early and implicit sensorimotor schemas include not only sight and smell, but also learning and use of language, and they underlie the human capacity for understanding such complex domains as logic, mathematics, and linguistic theory. This description clearly echoes the basic Piagetian tenets of sensorimotor schemata as “cohesive, repeatable action sequences possessing component actions that are tightly interconnected and governed by a core meaning,” constituting the basic building blocks of cognitive development (Piaget, 1952, p. 7). That is not to say that infants go through a stage in which their only way of understanding the world is through their physical actions or movements, in “a protracted period during which they cannot yet think” (Mandler,1990, p. 236). Rather, the sensorimotor source of our behaviors, even the most abstract type of knowledge such as language, reflects Piagetian precursors, whether acknowledged as such or not. To illustrate the role of sensorimotor schemas in acquiring knowledge, consider the use of metaphor, a late-developing type of figurative language (discussed in Chapter 5). For now, think of a metaphor as a comparison, where some aspect of the meaning of one element serves to illuminate the meaning of the other: for example, that salesman’s a shark. Technically, the salesman, the entity described, is the target domain, while the shark used to describe it is the source domain. Metaphors, which permeate use of language and are a key device for interpreting what is said in varied contexts, are tied to sensory experience. Metaphorical reasoning constitutes an instance of embodied cognition. Around three decades ago George Lakoff (2012) joined other cognitive scientists in challenging the idea that cognition involves the abstract manipulation of symbols. He proposed, rather, that cognitive activity is mediated by the body. In neuro-constructivist thinking, embodiment implies that the same neural circuitry that mobilizes our bodies physically also structures our reasoning, including the metaphorical. Primary metaphors (I’m boiling hot, your hand’s ice cold) are invoked by recurrent bodily experiences. These subsequently yield conceptual metaphors which further organize our view of the world. For example, the bodily experience of warmth when in a parent’s embrace gives rise to the perception of affection as warmth. Emotion metaphors derive from physical correlates of feelings, such as a rise in skin temperature and blood pressure associated with anger (he’s boiling mad, she’s seething). Linking primary metaphors to more abstract conceptual domains helps us understand them in more concrete terms, so people can build theories, digest ideas, or swallow an insult. Developmentally, the ability to understand metaphorical language is strongly affected by how close the comparison is to concrete experience (Cacciari et al., 1989; Gentner, 1988). Expressions like crying over spilt milk are successfully interpreted by 10-year-old children, but not, say, mourning one’s lost youth.

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To recapitulate, building and storing sensorimotor patterns is the common source of knowledge for all cortical regions, no matter what stimuli they process, although some regions react specifically to certain stimuli (language, noise, smell, or movement). Building on their experiences with co-occurring patterns and past events, learners adjust their predictions and reduce their errors by better anticipating possible outcomes in any domain (physical or mental) which they encounter.

1.4.4 A hierarchically organized device Humans are goal-oriented organisms, both in everyday life and in unusual circumstances. Except for reflexive behaviors (like breathing), of which we are unaware unless we deliberately focus attention on them, all our basic physiological systems are predisposed to achieving specific goals. People do not act simply in response to circumstances; they are geared to one of the countless purposes that underlie their perceptions, actions, and thoughts. Yet sensitivity to contingencies is also necessary to attain the desired state of affairs, because unexpected eventualities may require a change in actions directed to a goal, or even involve reformulating it. Consider, for example, a conversation between two bilingual Catalan-Spanish youngsters in the schoolyard during recess. The goal is agreeing on a venue for playing soccer. They converse in Catalan with much code-mixing, a behavior common among bilinguals where words and expressions in one language are interspersed with those in the other language, in this case Spanish and Catalan. While talking, two new students arrive, both Spanish monolinguals. The Catalan students immediately switch to Spanish alone, inhibiting their use of Catalan to accommodate the change that has occurred in the environment, while still keeping to the same goal (deciding on a soccer venue). This inhibitory behavior is an indicator of cognitive control, a general capacity to manage goal-oriented behavior, displaying the role of frontal regions in monitoring how we behave. Cognitive control is hierarchical. It concerns how, in the brain as a whole, certain regions exert control over others and how, across the cortex, certain layers are in control of others (Badre & Nee, 2018). With development, the functioning of the human brain becomes increasingly hierarchical with more rostral (literally toward the nose) anterior (frontal) regions exerting modulatory control over more caudal (from the tail, to the back) regions. Frontal regions, the cerebral cortex covering the front part of the frontal lobe—in particular the prefrontal cortex (PFC)—become increasingly hierarchized to exert the growing levels of control that, with development, are required by other neural regions and additional skills. The PFC integrates and processes signals from nearly every neural region through direct and indirect connections. As a domain-general associative

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region, it activates across numerous cognitive tasks—verbal, mathematical, and spatial—in contrast to domain-specific regions like the primary visual cortex, which receive stable sensory input. The anterior-to-posterior neurogenesis in the PFC is based on accumulated experience rather than on incoming input; it develops in the absence of sensory input from the thalamus. Cognitive control is exerted bi-directionally: by top-down feedback—from the desired or expected state of affairs to the actions and perceptions required for attaining them—and bottom-up feedforward—from sensory inputs to actions, perceptions, and anticipated goals. As explained by A. Clark (2013), “Bundles of cells … support perception and action by constantly attempting to match incoming sensory inputs with topdown expectations or predictions” (p. 181). Such internal representation of the desired state of affairs is necessary to guide thoughts and actions toward the goal(s) involved. Working memory is important for keeping in mind the intermediate steps and subgoals leading to ultimate goals, while a selective inhibitory control prevents competing tasks from distracting the brain from the current goal. The PFC is in charge of the relevant processes of control selection, monitoring, and inhibition (Lara & Wallis, 2015). Failing to manage the interrelation between these functions of executive control and the contexts in which they operate may result in breakdown or waste of time. Pinocchio, the absent-minded puppet who was unable to recall that he had to go to school, was probably suffering from a dysfunction in the frontal lobes! Language comprehension affords a clear case of bi-directional control. Both in spoken and written communication, a hearer-reader can anticipate from context some words or part of the upcoming information ahead of encountering it bit by bit. As soon as a message is initiated, the incoming information is matched to predictions, standing for some desired state of affairs, followed by successive adjustments or updating.15 Comprehension has thus been conceptualized as a dynamic process of belief updating. Consider the reasoning advanced in the example in (3a), cited in Kuperberg and Jaeger (2015, p. 36). (3a) The day was breezy so the boy went outside to fly a … (3b) … kite (3c) … plane When encountering the string of words in (3a), the reader builds a partial representation of the event (boy flies) in working memory. Event-representation serves to predictively preactivate from long-term memory a word that fits both semantically and phonologically, in this case (3b) kite. If instead of kite, the reader sees (3c) plane, the prediction will be violated. The representation of an event such as flying a kite (or a plane) relates to a higher level, top-down conceptualization,

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whereas the sound or meaning of the word itself exists at a lower level of bottom-up information present in the input. If the preactivated word were violated by bottom-up input, and (3c) appeared instead of (3b), there would be an increment in reaction time or neural activity compared to what would follow if the reader had not committed to any prediction. A bi-directional cascade between the predicted and the upcoming message guarantees effective comprehension. Comprehension would probably fail if reader-hearers relied exclusively on the anticipated content of the message. And it would take much longer if they analyzed each incoming utterance from scratch or waited until the end of the message before interpreting it. Instead, the cognitive control exerted by higher-level representation both facilitates and accelerates understanding. In Chapter 7, we discuss how the process of belief updating mediates reading comprehension, reflecting the importance of cognitive control in understanding what is written. Another example is what happens when children produce a piece of discourse without necessary cognitive control. As we discuss in Chapter 2, to tell a story the events must be combined along a narrative timeline, from beginning to end. When telling or even retelling familiar stories, young children juxtapose successive occurrences, rather than subordinating individual events to a global top-down story structure or narrative schema. And the sequence in which they relate to the events in the narrative corresponds strictly to the chronological order in which the events occurred. The text in (4) below reproduces how a late preschool Israeli child (5;5 years old) retells the Hebrew version of Hansel and Gretel. (4) halxu Ami ve-Tami lexapes oxel16 ‘Ami and Tami went to look for food’ hem samu gar’inim ‘they put (some) seeds’ hem higiu le-bayit ‘they arrived at a house’ ha-isha hixnisa otam la-bayit ‘the woman brought them into the house’ hi-sipra la-hem sipur ‘she told them a story’ hi hixnisa otam lishon ‘she put them to sleep’ hem kamu ‘they woke up’ ha-isha hixnisa otam le-kluv ‘the woman put them in a cage’ In order to go backward and forward, to separate the order of telling from the order of happening, children need to exert central cognitive control; they need

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to anticipate the larger narrative sequence. Limitations of cognitive control are also evident in preschoolers’ inability to provide suitable markers of the relationship between events and to specify clearly who is involved in each event at each point of the story. In (5a) and (5b)—from the accounts of two Englishspeaking children aged 5;8 years relating to parts of a picture-book story about a boy and his dog in search of his pet frog—it is hard to tell who did what to whom when. (5a)

(5b)

And then he put his boot on his head, and then his other boot on his foot. And after went out calling for the frog. And then the dog fell out and the boy jumped out … And then the little boy hollered in a hole, and then a mole came out. Then, then the dog barked up at the hive. Then it shoo–he shook the tree. Then they fell down. Then then the dogs got–Then he, the little boy, climbed up the tree … (Berman & Slobin, 1994, p. 178)

In sum, brain structuring takes the form of nested structures. Neurons are connected into many dozens of networks, each of which makes patterned connections with other brain structures to convey information in bi-directional ways—topdown and bottom-up—allowing brain structures to work together under the control of frontal lobes (Gierhan, 2013). Due to this nested structure, higher-level representations cascade on lower-level information, back and forth. This hierarchical distribution of work is manifested in different cognitive domains including, obviously, language comprehension and production.

1.4.5 Long-lasting learning capabilities About 100 billion neurons communicate through fine fibers that resemble thick brushes (dendrites) or long, twisting cables (axons). Each neuron makes from one to ten thousand contacts or synapses with other neurons. Information is shared between cells and learning takes place at the synapses. Only a small percentage of these synapses are close to the body of the cell, about 90% are more distant, connecting different cortical regions. Long-distance connections are active processing sites: learning is not just a matter of changing the strength of the synapses, it also involves forming new synapses by synaptogenesis, a powerful means of long-lasting learning. Growing evidence from animal studies and human neuroimaging shows that white matter (WM) consisting of axons covered by myelin (a substance of fatty lipids and proteins) speeds up signal transmission along the axon. Increase in the volume of WM throughout childhood and adolescence supports greater connectivity and integration of neural circuitry, so playing a role in learning over and above the work of synapses.

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This increase in WM takes place in both hemispheres but is more significant in the left language-associated regions (frontotemporal) in children and adolescents (Paus et al., 1999). Wilke et al. (2006) found that when listening to a story, children between ages 6 to 15 years present bilateral activation of the language regions (superior temporal, inferior parietal, and inferior frontal brain) with leftward dominance. Language development at these ages is clearly linked to development in nonlinguistic abilities like attention, social skills, and memory, together with well-defined lateralization (Gibson & Petersen, 2010). Research shows that most major WM tracks increase in volume during childhood and early adulthood (Kochunov et al., 2012) and that temporal lobe gray-matter structures (the amygdala and hippocampus) decrease over this time-span (Toga et al., 2006). Both functional and structural studies show that the process of synaptogenesis involves an overall decrease in the volume of gray matter (GM) accompanied by a continuous increase in WM, as an important feature of maturation across the cerebral cortex after age 5 (Lenroot et al., 2007). Two periods in the human lifespan display rapid synaptogenesis. The first lasts from about week 12 of pregnancy until roughly eight or nine months after birth (Stiles et al., 2012)—a period of exuberant synaptogenesis when the number of synapses in the brain of the human fetus undergoes tremendous growth. The second period is adolescence (approximately ages 13–19).17 Importantly, the longrange connections increase in number and strength with age, while the quantity of short-range connections within cortical regions decreases. The overall number of connections remains stable across development, because synaptogenesis is complemented by synaptic pruning, the process of synapse elimination removing unnecessary neuronal structures from the brain. Pruning begins near birth and continues into the mid-20s, following the key principle of neuroplasticity, use it or lose it.18 As the brain develops, the simpler associations formed in childhood are replaced by complex structures (Chechik el al., 1999). Teenagers might be a headache for parents, but adolescence is a period of active and integrative learning enabled by ever-increasing synaptogenesis and the protracted development of the PFC. The PFC, the site of executive functions, is perhaps the most highly interconnected cortical region in the human brain (Rougier et al., 2005). The major role it plays is due precisely to the shift in the pattern of connectivity from decrease in short-range connections within the same cortical region to increase in long-range connections between different cortical regions. This pattern of integration between regions explains the special role of executive functions in the teenage brain. Shifts from intra-cortical to long-range fronto-parietal connections in the PFC relate to improvements in reasoning abilities during the transition from childhood to adolescence (Wendelken et al., 2016). And developmental advances in the ability to inhibit conflicting input proceed in tandem with this increase in long-range functional connections. Behavioral tasks like the Stroop test, with the name of a

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color printed in a different color (say, blue in red ink), reveal that the reaction time employed to solve input conflict correlates with an increase in long-range connections. The PFC remains plastic at least through late adolescence and possibly throughout the lifespan, providing increased opportunities for changes in the internal and external environment to shape its development. As a result, linguistically relevant developments occur well after age 5 years, due to fresh peaks in flexibility and adaptability of the brain which emerge later in life, fed by increasing cognitive control and command of literacy. Limitations of executive control that impact the quality of narrative discourse in mid-childhood (Chapter 2) are analogous to difficulties of older children and adolescents in composing written texts (Chapter 7). Particular difficulty is observed at later ages in being able to construct connective links in a story or building an argument that spans a range of utterances in an expository text. This is shown in the long time it takes to develop explicit marking of relations between utterances. Use of terms like initially or eventually, for example or nonetheless, may require explicit instruction or at least extensive exposure to written texts (Uccelli et al., 2013). Compare the narratives of two 5-year-olds in (5a) and (5b) to the account of the same set of pictures by an English-speaking adult in (6). The mature narrator can coordinate several parameters to create a clearly interpretable narrative text: (i) making it clear how the events are related sequentially and causally (bolded); (ii) specifying explicitly who or what is being referred to at each point; and (iii) structuring the story top-down as a meaningful whole. (6)

The little boy, with the help of the dog, starts looking for the frog. And in the process, the dog's head gets stuck in the … the little bottle that the frog was in … while the little boy is calling out to the frog from the window. Then the dog falls from the window-ledge with the bottle on his head, and breaks the jar … After that … um … the little boy goes outside to the forest, he's calling for the frog. And then there's a hole in the ground, and the boy is calling for the frog in there. This gopher comes out and bites his nose, I suppose, and afterwards the boy is looking for the frog in the hollow of a tree, and in the meantime, the dog is barking up the tree at the bees … Then their hive falls.

The excerpt in (6) is rather halting and far from literary, yet it displays a hierarchical, top-down organization of the events recounted. To use such discourse-internal devices, children must learn to plan their discourse to reflect the interlocutor’s need to determine newness of information, the location of characters in the story, and the difference between foreground plot-advancing events and the background circumstances surrounding them.

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Later language development involves a move beyond conventions, both at the lexical and textual level. In general, language use of older speakers demonstrates a divergence from canonically accepted norms: Adolescents contravene not only social conventions, but also linguistic and discursive constraints, by including reflective analyses in their narratives and personal anecdotes in their expository discussions. As we will see in the coming chapters, the types of text produced with age become less uniform and increasingly divergent from a single norm (Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2007). It is generally agreed that by age 5 years, children have access to most linguistic structures of their language. However, the way they select, deploy, organize, and modify specific linguistic forms in different communicative circumstances continues to develop well into later childhood. These usages are increasingly appropriate and more flexible in adapting to different situations and interlocutors, and more variable in alternating options of linguistic expression. This makes inquiry into later language development a challenging exploit. Below we signal key turning-points in the brain linked to language development from infancy to adolescence, taking into special account the periods after age 5.

1.5 Developmental trajectories Following an Aristotelian counsel, we start from the very beginning because “He who … considers things in their first growth and origin … will obtain the clearest view of them” (Politics Book 1, 1252a25ff ). And, throughout the book, we demonstrate that the shifts which characterize the four periods noted in the prologue lie both within children themselves and in concurrent changes in their environment. As Stern and Hines (2005, p. 801) point out, “The leap from cells to thought seems almost infinitely complex, yet every growing child manages to make it. Somewhere in this middle ground, between molecular components and psychology, lie the means by which familial and educational experiences intersect with developmental biology to shape cognitive abilities and personalities.” Four time spans that show dramatic changes in learning and use of language: (i) age birth to 3 years, a period of maximal learning and near-total dependency on adult care; (ii) age 4 to 5, a time of intense activity and improvement in children’s abilities in different domains, a psycholinguistic frontier in the shift from early to later language development (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986a); (iii) age 6 to 12 years, a calmer period impacted by received wisdoms and conventional attitudes at home and school; and (iv) age 13 to 19 years, a stage of increased linguistic flexibility and divergent thinking en route to maturity, representing a watershed in cognitive, affective, and social development, hence in knowledge and use of language.

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1.5.1 Birth to 3 years: moving into language Textbooks on language development sometimes begin with William James’ (1890) description of the infant’s supposed first experience of the world: “The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion.”19 Current research on infancy shows that babies rapidly manage to put order into the mass of sensory stimuli to which they are exposed. First, the infant’s brain registers sensory information in the more specialized cortical areas—auditory, visual, and motor—as well as in the language-related temporal and frontal regions (Fransson et al., 2011). Subsequently, the relation between sensorimotor registers expands by increased synaptogenesis, augmenting the coordination of auditory, visual, and motor stimuli under the control of multimodal areas such as the PFC. Neural development in the sensory-motor areas improves acoustic discrimination of sounds and refinement of articulatory movements. Infants become more attentive to regularities in their acoustic environment, so that they can discriminate and compare high- and low-probability sequences of sounds. These abilities underlie the powerful mechanism of statistical learning, which enables human beings, from infancy onward, to extract statistical information from visual and auditory input, including from connected speech. Importantly, babies can exploit these regularities for singling out candidate words in the continuous stream of speech in their language. Take, for example, the invented string of letters in (7), containing a single repeated sequence (in bold). (7)

TATIPOKITRULITIPOKIPILATIPOKIRALO

The probability that the letter T will precede the letter I in the repeated sequence is much higher than the probability for the letter I to precede the letter T. The difference in transitional probabilities establishes a gap between repeated and non-repeated sequences, so that repeated ones are singled out from the string. A groundbreaking study by Saffran, Aslin, and Newport (1996) selected sounds or letters so that probabilities inside words (1.0) would be consistently higher than those between words (0.33), controlling for transitional probabilities. Infants were able to track these regularities by performing a rudimentary statistical calculation, reacting differently to the gap between words than to the words themselves. Other studies demonstrate that infants’ sensitivity to statistical structure applies not only across visual and auditory domains—shapes, objects, audiovisual events, and faces—but also to the specificities of the input and goals of a task. Statistical learning facilitates predictions and puts some order into the blooming, buzzing confusion of sensory input. The brain seeks regularities; it is a superb pattern processer.

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Such statistical computation is the basis of the distributional analysis that underlies being able to segment out possible words in the continuous stream of speech, essential for language learning. The process enables human babies to establish form-meaning relations by mapping a delimited sequence of sounds to particular situations or referents, just as it helps anthropologists and linguists, as well as L2 learners, to isolate out words in unfamiliar languages. Small children gradually accumulate preferred candidates for detecting possible words in the continuous stream of speech. They are aided in doing so by increasing control of coordination between acoustic and proprioceptive registers—those produced and perceived within an organism, especially ones connected to the position and movement of the body. Around 18 months of age there occurs a vocabulary spurt in comprehension and production of words (Clark E.V., 1993). This peak, documented across languages in which early lexical development has been studied, correlates with peaks in synaptogenesis, as shown by the work of Pujol and associates (Pujol et al., 2006). They examined large numbers of infants from birth to 3 years for volume of myelinated WM in the central sensorimotor region and in language-related temporal and frontal regions in the living human brain, revealing that changes began in sensorimotor regions and then extended to language-related ones. Interestingly, once a rapid myelination phase was attained in these areas, children’s acquisition of vocabulary accelerated, followed by a protracted process of integration. The PFC expands over twice as much as other cortical regions and begins to play a role in constructing abstract rules that guide learning and behavior during infancy for both language and vision. The ability of toddlers to detect regularities in language, to compute transitional probabilities, to single out and identify hundreds of words from the mass of acoustic signals bombarding them is no less than amazing. Perhaps even more remarkable during this period is the emergence of grammar—combining words in hierarchically organized stretches of speech that conform to patterns of the ambient language. As the term is used by linguists, knowledge of grammar involves three major properties that children need to attend to—combination, hierarchy, and nesting— which develop sequentially across time. Children initially attach meaningful content to units of their language around age 1 year, combining sounds into strings of word-like elements (as in little Juan’s reference to water). Their first, incipient attempt at producing syntactic strings emerges when they combine words into twoor three-word phrases. Across different languages, these express, often in nonconventional or incomplete forms, a restricted set of functions and types of content that we noted at the outset of this chapter—location or naming, requests or desires, negation, possession, and events (Slobin, 1979). Grammar emerges around 2 years of age, when children begin what linguists call morphology—adding elements to words to mark grammatical categories like tense or number (e.g., baby crying, foots dirty). Three years is the age when many

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formal linguists consider language acquisition to have been largely achieved. However, while the principle of combination is manifested early on both within and between words, the transition from grammatically incipient utterances to fully formed syntactic strings that display hierarchical and nested structures has a long development route. These maturational processes are not deterministic, as proposed by Borer and Wexler (1987), but critically impacted by the environment and experience. Early childhood adversity in the form of neglect, extreme poverty, family violence, substance abuse, or parental mental health problems generates toxic stress and shapes health and cognitive development across the life course. Toxic stress provokes delayed cortical development in GM maturation and reductions in WM tracts between the PFC and other cortical and subcortical regions (Johnson et al., 2013). The authors explain that very early environments shape and calibrate the functioning of biological systems, while maintaining that “Even in the most extreme cases of adversity, well-timed changes to children's environments can improve outcomes” (p. 319).

1.5.2 Age 4 to 5 years: toward a psycholinguistic frontier Compared to the periods before (0–3 years) and after (6–13), age 4–5 years has been relatively less studied from a psychobiological perspective. This might be because preschoolers represent a particularly challenging group for successful imaging data-collection. While infants can sleep in certain imaging environments and older children will generally conform to instructions, preschoolers are restless and hard to control. The preschool period witnesses a significant expansion of cortical areas, which extends into the early school years (Brown & Jernigan, 2012). Around age 4, the greatest changes occur within the PFC and temporal associative areas, with primary sensory (visual, auditory) regions still changing, although to a lesser extent. The growing 3- to 5-year-old brain expresses itself through bursting behavior, which is unrestrained and difficult to contain, manifested in speech as well as the notational domains of writing and numbers. For example, 4-year-olds are particularly apt to coin unconventional lexical items in their spontaneous speech output, while in experimental elicitations they produce a wider range of structurally deviant word-forms than younger or older children. This period sees an increase in both size and quality of vocabulary (for example, lexical classes like adjectives and connectives are added to children’s repertoire), reflecting advances in structural and expressive use of language. Children begin to use grammatical items like determiners (the, some, all) to specify the referents they are talking about (my brother’s teacher, the boy in the corner), to use adjectives and prepositional phrases to qualify their referents (a noisy street, a baby with

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blue eyes), and connectives (then, so, because) to make explicit temporal or causal connections between strings of speech output. This is shown by a 5-year-old in (8). (8)

Me and my big brother fought about his iPad

The utterance in (8) constitutes a single clause made up of a subject referring to two participants (me and my brother) and a predicate consisting of the verb fight in past tense and a prepositional phrase qualifying that activity (about his iPad).20 Preschool children talk a lot and readily, at least in Israel, Spain, and the U.S. During get-togethers in preschool activities like American show and tell sessions, they develop lively conversations with each other and their caretakers. Nonetheless, probably as a consequence of still-developing cognitive control over their outputs, they do not always respect Gricean conversational maxims (Grice, 1975).21 They may talk more than needed, and without concern for supporting evidence, pertinence, or clarity, constructing their own versions of what constitutes a conversation. As a result, show and tell sessions at this age sound more like a juxtaposition of monologic chattering than a conversation, as shown in (9), an excerpt from a show and tell session in a Spanish kindergarten: (9) Scenario: The teacher is seated before a circle of children, next to whom is a box with cards illustrating different weather conditions—rainy, sunny, cloudy, windy, etc. The teacher tells them they must choose the card that best depicts the weather on that day. Teacher [turning to Pedro, Juan, Marı´a, and Luis and pointing to the cards]: “Could you choose the card that best shows today? What’s it like today? Snowing? Raining? Sunny?” Pedro [sitting in his chair without pointing anywhere]: “This can go” Teacher: “Show me which one” Juan: “He went already” (to select a card) Marı´a: “I don’t want to go out to the yard” Pedro: [Pointing at the cards] “The one there” Teacher: “Show me which one” Juan: “He went already” (to select a card) Luis: “It can also be this one” Teacher: “Which one do you say?” Marı´a: “The other one also suits” Teacher: “Which one?” Marı´a: “Luis, Luis!! Pedro is taking it from you!” The fairly typical interchange in (9) shows that children at late preschool age use the physical context to communicate their intentions, but they are not yet able to follow rules of appropriate conversation. On the other hand, by 4 to 5 years of

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age, children are increasingly sensitive to mental states and beliefs of both their own and others, developing what psychologists call a Theory of Mind, the ability to attribute mental states to people, also known as mind-reading or mentalizing. This capacity to mentally represent and take into account our thoughts and those of others is what enables people to interpret, explain, and predict behavior.22 Mentalizing broadens how children interpret speech and behavior to include intentions, purposes, and beliefs, so that they can distinguish, for example, between what is meant and what is said, or between saying what really happened and lying (see Chapter 5). Although lying runs counter to the received beliefs of parents and teachers, at least in the Western world, some scholars suggest that “even seemingly negative human social behaviors may confer cognitive benefits when such behaviors call for goal pursuing, problem solving, mental state tracking, and perspective taking” (Ding et al., 2018, p. 35). This enlarging of the world of young children also encompasses the notational domain (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992; Tolchinsky, 2003), the production and interpretation of graphic marks in what is sometimes termed emergent literacy. The human child is driven to leave a trace, everywhere. Try giving a small child some crayons and in a few minutes any smooth surface will be filled with the marks s/he has made. Apart from developing a drive to leave traces and a precocious responsiveness to writing instruments, preschoolers show an early awareness of the presence of written marks in the environment—on books, advertisements, cans, T-shirts, and other surfaces. The traces they themselves create and the world of printed materials mirror how children look at and produce linguistic behaviors—naming, asking questions, describing situations, and talking about events—which literate adults perform when producing printed messages. Late preschool age is the time of invented spelling (Read, 1975) and invented reading. Preschoolers use their emergent knowledge of letters to write words they do not know in unconventional ways, for example bus as *BAS, demonstrating intuitive knowledge of letter-to-sound correspondences and sensitivity to the phonetic characteristics of words. Likewise, well before formal instruction, children read even without knowing how to read. They imitate adults’ reading intonation and digital reading behaviors, using finger taps for their parents’ (and often their own!) cellphone screens. In doing so, they reproduce at higher levels, by means of a cultural artifact, sensorimotor schemas of the type basic to the working brain.

1.5.3 Age 6 to 12 years: going conventional After crossing this psycholinguistic frontier, children enter calmer waters. Ages 5 to 7 is the period when, in many cultures, formal schooling is begun. Earlier overflowing conversations and notations become more monitored, children learn to maintain a topic in spoken interchanges, and to support their arguments with

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reasons. They can write in a notebook or on a screen, and invented spelling is replaced by the literacy of the ambient language(s). This move to more conventional behavior can be attributed to schooling, not necessarily to brain-related changes. The classroom context requires children to sit still, raise their hands to go out, respect speech turns, and pay attention to what is being said or written on the board. Starting school at this age range was established long before neurologists discovered how this period marks great improvement in children’s ability to exert control over their behavior. In Freud’s (1973) theory of psychosexual development, the so-called latency period starts at a similar age range (following the anal, oral, and phallic stages), persisting up until puberty, as a period when we can observe a halt and retrogression in sexual development. At this time of reduced sexuality, children also begin the process of what Freud terms infantile amnesia—and alienation of early childhood memories that are traumatic, evil, or overly sexual. At this stage, children develop social skills and values while learning to interact with peers and adults outside the family. Piaget, too, viewed this as a pivotal period. The third of the four stages that he identified in cognitive development, the concrete-operational stage, spans ages 7–11 years, the period of middle childhood when the child’s thought processes are no longer confined to concrete objects and operations but move into the domain of abstract logical thinking (Piaget, 1952). The fact is that across Europe and the United States, as well as in India and other countries in Asia and Africa, children start formal schooling at around age 6 years—deferred to age 7 in parts of China, as well as in Sweden and Latvia, and in Waldorf schools around the world (Steiner, 1995). This near-universal agreement on when children first encounter formal schooling is clearly related to neurological developments. Current studies support the conjunction between neurological development and schooling practices. For example, Epstein’s (1986) review of data about human brain and head circumference growth found significant peaks in cortical thickness and electro-encephalography (EEG) energy around ages 7, 12, and 15 years compared with troughs between these ages. And an MRI-based study conducted by neurologists from the United States, France, and Germany concluded that middle childhood represents a late, but critical phase of brain growth when the brain is being adjusted to support the operations of the adult brain. Between ages 7–11 years, the brain has already reached 95% the size of the adult brain, with some differences between boys and girls (Caviness et al., 1996). This progression is particularly marked in maturation of fronto-parietal connectivity, of the kind that increases cognitive control. EEG-based studies reveal an age-related increase in detecting and predicting errors, showing a positive association with academic achievement (Stiles, 2008; Stiles & Jernigan, 2010).

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Children’s encounter with formal systems of instruction supported by the development of fronto-parietal connectivity give rise to compliance with accepted norms, which is manifested in their spoken and written usage as well as in interactions with peers and family members. A large-scale project of ours in seven countries examined abilities of nativespeakers of different languages and age-groups (grade schoolers aged 9–10 years, middle schoolers aged 12–13, high schoolers aged 16–17, and university graduates in their 20s and 30s) (Berman, 2008). Participants were required to produce spoken and written texts about problems between people—relating to possible, hypothetical rather than actual events in the real world (see Chapter 4). Schoolchildren aged 9–10 years showed prescriptively judgmental attitudes and socially motivated prohibitions, using expressions like must, shouldn’t, have to, it’s bad, it’s not good to when talking or writing about situations of interpersonal conflict. In marked contrast, 16- to 17-year-old high-school adolescents expressed their ideas from abstractly mentalist, largely individual perspectives, using epistemic terms such as can, might, would, perhaps, probably, it’s likely to refer to eventualities that are conceivable in a hypothetical world. Conformity to the world (and words) of adults, characteristic of the school years, confronts a crisis on entering adolescence.

1.5.4 Age 13 to 19 years: from nonconformists to autonomous and (sometimes) creative individuals Early in seventeenth century England, in his romantic comedy of 1623, The Winter’s Tale (Act III, Scene iii), Shakespeare portrayed adolescents much as we view them today: “I would there were no age between sixteen and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting …. Having said that, would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt in this weather?” The big difference is that nowadays we try to understand young people’s behavior in terms of changes in their brains. Adolescence starts with the biological, hormonal, and physical impacts of puberty and ends at the age when individuals attain a stable, independent role in society. This period has been described as a move toward becoming a ‘fully autonomous adult,’ but in fact adolescence more accurately reflects a shift from the caregiver-dependent child to dependency on peers—friends, partners, social networks—anchored in growing cognitive capacities and greater executive control (Paus, 2005). Peer-interaction regulates most adolescent decision-making—in the drive to become independent of parents and to impress friends. As noted, the PFC, which is involved in decision-making, planning, cognitive control, and flexibility, changes most dramatically in adolescence. Adolescents are

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“more capable of abstract multidimensional, planned and hypothetical thinking … [with] marked improvement in [deductive] reasoning, [more efficiency and capacity of ] information processing … and expertise” (Steinberg, 2005, pp. 69–70). This cognitive flexibility finds expression in divergent thinking that considers different perspectives on a given situation and conceives innovative solutions to a problem. The PFC, then, is still very much undergoing development during adolescence. At the same time, however, the limbic system, deep inside the brain, and involved in processing emotions and rewards, is hypersensitive to the feeling of risk-taking in adolescents compared with adults. This may explain teenagers’ tendencies to be daring, their poor impulse control, and lack of self-consciousness. Adolescents take more risks than children or adults, particularly with their classmates and friends. Parents, teachers, and media commentators consistently complain that today’s teenagers don’t know how to talk, let alone read and write. But denigration of teenage language runs counter to empirical findings from the cross-language study mentioned earlier. Across domains—ideational content, text organization, syntax, and lexicon—in written and spoken personal-experience narratives and discursive talks and essays, adolescents in different countries were more similar to adults than to the two younger groups. The development of linguistic flexibility as a function of age-schooling level also characterizes this period. One example is the ability to switch from genrecanonical linguistic forms by inserting illustrative narrative-like episodes in expository discussions or by including expository-like generalizations in narrative texts, which we found to emerge only from high-school age. This flexibility is also found within a particular genre, for example, in the ability to alternate tense-aspect markings of temporality for expressing background-foreground distinctions in building a narrative, as well as in adopting a particular level or register of language use to fit changing circumstances (Chapters 2 and 3). These features of adolescence can be attributed, on the one hand, to environmental factors of increased schooling and literacy, exposure to different kinds of texts, and richer, more varied personal experiences and hence world knowledge. Yet they are at the same time another instance of mutually induced changes between the neural and behavioral domains. Factors intrinsic to the developing organism, such as increased executive abilities and protracted limbic development, channel experience, which in turn shapes development.

1.6 Bi-directional interactivity across the life span This chapter introduced the basic tenets of neuro-constructivism, a neurobiological perspective that frames our approach to later language development. By assuming bi-directional interactivity between genetic endowment and experience as lying at the core of development, this perspective goes beyond the either/or views

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that marked twentieth-century approaches to language development—nativism versus empiricism; localism versus distributed processing; domain-specificity versus domain-generality. Brain structures and functions are both genetically generated and modified by experience. Nature provides the tools for perceiving, understanding, and changing the environment which, under the impact of these changes, turns into constantly renewed nurturing experience. The opposition between localism versus distributed processing for language takes on a different slant once we consider the interconnectivity between the different parts of the brain—the spreading involvement of different regions in mental processes— and the range of potential brain reorganizations and repurposing processes due to experience. Finally, we have argued that the sensorimotor schemas that our cortex learns constitute a common source of knowledge across domains of cognition. These differ in the sensory inputs they receive, but all alike are translated into sequences of electric and chemical impulses, signals that the cortex understands as unique ways of communication. Cognitive control, the attempt to match incoming sensory inputs with top-down expectations, is identically applied to every domain of knowledge. True, with development, individual neurons come to specialize in encoding specific stimuli in circumscribed brain regions, but neural mechanisms are multimodal (or domain-general), just as experience-dependent mechanisms like statistical learning apply across domains. This means that language development is a specialized process governed by domain-general learning mechanisms. The neurobiological evidence reviewed in this chapter justifies going beyond early language development. Not all we really need to know (about language) is learned by kindergarten (Fulghum, 1990). The protracted development of some components of the brain and the recurrent peaking of synaptogenesis and pruning provide long-lasting opportunities for experience to shape cognition and language development. There are thus crucially relevant changes in the way individuals understand, generate, and reflect on language beyond age 5, along lines that this book aims to portray. This evidence also deepens our grasp of the functioning of the human mind in general and, from the point of view of our present goals, provides a more profound understanding of the properties that characterize later-developing knowledge and use of language. Across the life span, our cortex (implicitly) learns and remembers each and every interface through the sensory organs and, on the basis of these interfaces, confronts new situations. The centrality of implicit learning has two main consequences. It explains children’s adaptability to communicative circumstances and also how their use of language improves as a function of age, without explicit instruction, by interaction with environmental experience. This is particularly clear from studies on discourse development cited in the chapters that follow. It also explains developmental changes in the use of indirect speech acts and figurative language, as detailed in Chapter 5. Grade-school teachers do

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not instruct children on how to lie or be ironic, yet they learn to do and be so. Rather, implicit learning reinforces the influence of environmental experience, as impinging directly on the structure of the growing brain. Developments in neural organization, furthermore, make it possible for children, with age, to gain more conscious access to their behaviors, thoughts, and language, as shown by developing metalinguistic awareness discussed in Chapter 6. Cognitive control, rooted in the basic processes of neurogenesis, is central to later language attainments. In the following chapters, we aim to demonstrate the crucial role of cognitive control and executive functions in every sphere of developing language knowledge and use—for telling stories, constructing grammar, improving conversational skills, producing coherent stretches of discourse, and for planning and writing essays.

Notes 1. We adopted the phrase ‘an iterative bi-directional activity’ as suggested by our friend and colleague, the psycholinguist Judy S. Reilly. See also (Stiles et al., 2005; Stiles et al., 2012). 2. By ‘normally developing,’ we refer to children with so-called typical development, who do not suffer from mental or physical disabilities that could affect their acquisition and use of language—due to conditions such as Down’s or Williams syndrome or being deaf or hard-of-hearing (Karmiloff-Smith, 2009). 3. The term utterance refers to any stretch of spoken output that ends with a final intonation. An utterance may be a single word (Yes, okay), or a long string (Yes, okay, so I will be there no later than five o’clock). 4. Sign(ed) languages develop in deaf and hearing-impaired communities using a shared system of manual gestures and facial expressions as visual rather than auditory means of linguistic input and communication. They develop separately from the languages spoken in a given community (for example, British and American Sign differ), and employ conventionalized systems of signs in phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics which are as complex and communicatively effective as those of spoken languages (Morgan, 2020). 5. See Glossary II for explanation of the terminology regarding brain sites and functions mentioned in this chapter. 6. Infants can distinguish nearly all and any sounds used in the languages of the world, but during the first year of life the repertoire of sounds they produce narrows down to those of the ambient language. That is why German or Hebrew speakers cannot pronounce the th in words like the, and thing, and why speakers of Bantu languages like Xhosa or Zulu continue to use click-like sounds in their speech. 7. Priming is used in psycholinguistic research to examine, for example, how the lexicon is organized—in meaning, sound, or structural relations between words. Typically, the experimenter presents pairs of words—the prime and the target—and participants have to indicate whether the target is a word of the language or not (in lexical decision tasks). Priming is said to occur when the timed response to the target

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8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

BRAINS FOR L ANGUAGE ( AND EVERY THING ELSE) (e.g., DARKNESS) is affected—either speeded up or slowed down—as a result of having previously encountered a related prime (e.g., happiness), compared with an unrelated prime (e.g., faithful) (Boudelaa, 2014). In the words of Lakoff, “Thought is physical and is carried out by functional neural circuitry,” (Lakoff, 2012, p. 773) and the neuroscientist Eagleman “Thoughts are underpinned by physical stuff.” (Eagleman, 2011, p. 3). The same word ‘stimulus’ covers both internal stimuli, like our heartbeats, and external sensory stimulation, like the light we see (Ursin, 2014). Schemas (or schemata) are superordinate knowledge structures that reflect abstracted commonalities across multiple experiences, exerting powerful effects on how situations are perceived, interpreted, and remembered. Language is one of the most lateralized functions: the brain networks controlling language are located asymmetrically in LH or RH. Most right- and left-handed people present a dominant LH for language, but 12% of right-handers and 15% of left-handers do not present a clearly dominant hemisphere, and only 7% of left-handed represent a dominant RH for language (Boudelaa, 2014). A claim for neural localism underlies, often implicitly, Chomsky’s assumption of an innate language module (Chomsky, 2005), in line with the view of the modularity of language functioning, such that domains like phonology, syntax, and semantics are largely independent of one another (Fodor, 1983). Pessoa provides two examples: “The dorsal-medial PFC is important for a diverse range of cognitive operations, as well as for emotional processing. This region thus provides an example of an area involved in many functions, namely an instance of a one-to-many mapping. Conversely, both frontal and parietal regions participate in attentional and executive processes, illustrating the situation of multiple regions carrying out a related function, an instance of a many-to-one mapping” (Pessoa, 2014, p. 2). It is generally accepted that memories reach the cortex rapidly. More controversial is the question of just how rapidly learning-induced anatomical changes occur in the brain. Brodt et al. found that experience-dependent plasticity in human subjects was rapidly induced after learning, persisting for more than 12 hours, driving behavior, and localized in areas displaying memory-related functional brain activity (Brodt et al., 2018; Stern, 2018). Given this logic, the role of prediction in language processing appears uncontroversial. Yet debates are ongoing as to its contributions, with psycholinguists taking strong positions on both sides (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2015). The Hebrew letter x (Greek chi) is used to represent the letters xaf and xet, both pronounced like the last sound in the words loch, Bach in English. (However, we represent the Hebrew phonemes c = ts, and ∫= sh as digraphs so as not to burden readers with additional unfamiliar phonetic symbols.) The term adolescence, from the Latin adolescere, ‘to grow up,’ appeared in the fifteenth century (Muus, 1990). Interestingly, the three seven-year periods (infancy, boyhood, and young manhood) prior to full maturity proposed much earlier by Aristotle are largely consistent with those in contemporary models of development.

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18. Synaptic pruning differs from the regressive processes in older people. Developmental pruning is experience-dependent, unlike the deteriorating connections associated with old age. 19. James W. (1890). The principles of psychology (ch. xiii). In https://psychclassics.yorku. ca/James/Principles/prin13.htm. 20. Throughout the book, we use the term clause for a key element of syntactic structure, defined here as any unit that contains a unified predicate—that is, a predicate that expresses a single situation (Berman & Slobin, 1994)—where situation refers to an activity such as fighting or talking on the telephone, an event such as falling or being pushed, or a state such as knowing something or being tired. 21. The philosopher Paul Grice (1975, pp. 45–46, 49–50) defined conversational maxims governing the pragmatics of natural language to explain the link between utterances and what is understood from them, based on his cooperative principle: “Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged.” 22. The term ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) was coined by Premack and Woodruff (1978) reporting experiments carried out on the chimpanzee Sarah. Whether and in what sense non-humans have ToM remains unsettled (Leslie, 2001).

2 Language for recollection Ken Scott’s movie The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir opens with an Indian man standing in front of three filthy, terrified children inside a prison cell.1 Are you going to hit us? They ask. No, I’m going to tell you a story. He replies. From the moment the young man shifted to story-mode, the children relaxed, taking on the role of an audience. Enchanted by the storyteller’s accounts of his hero’s adventures, they renounced their life of crime to return to school. And they lived happily ever after. THE END Stories do not only redeem crimes. Narration, the act of storytelling, is a fundamental human activity. Poets and philosophers from different cultures, like the Persian Khalil Gibran, author of the timeless masterpiece The Prophet (first published in 1923), or the French critic and essayist Roland Barthes (1915–1980), agree that storytelling fulfills a basic human need, and that stories, which may be as old as human speech, are part of life itself. In societies without writing, stories serve to preserve and transmit tradition. Across the world, they are effective strategies for salespeople and pedagogues alike (Wigginton, 1985). Which of us, from whatever background, east or west, underdeveloped or industrialized, has not experienced hearing stories from our elders sitting around the dinner table or under a tree, or used them for putting a child to sleep? In this chapter, we tackle narrative discourse: • as a mode of thought and as a use of language, to inquire why it is such a universal and basic human undertaking; • as displaying distinctive features of the genre: relating to time, interconnecting events, identifying participants, providing background description and evaluation, organizing the story as a whole, and conveying appropriate content; • as filtered through the options provided by a particular language in verbalizing events;

Growing into Language. Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman, Oxford University Press. © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.003.0002

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• as underpinned by neural bases that explain the cognitive processes in narrative construction and why listening to and telling stories are such pleasurable and universal activities; • as based on different research methods for eliciting narratives; • as developing from recounting two or three happenings to forming a narrative schema (a mental representation of a sequence of events), culminating in the ability to produce original and compelling stories.

2.1 Narrative as a mode of thought Several decades ago, the developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner drew a contrast between two modes of thought: logico-scientific and narrative (Bruner, 1986). In the first mode, people categorize and conceptualize; they describe and explain topics in formal, abstract terms. The narrative mode, in contrast, deals with human or human-like actions and vicissitudes, and how these mark the course of our lives. This explains why stories are universal—because human beings, their intentions and unfolding, are universal, independent of culture, literacy, or social class. Narratives can be cast in different modalities—pictures, movies, pantomime, speech, literature. Oral narratives can be interspersed in conversation with others or stand on their own as monologic pieces of discourse, where someone tells a story from beginning to end. Whatever the medium, products of the narrative mode of thought are one of the many genres of language use (see Prologue), both shared across societies and shaped by the socio-cultural norms and conventions of a given speech community. In narratives, language may serve to create original events and characters, relate the contents of a movie or book, or call to mind events from the past—in distant history or that happened directly to the teller. Some even claim that an experience can only be recalled if it has been verbally realized by a story: Experience, if it is to be remembered and represented, must be contained in a story that is narrated. We have no direct access to experience as such. We can study experience only through its representations, through the ways in which stories are told. (Oakley, 2003, p. 249)

Cognitively, in order to tell a story, people must have stored in memory a particular event-complex, actual or imagined, that they have encountered; they need to retrieve these events from memory, and to reconstruct them verbally, in words, so as to relate them to a hearer or reader. In telling a story, people must make reference to time, basically of past events (Fleischmann, 1990); and they must talk or write about living beings

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(usually humans) who participated in these events. In 1990 the Honduran author Augusto Monterroso wrote one of the shortest narratives in Spanish literature (1): (1) Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí. ‘When (s/he) woke up, the dinosaur was still there.’ Your personal narrative thinking may allow you, as the reader, to complete the chain of events that preceded and followed (1). On the face of it, such brevity appears to resemble the diminutive Hebrew account in (2), given by Tami, a 2-year-old asked about her day in kindergarten: (2) Rani (na) fal, kibel maka, baxa ‘Rannie fell, got (a) blow, cried’ The two accounts differ dramatically. Monterroso’s expert rendering consciously diverges from canonical or accepted Western narrative.2 Tami’s brevity is not an intentional stylistic transgression; rather it reflects her immaturity as a storyteller. She is at the starting point of an extended process that leads from brief juxtaposing of events to constructing full-blown, well-structured stories. Below, we outline key features of narrative as a genre. We delineate the neural networks that support these features, note ways researchers have studied children’s storytelling, and trace how narrative discourse develops from childhood to adolescence.

2.2 Properties of canonical narratives Several properties reflect what turns a piece of discourse into something like a satisfactory narrative.3 Two key features of the narrative genre are that it is ‘agent-oriented,’ focusing on people, their actions and motivations, and ‘eventbased,’ giving voice to the unfolding of events experienced or witnessed in the past.

2.2.1 Temporality: narrative time Stories reflect the dimension of time in human experience, using language for recollection, in the Proustian sense of ‘Remembrance of Things Past.’ To do so, narrators need to shift from the hic et nunc—‘the here and now’—of current actuality and relate to specific events rather than general or habitual situations. Cognitively, narrators need to call up events from the past, moving from the online occurrence of witnessed events, like a cup falling and breaking, to more distant events. This involves two types of long-term memory. Episodic memory recalls events that we have experienced personally; when, where, sometimes why, and in what circumstances. Semantic memory, which may also involve episodic memories,

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stores generalized pieces of information, world knowledge, and concepts that we have constructed in the course of our lives; it relates to complex categories like landscapes, political parties, or fashions, and involves sensory-motor schemas for identifying people, events, and objects. Narrative temporality is at once peculiarly restricted and richly complex. Linguists focus on how temporality is expressed in the grammatical categories of Tense—whether an event occurs at the time of, before, or after the telling—and Aspect—indicating the contour of a situation, whether it is ongoing or punctual, one-time or iterated (Binnick, 1991).4 Because languages divide up the domain of time (as of space) in different ways, in telling stories children filter their recollections through the particular options afforded (or required) by their own language(s). Do people who talk differently about time also think about it differently? Chinese has no grammatical marking of tense, so do Chinese speakers conceive time in the same way as speakers of English, Spanish, or Hebrew, languages that mark such distinctions by grammatical means? The same question also applies to current and future events, as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4 respectively. Notions of time offer an excellent platform for examining the relation between language and thought and the thesis of linguistic relativity, the hypothesis that the structure of a language influences the way its speakers conceptualize the world (Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). Narrators typically present the foreground events at the core of their account as having taken place in the past, as in the examples from Monterroso in (1) and a 2-year-old in (2). However, proficient narrators may diverge from the past tense, with mature narratives tending to fluctuate in how they mark temporal relations, depending on their language (Berman & Slobin, 1994, pp. 6–9). This allows narrators to differentiate between background commentary, descriptions, and interpretations on the one hand, and foreground, plot-advancing events at the core of their narrative on the other. In English, they can, for example, alternate between present and past tense or perfect aspect (Levy, 2006), as in (3), from a teenager’s story about a conflict with a classmate (with verbs marked for tense and/or aspect in bold). (3)

BACKGROUND COMMENTARY: Not a single life in all of recorded history has been free from obstacles and problems. My own experiences prove that my life is not an exception to this general rule … STORY INITIATION: At my grade school I had a classmate who was clearly popular because he was feared, not respected or loved … FOREGROUND EVENTS: One morning, while I was enjoying a conversation with a friend of mine, he appeared. He entered our conversation as an unwelcome intruder and told me to shut up and pushed me to reinforce his message …

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Shifting between tense/aspect forms enriches the temporal texture of a narrative and is a late-developing ability. Narrators can also vary the temporal texture of the stories they tell by using verbs that are not marked for tense (‘non-finite’ forms) to demote backgrounded events, as in (4). (4) Then he spied Mrs. Dunan, the bank president’s wife, coming toward him. (Hammett, 2017)

2.2.2 Narrative connectivity: linking parts of a story In contrast to example (1), narrators do not generally expect their hearer-readers to connect parts of a story for themselves. Rather, narrators undertake the task of relating events in narrative (Berman & Slobin, 1994) in two senses of the word relate:5 they tell others what happened, and they also connect events to form a meaningful storyline. The most basic way of doing this is when events follow one another in time, mirroring the sequence in which they occurred. This is already evident in the 2-year-old’s minimal narrative in (2): the boy fell, then got hurt, and then cried. The three events are not connected linguistically, but the temporal and causal relations between them are obvious to us from what we know about the world. Compare this with the sequence of events in (5), reported by a 6-year-old boy recounting what happened in an accident he witnessed. (Linguistic elements marking connections between events are bolded.) (5) Car got burned up. There was three kids in there. Everybody got out in, just in time, and, and, and then my Dad didn’t keep his eyes on the road and we were almost wrecked.6 This child combines several past events in his account, sometimes linking them explicitly by lexical forms like ‘and,’ or ‘and then.’ The brief account in (5) not only reports events in temporal sequence, it also refers to consequences of these events (“we almost got wrecked”). This narrative thus involves, though only implicitly, another key type of connection between different narrative events: causality. Narrative causation provides motivations for the events to be recounted, explains why and under what circumstances they took place, and/or draws general conclusions from them. Distinguishing foreground sequential and background descriptive or evaluative facets of storytelling is also important to how narratives are organized. Background material tends to occur at the beginning, in the setting of the story, or at its end, in providing a coda.

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Temporality is grammatically marked in many languages, whereas the connection between events may be left to the listener or reader to infer. Sequentiality is the default for how narrative events follow one another in time. And causal relations can be inferred from world knowledge, as in the sequence of statements: ‘I’m starving. There’s a Macdonald’s around the corner.’ This is also true of situations like a child crying after she falls, or a car getting wrecked as the result of an accident. Compare how an adult packages together events depicted in a children’s picture book (Mayer, 1969)—using linguistic markers (in bold) (6a) and how the same events are reported without overt marking of the relations between them in (6b).7 (6a)

The next morning, when the boy and his dog awoke, they found that their frog was gone, a situation about which they were very concerned, so they began looking for it everywhere around.

(6b)

The boy and his dog awoke. Their frog was gone. They were very concerned about the situation. They began looking for it everywhere around.

The contents of (6a) and (6b) describe the same (pictured) states of affairs, but in (6a) different aspects of this complex of events are linked together into a single syntactic unit, and the interrelations between them are encoded linguistically—for sequence by next morning, then; for consequence by so. This kind of packaging of a set of happenings into a single cohesive cluster requires considerable cognitive dexterity: to conceptualize different facets of a complex event and preplan in advance what linguistic forms to use, narrators need to verbalize how they are interrelated. Developing these abilities presents a challenge to young storytellers, and not all adults are equally adept in using them.

2.2.3 Reference: specifying who or what is being talked about For a story to make sense, it needs to be clear who and what the narrator is referring to all along the way. S/he has to specify unambiguously who did or said what to whom, so that the audience can identify these entities as the story unfolds. A narrative must introduce new participants, re-refer to them by maintaining reference, and mark a change when shifting reference to other participants (Serratrice & Allen, 2015). Consider the example in (6a), repeated here with reference to the protagonists in bold. (6a’) The next morning, when the boy and his dog awoke, they found that their frog was gone, a situation about which they were very concerned, so they began looking for it everywhere around.

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Across this excerpt, the hearer knows exactly who or what is referred to, even if s/he has no idea of the contents of the storybook on which it is based. For adults this may sound obvious, but it is a formidable task for children (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979). The referring expressions function as cohesive ties that serve to link together parts of a text (Halliday & Hasan, 1976). To use them appropriately, the narrator needs to integrate local and global processes of text construction—e.g., specific ‘the boy and his dog’ versus generalized ‘the situation’ in (6a)—so as to achieve linguistic cohesion between statements and discourse coherence across an entire text. Making reference involves knowledge of different grammatical elements (including determiners, pronouns, and lexical nouns) and processes like subject elision and syntactic dislocations (Hickmann, 1998). Returning to the example in (6a), the first two cohesive ties—‘the boy’ and ‘his dog’—let us know who or what is being referred to, while the determiners (‘the boy,’ ‘his dog’) also tell us that it is a specific boy (the one in the picture), not any boy, and that the dog belongs to him. Subsequently, use of the pronoun they refers back to these two protagonists, the boy and his dog, by means of what is called anaphoric reference. Narrators need to understand and encode the distinction between anaphoric reference and deixis (from the Greek for ‘finger’ or ‘pointing’). Deictic terms like me, here, now, today, the boy over there point at the extra-linguistic situation, outside of the text itself. They can only be interpreted by reference to the real (or pictured) setting in which the events occur. For example, now refers to a very particular time of speaking, and here to a specific place in the actual context of when a bit of language is produced. Deictic reference to objects or people in the concrete setting outside of the text itself is much easier than anaphora: it places less of a burden on memory and cognitive processing than going backward and forward in a piece of discourse, bearing in mind what is being referred to at each point. Making reference explicit enough yet not redundant also means differentiating between information that is new to reader-hearers and information they can be assumed to have—either from their general world knowledge or from what is said or written earlier in the account. Narrators must also recognize which information they share with their interlocutors. To do so, they need to have ‘a theory of the reader-listener,’ they need to be capable of ‘mind reading,’ so as to produce and interpret what or who is being referred to in a way that is informative, unambiguous, and non-redundant.8 The challenge in constructing a narrative, as in producing other genres of discourse discussed elsewhere in this book, is to textualize, to put clearly into words, what is being talked about. Each of the three features of narrative reviewed so far finds expression in a particular linguistic category. Temporality relies mainly on verbs (talks, is talking, will have been talking); connectivity makes use of conjunctions and adverbs

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(and, but, then, later on, in the end, eventually, moreover); and reference to entities depends on nominal categories like nouns, noun phrases, and pronouns (children, all the little children, they). In contrast, the next three facets of narrative that we consider—elaborating on events, narrative structure, and thematic content—do not rely on any particular linguistic category. They are built up of propositions: what narrators say about entities and events. To characterize how narrators meet these challenges, we use the clause as our basic unit of analysis. A semantically and syntactically motivated unit, a clause contains a unified predication that expresses a single activity (running), event (falling into a pond), or state (being frightened). One reason to prefer this unit of analysis is that the alternative, the sentence, is difficult to define. Structurally, its definition is often model-dependent, specified differently in formal, generative models and traditional grammars. Conceptually, even educated adults do not always agree on what constitutes the boundary of a sentence. Besides, the sentence has a particularly dubious status in spoken language use, and it makes little sense to assume that young pre-literate children know what is meant by this abstract notion. Thus, following other studies of narrative development in different languages (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Berman & Verhoeven, 2002), we use the more accessible and cross-linguistically valid notion of clause to analyze narratives and other types of extended discourse (as in Chapters 3 and 7).9

2.2.4 Elaborating on events: description and interpretation For the sociolinguist Labov (1972b), narrative is a “method of recapitulating past experience by matching a verbal sequence of clauses to the sequence of events which (it is inferred) actually occurred” (pp. 359–360). A ‘good story’ starts with an introductory setting to which the narrator returns in the concluding coda. Importantly, Labov distinguishes between plot-advancing ‘narrative clauses’ and elements of ‘narrative evaluation’ that elaborate on these sequentially presented events. Following Reinhart (1984), we suggest that there are two kinds of elaborative elements: description of the circumstances in which the events took place, and interpretation of the motivations and attitudes of the narrator and/or participants. We thus define narratives as having three main elements of content: (i) eventive, (ii) descriptive, and (iii) interpretive. While a minimal story may contain only the first, an adequate narrative must include all three (Berman, 1997): (i) Narrative Predications, describing events in sequence; (ii) Informative Descriptions, fleshing out these events by specifying features of the time, place, and physical circumstances in which they occurred; and (iii) Interpretive Evaluations, voicing the narrator’s attitude to the events, and how s/he interprets the mental and emotional reactions of the participants.

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These three components are illustrated in (7), the first part of a narrative written by a Californian graduate student asked to tell of an experience with interpersonal conflict. (A bracket] indicates the end of a clause, and ‘eventive’ elements are in bold.) (7)

As I stated just moments prior in an interview, a story about conflict] that arose in my own life] occurred recently ]. In my research laboratory there are certain times] in which stress is much more tangible than other times,] for example, when we are under the time pressure of a grant submission deadline.] It was during one of those ‘crunch’ times] when it became apparent] that our research staff was under a great deal of stress ]. Concomitantly, groups of people began to snap at each other ], show labile mood ], and/or have certain tones in conversation] that were found] to be condescending to others]. IN ONE INSTANCE, this type of scenario occurred between me and another lab colleague ]. When alone in my office] we both exchanged less than optimal tones with each other.] …

The narrator of (7) introduces an incident of conflict with a longish commentary, nearly half the text. Before telling what happened in that one instance, she describes the emotional and social circumstances that formed the background to the conflict and interprets the conditions that gave rise to the event. In discussing developmental trajectories (Section 2.4), we show that with age, storytellers assign more weight to elaborative story elements, marking them off from initiation of the key plotline event—as by the phrase in one instance in (7).

2.2.5 Narrative structure: how stories are organized The mental representation known as a narrative schema is another facet of narrative that has cognitive rather than strictly linguistic underpinnings. The notion involves understanding that a story needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end: starting with background information, proceeding to what happened, and ending with a solution or coda. Some suggest that children derive the ability to construct and understand narratives from their mental representations of generalized event complexes, the routines that inhabit procedural and perceptual memory, such as having a bath and going to bed (Tomasello, 1992). Cognitive psychologists define these as scripts rooted in long-term procedural and perceptual memory systems: prototypical behaviors in a given situation, typically including actors, props, setting, and a set sequence of events. Some consider knowledge of scripts necessary for creating an account of a specific instance of a general event complex (Nelson, 1986): a person cannot tell

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a story about, say, a birthday party without having knowledge of what is involved in birthdays and in parties as a type of celebration. A different perspective emerged under the impact of twentieth-century structuralism in Chomskian linguistics and anthropology, led by scholars such as Claude Lévi-Strauss. Narrative researchers in the 1970s and 1980s applied a story grammar framework to children’s stories (e.g., Stein & Glenn, 1975), analyzing stories as requiring four components—an initial background setting or introduction; the theme or initiating problem setting events in motion; episodes—the events constituting the plot; and a resolution or conclusion. Superficially similar to Labov’s ideas, these analyses focused on structural organization (with some note of inner states) rather than on linguistic features or thematic content (Mandler, 1982). We illustrate a story-grammar analysis in (8), the response of a 5-year-old girl asked if she had ever gotten jabbed (from Peterson & McCabe, 1983, p. 30). (Small caps indicate event components, with descriptive and interpretive material bolded.) (8) BACKGROUND INTRODUCTION [supplied by experimenter]: Have you ever gotten jabbed with anything? INITIAL (MOTIVATING) EPISODE: I got jabbed with a bee. See, I got jabbed on my foot. I was barefooted. SUBSEQUENT EPISODES: I screamed and I screamed and I cried and I cried. COMPLICATING ACTION: Until my next-door neighbor came out and my dad came out and my brother came out. RESOLUTION: And they all carried me into the house. CODA: But after that happened I got to sleep overnight with my neighbor. Researchers thus analyze narrative development from different perspectives, but all share the idea, going back (at least) to Bartlett (1932), that our knowledge of narrative structure is organized by means of a special kind of mental schema. This includes a problem or goal facing the protagonist, actions taken to solve this problem or meet this goal, and a resolution or outcome in which this goal is attained. For example, Mercer Mayer’s (1969) frog story picture-booklet starts with a problem—the boy’s pet frog escapes, shifts to the boy’s goal—to find the frog, leads to actions—searching for the lost frog in different places, and ends with a resolution—the boy finds a new frog. It thus emerges that for a narrative to be adequately structured it needs to go beyond temporal sequence to a causal underpinning of the events it recounts and on to an overall organization. Developmentally, this means moving from bottomup presentation of local, juxtaposed events to top-down organization of events interconnected in an overall global structure.

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2.2.6 Thematic content: narrative topics and perspectives What do narrators choose to talk about when telling a story? What governs their choice of topic and the perspective they take on the events or circumstances they present? First, people cannot tell or understand stories on themes that are not familiar to them; narrators must have some (even if vicarious or imaginary) experience with the situations they relate. Second, narrators make personal choices about what they regard as worthy of telling, of interest to themselves and others. For example, Hebrew-speaking young adults asked to tell a friend a ‘hassle story’ selected different scripts and expressed diverse attitudes, from being cheated by a gas-station attendant, to poor service in delivery of a new closet, or teachers disagreeing about class scheduling, That is, people of similar ages and backgrounds decide not only how to tell a story, but also what they regard as worthy of narration—because of the impact the event had on them personally, or its potential interest to others. Developmentally, as detailed in Section 2.4, children talk about different, more limited and concretely specific events than adults. For example, accounts of interpersonal conflict differ immensely as a factor of age and personal history, shifting from concrete situations like quarrels about possessions to conflicts over abstract issues of principle. And well-educated adults relate to topics beyond the realm of experience of their less educated peers (a theme developed in Chapter 7).

2.2.7 Filtering narrative accounts: the impact of experience, language, and culture Our leitmotif here is Slobin’s (2004) idea of filtering events via narrator perspective, target language, and cultural conventions. The world does not present events ‘objectively’ encoded in language. When experiences are put into words, they will invariably be filtered through the expressive options provided by a particular language and the cultural conventions of the community, as well as by the subjective perspective, individual aptitude, and world knowledge of each speaker-writer.10 This was clearly demonstrated in a doctoral dissertation (Segal, 2001), where Israeli college students revealed different ways of recalling, interpreting, and relating their experiences during the Gulf War. One woman described her mother’s rather hysterical stocking up of provisions, another talked about how threatened they felt closeted up in their ostensibly ‘safe’ room. Their stories clearly reflected the so-called Rashomon effect, named after Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film in which four different witnesses to a murder each give a very different account of ‘the same’ events. Stories also reflect cross-cultural differences. Some communities require a moral ending (common in Chinese culture and among religious Israeli Jews compared

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with their non-observant counterparts) (Wang & Leichtman, 2000). In an international research project, we found that Californians, Southern Europeans, and Israelis were more willing to relate their experiences with interpersonal conflict than their Northern European peers. Nor do Southern African folktales (Tappe, 2018) conform to canonical ‘story grammar’ structure: narrators in Malawi, Lesotho, and Zambia tend not to relate to protagonists’ internal states, placing value on the moral lesson that hearers can derive from the account, which they tend to treat as a ‘performance.’ Comparisons of children from mainstream, middle-class families to their peers from disadvantaged or lower SES backgrounds reveal the impact of different value systems, showing that children early on accommodate to the social practices of their community (Heath, 1983). For the sociolinguist James Paul Gee (1991), “the fundamental function of narrative in human life is not to report a chronological sequence of events, but to signal a perspective on events and create a satisfying pattern of themes one has drawn from various social traditions” (p.20) (emphasis in the original). To Gee, narration is the product of the different ways people relate to memory and myth, so that both recent experiences and accounts of events from the far past reflect marked differences across time and culture. Studies using the frog story picture-book (Mayer, 1969) conducted in traditional, non-urban cultures (Guo et al., 2009) revealed dramatic cross-cultural differences. Berthele (2009) reports that his informants in an isolated community in the Swiss Alps were bewildered by the task of telling a children’s story to an unfamiliar adult, leading him to suggest that theirs may be a ‘non-narrative culture.’ In the same collection, Bavin (2009) reports that stories told in Warlpiri by aboriginal children in the central Australian desert reveal little use of ‘evaluative’ elements. Adults narrating the same picture-book in other cultures (including the Central Australian language of Arrente, the Mayan language of Tzeltal, and the West Greenlandic of the Inuit in Denmark) provided detailed descriptions of the route taken by the boy in search of his frog, highlighting the script of journeys in cultures that rely heavily on food-gathering expeditions. Gaining mastery of the cultural preferences for storytelling differs not only across languages and societies, but also across development from childhood onwards (as shown in Section 2.4). A rather different type of filtering is linguistic, in the sense that “experiences are filtered through the set of options provided by the particular language into verbalized events” (Berman & Slobin, 1994, p. 611). Different languages impose different constraints on how people talk and so how they depict events in narrative (Slobin, 2004). Yet, as we noted in Chapter 1, no one language is easier or more difficult for normally developing children to acquire (as distinct from second or foreign language learning). True, languages vary in the complexity of their structural systems, but this does not affect children’s success in learning their native language. What it does mean is that from early on, children are attuned to the particular means

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of encoding events available or required in their native language. Compare, for example, the excerpts in (9) showing how 3-year-old speakers of different languages describe the same pictured scene, of an owl emerging from a tree that the boy has climbed and from which he falls down in fright, while his dog is shown running away from a swarm of bees whose hive he disturbed (Berman & Slobin, 1994). (9)

English, 3;1: German, 3;3: Spanish, 3;3:

Hebrew, 3;6:

An owl. Flew out of here. And he's running away. Da kommt ein Vogel. Und da rennt er. ‘There comes a bird. And there he runs.’ Salió un pájaro inmenso. Y un niñito se cayó de cabeza así. ‘A big bird came out. And a little boy fell on his head like this.’ hine yanshuf. ve hine ha-yeled nafal. ‘Here's an owl. And here (is) the boy fell (down).’ (pp. 63–64)

These immature accounts of the same pictured scene each touch on different aspects; all fail to mark necessary linguistic categories, for example, in connectivity and reference; and each reflects language-specific features, like the English –ing at the end of the verb and directional particles out and away not used in Spanish or Hebrew, use of the t marker on the end of the verb in German, the agreement of masculine noun to adjective in Spanish un pa´jaro inmenso, and of subject to verb in Hebrew ha-yeled nafal. The grammatical, lexical, and rhetorical differences between languages impact how narrators describe events, even if they do not necessarily affect the way people perceive these situations (Bowerman & Levinson, 2001; Gumperz & Levinson, 1996). Languages differ in the way they describe time and space and in how speakers introduce and maintain reference to the characters in a narrative. For example, in English, speakers introduce the subject once and then refer to it by pronouns (e.g., ‘My sister couldn’t find her purse, she looked everywhere until she found it’); in languages like Spanish and Italian, speakers do not necessarily refer to the agent each time by means of a pronoun (e.g., mi hermana no encontrό su bolso, 0 lo buscό en todos partes, hasta que lo 0 encontrό—where the zero indicates a slot where other languages might use a pronoun), with non-mention of a subject that has been previously mentioned built into the language. On the thorny question of the relation between language and thought, we adopt Slobin’s (1996) idea of a dynamic process where, “in acquiring a native language, a child acquires particular ways of thinking for speaking” (p. 75). Speakers of different languages do not necessarily perceive or even conceptualize reality in different ways, but how they put their thoughts into words will be governed by the expressive options available in their native language. This means that, when telling

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stories, we necessarily resort to the repertoire of forms specific to our language for putting our ideas into words. This process is constrained not only by the particular nature and content of the language we are using, but also how well we know it—as experts, educated adults, or inexperienced children—and by the particular choices we make in what we talk or write about.

2.3 Neural underpinnings of constructing and enjoying stories We now turn to the brain structures, both domain-general and language-specific, underlying narrative. Neuroscientists have found that several neural networks distributed in our central nervous system support narration (Richardson et al., 2004; Young & Saver, 2001). First are the frontal cortices and their subcortical connections involved in the processes of retrieval and storage, crucial for recollection, which exert cognitive control on both memory and verbal expression in storytelling. The amygdalo-hippocampal complex in the limbic system controls emotional and motivational aspects of narration, sensitizing narrators to take another’s perspective and consider their interlocutor’s knowledge. And the left perisylvian networks, where language is formulated together with other righthemispheric structures, is involved in the linguistic formulations that both express and organize our memories. In the process of retrieval, we activate and recover stored material triggered by inner thought processes or by environmental stimuli—a picture, an odor, a melody. For example, in daydreaming, we may suddenly activate reminiscences of an old friend or start telling how we cheated on a math exam.11 This evokes a change in our recollections because, consciously or not, we adapt them to our current circumstances. What we consolidate in long-term memory after conscious retrieval is most probably a representation of our initially retrieved memories modified by processes of post-retrieval encoding and consolidation. The material we activate in retrieval is stored in long-term memory from innumerable experiences throughout our lives and up to the last few minutes. They are encoded by our sensorimotor systems, last a few seconds in short-term memory, and then consolidate. The process is highly selective: we do not encode every event, object, face, or odor that we encounter. The processing capabilities of our brain—how far new stimuli are predicted by existing patterns and how they fit into consolidated patterns—constrain both encoding and consolidation. These processes are also mediated by language—English, Spanish, or Swahili, say. Encodings that fit existing patterns, that have high emotional value, and are readily accessible to typological features of the language in use are most likely to be stored. Where they will be stored in the frontal cortices depends on the type of long-term memory system involved.

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Episodic autobiographical memories (EAM) and semantic memories (SM) are stored mainly in association areas, although storage and retrieval of the EAM system also involve the limbic system. The EAM is context-specific with respect to time and place, say, a recent meal with friends or a family trip from two years ago, and so plays a crucial role in narrative recounting of personal experiences. In contrast, SM is context-free; it refers to general facts and encompasses world knowledge as a whole. When telling a personal story, we evoke EAM memories where our limbic system is more active, particularly for incidents with high emotional associations. Our recollections may also include general contextualizing pieces of information, such as the city in which an encounter took place. In the course of remembering, we consciously call up memories embedded in time and space, with some emotional flavoring. What we know, however (the country in which the city is located, say) includes conscious distinctions not necessarily involving emotions. Two different components of the limbic system, the hippocampus and the amygdala, are linked independently to the EAM and SM memory systems, yet they interact importantly when emotion and motivation are involved. The hippocampal complex, by forming episodic representations of emotional significance, can influence the response of the amygdala, and the amygdala can modulate both the encoding and storage of hippocampal-dependent memories. The activity of the amygdala correlates with retention of information depending on its emotionality. More emotionally arousing information increases amygdala activity, which in turn correlates with retention. Both memory systems are essential to narration: the more personal the story, the more it will rely on the EAM; the more detached and general, the more it will depend on SM. Three additional memory systems are relevant to using language for narration. Procedural memory is retrieved and stored in basal ganglia and motor-related areas that include sensory and cognitive skills. Priming is stored in the primary and association cortices to promote identifying previously perceived stimuli. (As discussed in Chapter 1, this facilitates the implicit impact of previous experience on interpretations.) Perceptual memory, located in the posterior sensory cortex, enables us to identify an object, item, or person on the basis of its distinctive features. Tulving (2005) proposes that memory development starts with procedural memory and culminates in the SM and EAM memory systems. As noted, some scholars suggest that narrative invariably evolves from scripts, as generic, prototypical sequences of events anchored in mental schemata. Familiar routines of 1- and 2-year-olds are rooted in procedural memory, providing the most basic and earliest forms of storytelling (Tomasello, 1992). With age, the topics that children and adolescents talk and write about grow in abstractness and generality, reflecting the increased power of SM systems. Narrative development also reveals improved organization of events along a temporal axis, clearer expression of causal and other logical relations between

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events, and increased control in introducing and maintaining reference to protagonists. These changes result from a growing capacity for planning and central cognitive control enabled by the protracted development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC). As explained in Chapter 1, the PFC is richly connected to subcortical and other cortical structures, notably the amygdala, the hippocampus, and cortices of association in the temporal and parietal lobes. As a result, the PFC exerts increasing cognitive control in different domains, including to construct a narrative schema. Mastering use of connective devices in producing a narrative is, likewise, not simply due to greater linguistic knowledge by adolescence. Rather, more skilled, complex packages of narrative information are due to increased executive abilities in the form of longer memory spans and being able to hold different pieces of information in mind simultaneously while dealing with an online task (Pascual-Leone, 1987). Narrative construction also requires recognizing information that is new. The left perisylvian networks and other structures in the right hemisphere (the right inferior frontal gyrus and the right angular gyrus) intervene to direct this key facet of narratives, like other types of discourse. Importantly, language does more than merely verbally encode previously formed episodic or semantic memories. Rather, as proposed by Schank (1975), the telling of a story is what enables the making of memories, leading to re-encoding by post-retrieval processes that follow the telling. Here, too, typological features of the ambient language mediate ‘thinking for speaking’ as well as for remembering (Slobin, 1997, 2004). For example, in French and Spanish, narrators have grammatical means for distinguishing background from foreground events by marking the verb with imperfective or perfective aspect. Hebrew and Turkish speakers will mark causative events morphologically in the verb rather than by an auxiliary verb, like cause to fall, faire tomber, hacer caer. And when describing events in space, English and German narrators will use special directional particles like run away, fall down, go across, where French, Hebrew, or Spanish will mark directionality in the verb itself (e.g., French enfuir, tomber, traverser). The process of producing a story also creates the memory structure that retains the gist of the story. Narrators will not hold onto the actual words they used in the telling, but they can and do retain the story’s core, so creating “a cognitive space or an environment for thought that can be drawn upon when the gist of the story serves a new purpose” (Young & Saver, 2001, p. 84). Telling a good story means adopting a mentalistic stance (Radvansky & Zacks, 2010) relating to the mental states and motivations of protagonists beyond the events in which they participate and taking into account how the reader-hearer will envisage what the narrator has said. And indeed, neuroimaging reveals that mentalizing brain regions are consistently implicated in story-processing. As we argue in Chapter 5, these regions are involved not only in understanding the mental states of ourselves and others, they are activated when people perform the pragmatic inferences necessary to make sense of any piece of discourse.

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Taking a mentalistic stance in storymaking is a protracted and far from universal achievement. Young children’s storytelling is event-based, giving little or no expression to motivational, evaluative, and other backgrounded elements, even though they may share the feelings of the characters (Reilly, 1992). Only around middle childhood do stories become more oriented around their protagonists. Yuan (2018) and associates examined whether the brain areas that support storytelling are linked to a specific sensorimotor modality or whether there are cross-modal areas that form a ‘narrative hub’ in the brain. They had participants read simple headlines (e.g., ‘Surgeon finds scissors inside patient’) and then depict the narrative it inspired using either speech (as in a news brief ), pantomime (as in charades), or drawing (as in the game of Pictionary). They found that areas associated with mentalizing, social cognition, semantics, and discourse processing show similar patterns for all three modalities. They found four areas shared by spoken, mimicked, or pictured stimuli: the posterior superior temporal sulcus— which plays a role in encoding the goals and intentions underlying actions and is sensitive to the context in which actions occur; the temporoparietal junction— which serves bilaterally for integrating information from the external environment and the body; the posterior cingulate cortex—which modulates attentional focus over time; and the anterior superior temporal sulcus—associated with discourselevel processing (Leech & Sharp, 2014). There seems to be a dedicated site for narrative thought, with the same four brain areas being activated irrespective of the modality in which the narrative is realized. Other areas, however, are more directly related to specific modalities. The posterior middle temporal gyrus, a semantic processing area, was activated bilaterally for speech and drawing, but only in the left hemisphere for mime. Drawing uniquely showed additional activity in the left premotor cortex and dorsomedial PFC. These studies disclose two contrasting neurobiological facts. On the one hand, the extended neural networks involved in storytelling reflect the multidimensionality of the task. Telling a story embraces different memory processes, each mediated by experiential, contextual, emotional, and linguistic factors, implying a high proportion of mentalizing, much like life itself. On the other hand, not only the telling but also mimicking and graphic depiction (of a story) are supported by these multiple areas. These findings provide neurobiological support for Bruner’s ideas on narrative as a unique mode of thought (Bruner, 1986). A few years ago, Paul Zak, the man behind the discovery of the behavioral effects of oxytocin, realized that compelling narratives cause release of this hormone and have the power to affect our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. Zak (2014, 2017) and his colleagues found that oxytocin is synthesized in the human brain in situations of interpersonal empathy and trust, and that it promotes prosocial behaviors. Narration creates a feeling of trust, so that stories involving drama and suspense

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cause an increase in cortisol and oxytocin. This change in oxytocin correlated positively with participants’ feeling of empathy and is associated with concern for the characters in the story. If you, as hearer or reader, pay attention to a story and become emotionally engaged with its characters and their experiences, then it is as if you have been transported into the story itself—you have become part of its unfolding. We move next to the prolonged developmental route of narrative abilities, supported by neurobiological processes in constant interaction with environmental factors.

2.4 Developmental trajectories In tracing how children develop as storytellers in recollecting past experiences, or putting into words graphic or filmed depictions of events, we review, first, linguistic means for expressing the narrative functions of marking time, connecting parts of a narrative, and making reference to characters, and then move to factors impacted by socio-cognitive growth and increasing world knowledge: plotelaborating elements, discourse structure, thematic content, and cross-linguistic comparisons. Here, we highlight three themes. First, development in narratives as in other domains pursues a lengthy route from early childhood to adolescence and beyond. Second, following Karmiloff-Smith (1986b), we approach development as progressing in recurrent phases rather than in a domain-general Piagetian view of invariant stages occurring across the board at a given period in development. For example, preschool children can tell stories in the past tense, but it takes them until school age to mark narrative connectivity beyond basic sequential relations; and making explicit and unambiguous reference to participants in a story may consolidate only in adolescence. Third, on the interrelation between form and function, we trace development in connecting between (linguistic) forms—grammatical morphemes, words, syntactic structures—and (discourse) functions, like linking parts of a story or referring to its entities. With age, children will use familiar forms to express new functions, and concurrently develop new forms for expressing familiar functions (Slobin, 2001). Treating how each of these abilities develops separately is an analytic strategy: no single one emerges or exists in isolation from the others, they develop in tandem or not at all.

2.4.1 Developing narrative temporality Utterances like the minimal story told by a 2-year old in example (2) typically concern the past of direct experience, events the child has been part of or witnessed. With age, children talk about more remote events, helped by exposure

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to storybooks and real-life accounts. For example, in relating the events in the frog-story booklet (Mayer, 1969), from around age 8 to 10 years children in different countries began their narrations with an overt marker of the distant past, like once (upon a time). Further steps in moving away from the here and now take place in grade school, when children learn about historical events from the past. An important development in narrative temporality is shifting from one tense and/or aspect marking to another, depending on the options available in a given target language (Levy, 2006). This may be expressed at a local level between clauses by grammatical variation in marking different facets of the same event. Compare, for example: The boy fell down from the tree while the dog ran after the bees versus The boy fell down from the tree while the dog was running after the bees; or When the boy woke up, he saw that his frog ran away as against When the boy woke up, he saw that his frog had run away. The first clause in each example uses event-based simple past tense. The contrasting form was running marks the dog’s activity as protracted rather than punctual in contrast to falling, and had run away marks the frog’s escape as anterior to the boy’s waking up and seeing what had happened while he was sleeping. Alternations of verbal aspect are not similarly available across languages. In languages that mark them (like English or Spanish but not German or Hebrew), they provide a rich temporal texture to the narrative account (Kupersmitt, 2015). Where such variation in temporality marking is optional rather than built into the grammar of the language, it will develop only at school age or beyond. Recall that languages like French and Spanish require different grammatical marking of perfective (punctual or completed) events compared with imperfective (durative) states of affairs. Consider the opening of a traditional fable in Spanish compared with Hebrew in (10a) and (10b). (10a) (10b)

Caminaban dos mulas, llevando su carga ‘Walked / were walking two mules, carrying their load’ štey pradot halxu ba-dérex nos’ot masa al gaban ‘two mules went=walked on-the-way bear(ing) (a) load on their backs’

The first verb in (10a), caminar ‘walk,’ is in imperfective form, describing the ongoing activity of walking along a path. In (10b), Hebrew uses the same past tense form halax (plural halxu) for both ongoing and punctual or telic events that have a clear endpoint (e.g., hu halax habayta ‘he went home’). The example in (11) illustrates this from the story of a 10-year-old boy. The perfective past (in French, passé compose) is in bold, imperfective (imparfait) verbs are in small caps.12

DEVELOPMENTAL TRAJECTORIES (11)

il y A quelques années quand j' ÉTAIS nouveau. il y A quelqu'un qui tout desuite est venu vers moi. et qui a commencé à me donner des coups et moi comme j'ÉTAIS nouveau J'AVAIS aucun ami pour m' aider et c’ÉTAIT très dur parce que chaque jour il REVENAIT vers moi et me TAPAIT tout le temps.

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‘It was some years ago ‘when I was new ‘there was someone ‘who suddenly came up to me ‘and who started hitting me ‘and because I was new ‘I didn’t have a friend to help me ‘and it was very tough ‘because he came up to me again every day ‘and hit me all the time.’

Even the young French speaker in (11) can alternate verb forms suitably to distinguish durative or background situations from specific events; it is part of knowing the grammar of his language. Hebrew narrators, like their German-speaking counterparts, may mark this distinction in other ways, say by adverbs implying durativity like ba-dérex ‘on the way’ or punctuality like pitom ‘suddenly.’ But they do not necessarily feel the need to do so, that something is missing from their way of presenting situations and events. Only by high school, and only certain speakers of such languages alternate, say, present and past tense to elaborate the temporal texture of their accounts—as in (10b), by using participial form holx-ot ‘go/walk ~ going/walking + FEMININE PLURAL).13 This reflects more general properties of developing language from childhood to adolescence: with age, speakers make increasing use of the options available to them in their language, but they do not seek alternative means beyond them. In contrast, second language learners find it hard to use perfective/imperfective forms suitably, and they may even seek (inappropriate) equivalents in their own languages. Native speakers do not have this need to ‘compensate’ for grammatical options available in other languages than their own. Example (12), an excerpt from a Californian high-school boy’s account of a conflict with a classmate (with verbs marked in bold), illustrates sophisticated use of linguistic marking of narrative temporality in English, a language which does not make the same perfective/imperfective distinction as French. (12)

Not a single life in all of recorded history has been free from problems. My own experiences prove that my life is not an exception … I have also had to grapple with problems involving others. At my grade school I had a classmate who was clearly popular because he was feared, not respected or loved. Making my daily life … miserable was, as it seemed, the highlight of his existence. This classmate, who I had first met in kindergarten …

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This adolescent uses a diversity of grammatical verb-forms: he takes advantage of varied options for expressing temporality in English: simple present tense prove, present perfect have experienced, simple past had, seemed, past perfect had met, present participle involving, past participle respected. Such flexibility of tenseaspect devices reflects a cognitive ability to cope with expressive diversity which, in storytelling as in other domains, blooms in adolescence. This reflects a more general developmental trend in later language use: moving from dichotomy to divergence. Teenagers’ shifting from monotonic reliance on past tense to varied marking of temporality reflects cognitive flexibility. For example, they can differentiate two pivotal facets of narrative temporality: storytelling time, which locates a narrative account in the act of narration, and story time, which recounts the events that occurred as the core of the story. This mirrors a functional shift in marking background/foreground distinctions between different components of a narrative and signifies an age-related shift from local to global level alternations in constructing a well-organized story.

2.4.2 Developing narrative connectivity We saw earlier that young preschoolers rely heavily on the single connective and to mark the connection between one statement and the next. Compare a 3-yearold’s descriptions of two events in a picture-book in (9) above with the translated version of a Hebrew-language account of a quarrel at nursery school in (13), from a girl aged 3;6. (13)

Once there was a boy called Eytan and Dotan threw sand on his face and on his head, also, and in his eyes. And afterwards he came and the other one cried and the girl said to them “Don’t cry, Rami,” and Talli, Talli she said to Riba she must go home and so must all the boys, and Riba will stay alone without the teachers and only one girl will stay and also one boy and all of them will go, and one boy will stay and they also wanted to throw sand another time.

In (13), as in the excerpts in (9), and does not mark a thematic relation (sequential or causal) between statements; rather, it serves as an interactive cue to the next utterance, to inform the hearer that the narrator has not finished. Children can early use language to verbalize dynamic actions transformed from their static graphic representation in a picture-book or to relate events they have experienced personally. But they are unable, linguistically and cognitively, to express temporal or logical relations between events as part of an inter-connected narrative sequence. Around ages 5 to 7 years, children will use and, often excessively, as a means of sequential chaining of one event to the next, sometimes by adding a more specific

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sequential term like then, afterwards, as in (14), from a 5-year-old’s account of the picture-book story. (14)

There was a boy that er … that he caught a frog!! And he slept, and suddenly did not see it. And then he said to the dog … And - and - he also went outside with his dog to search. And afterwards he took it. And - he said (something) like this. And they called for it [the frog]! And he went down, told him [=the dog] to go down.

Compare this child’s narrative with how connectivity is expressed in the same task by older children in (15) and (16). (15)

Spanish-speaking grade-school 9-year-old: Entonces el niño dejó a la rata ] y se subió a un árbol ] y el panel se cayó. ] Después salió una lechuza] y se asustó el niño ] y se cayó ] y las abejas empezaron a perseguir al perro]. Entonces la lechuza dejó al niño ] y se subió a una roca, el niño. ] ‘Then the boy left the rat] and climbed a tree] and the hive fell. Afterwards an owl came out] and scared the boy] and he fell], and the bees started to chase the dog.] Then the owl left the boy] and (he) climbed the rock, the boy.’

(16)

English high-school 17-year-old: Meanwhile, the boy has climbed a tree and is looking for the frog in a hole in the tree ] while the bees start chasing the dog. And the boy falls off the tree because an owl came out of the hollow part … and frightened him. In the meantime, the dog runs away as the bees follow him.

With age, narrators connect events going beyond sequentiality (then, afterwards) to mark co-occurrence or simultaneity (while, meantime, as), as well as causality (because). Although it does not express recollection of past events, the task of recounting the contents of the same pictured story by speakers of different languages highlights several age-related developments that are shared across subgenres of narrative: (i) young preschoolers typically relate to each picture (or situation) as representing an isolated event, often not realizing that the same protagonist (a little boy looking for his lost frog) occurs across the fifteen-page booklet; (ii) 5- to 6-year-olds are able to connect events in the story sequentially as occurring one after another along the narrative timeline; (iii) from middlechildhood around age 9 years, children typically indicate causal relations between events; while (iv) by early adolescence, they can embed top-down events in a global, overall action structure—for example, by segmenting the text as a whole into chunks of events with the help of lexical expressions like at first, in the beginning; later on, subsequently; in the end, eventually.

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These developments underscore the interplay between cognitive abilities and language use. Knowing how to hold several different events in memory at the same time, and using appropriate verbal means for expressing temporal and logical relations between them as the account proceeds, are advanced abilities at the interface between language and cognition. In recounting personal experiences, too, children start by mentioning isolated occurrences, go on to chaining them sequentially in time, and then relate them in causal networks. From later school age, they subordinate individual events to a top-down, global narrative structure and use more varied means to connect events, like ‘while he was running, ‘when running,’ to join events that happen at the same time.14 With age, narrators also package together larger chunks of information in a single syntactic and/or thematic piece of discourse. We illustrate this increased density of connectivity among adolescents and adults compared with younger children in (17)—the opening of a Californian teenager’s personal narrative. Each clause (or predication) is marked by a bracket ], and syntactic packages by a double bracket ]]). (17)

When I was in the seventh grade,] I had a conflict with a boy] who was in a few of my classes. ]] As it turned out,] his father was an executive vice-president at the company] where my father worked. ]] The boy was constantly giving me grief ] saying] that if I ever did anything] to upset him] he would have my father fired. ]]

Binding together different facets of a situation into a well-organized package requires cognitive pre-planning and memory retention beyond the capacities of pre-adolescents. These abilities are critical for other types of discourse, too, such as analytical prose, as discussed in Chapter 7. And they are intertwined with developing other facets of narrative abilities, like making reference and constructing a well-organized piece of discourse.

2.4.3 Making reference to participants Specifying who is being spoken about at each point in a story imposes heavy cognitive demands. For one thing, making reference needs to take into account interlocutors’ knowledge, rather than assuming that the reader or hearer knows who or what is being referred to. The examples in (13) and (14) show that this is a difficult task for preschool children, even in a language that marks whether the referent (the entity referred to) is masculine or feminine, singular or plural, on pronouns and nouns, and even on verbs and adjectives as well.15 Young children even find it hard to make unambiguous use of referring expressions in conversational

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contexts—though these are typically ‘scaffolded’ by supportive input from familiar adults, who generally have a good idea of what the child knows about people and entities in the world. Clear reference-making is even harder in monologic text construction, especially when narratives are elicited by unfamiliar researchers in non-interactive contexts. Children as young as age 3 to 4 years can use varied linguistic means for making reference, such as: articles (a boy versus the boy) and demonstratives (those boys), lexical noun phrases (the little boy in the picture), pronouns (he, she, it, they/them), and person-marking on verbs in languages like Spanish or Hebrew. So the difficulty is not necessarily lack of linguistics means. Yet young children, when asked to relate the contents of a picture-series or a picture-book story, use numerous deictic or ‘pointing’ expressions that can only be interpreted by reference to the existing extralinguistic situation.16 To move away from deictic self-centering means taking the perspective of another person. It involves ‘mentalizing,’ so speakers can decide how much information to provide about entities in the discourse, as well as how to refer to them linguistically. It is not surprising, then, that use of anaphora—to refer to entities from inside the linguistic context rather than from the external (or pictured) world—is a late-emerging capacity. Five-year-olds can say things like ‘My sister has a beanie bag but she doesn’t let me play with it.’ But they cannot generally sustain unambiguous anaphoric reference to entities mentioned earlier in the story across longer stretches of discourse—as demonstrated by the accounts of a boy’s throwing sand at other kids in (13) and the excerpt from the frog-story in (14). This requires children to understand the complexities of definite (the boy, that girl) versus indefinite (a boy, some girl) reference, using indefinite forms when a character is first introduced and definite marking or a pronoun on subsequent mentions. Before school age, children tend to use definite and indefinite expressions in a seemingly random fashion. Another difficulty in reference-making lies in memory-related capacities. Narrators need to bear in mind who or what was mentioned earlier in discourse, and also how that entity was referred to. This ‘tracking’ of referents makes different demands on memory in languages where, unlike English, gender differences are marked not only on pronouns (e.g., he, she, it) but also on nouns, verbs, and/or adjectives. Children around age 5 to 7 years may adopt other, less mature means for making anaphoric reference across a stretch of discourse. Karmiloff-Smith (1985, p. 71) termed ‘a thematic subject constraint’ cases where a child refers to a single major protagonist, such as the boy (he) in the frog-story or the narrator (I, me) telling about a quarrel with a friend or sibling. This is an effective, if not fully informative, means of making reference to a particular protagonist. It allows the narrator to maintain reference to a single participant without having to shift reference to other participants as the narrative unfolds.

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Wigglesworth’s (1990) study of frog-story narratives showed that speakers of Australian English chose varied strategies for reference. Preschool children favored a thematic-subject strategy, referring to the boy as main protagonist, but from 8 years up they tended to adopt an anaphoric strategy, using full nouns (boy, dog, frog) to switch reference from one character to another and pronouns (he, it, they) to maintain reference to a given character. The complex path of narrative reference is highlighted by Karmiloff-Smith’s (1985) analysis of three phases in the narratives produced by 4- to 9-year-olds. The examples in (19) are based on a series of six pictures: 1—a large rabbit dressed in blue, riding a bicycle; 2—two cats playing tennis; 3—a dog kicking a football into a goal; 4—a small rabbit dressed in red drawing a line in front of a turtle on a bicycle; 5—a fox playing a trumpet; 6—a hare playing a guitar. The author’s interpretations of texts produced at each of these three levels are given in brackets in (18) for three narrative components: Reference, Connectivity, Action Structure. The sample narratives go from the largely incomprehensible text in (18–I) to the clearly formulated piece of discourse in (18–III). (18)

Narrative Action-Structure and Referential Strategies (adapted from Karmiloff-Smith, 1985) I. Here the rabbit’s riding a bike and … the two cats are playing tennis and … the dog’s kicked a goal and the rabbit’s drawing a line ‘cos the turtle’s won the race and the fox is playing his trumpet and … the dog’s singing with his guitar. [+(Definite) nominal strategy, -Sequentiality, -Action Structure] II. There is a rabbit riding a bicycle and he … sees two cats and he … draws a line for the turtle and he … sees a dog with a ball and then he sees a fox playing music and then he … hears some more music. [+Thematic Subject Strategy, +Sequentiality, -Action Structure] III. Well, there’s a rabbit going for a ride on a bicycle and he passes by two cats who’re playing tennis, and then another rabbit … his friend, is drawing a line. It’s the finishing line for the bicycle race. And then he rides by a dog playing football, and then there’s a fox cheering him with a trumpet, and then they all have a party because he won the race. [+Clear noun ~ pronoun Reference, +Sequentiality ~ Cause, +Action Structure]

By around age 9 to 10 years, but not before, children are able to make sense out of an apparently unconnected set of pictures, as in (18–III). They can make clear at each point in their account who or what they are referring to. And, in keeping with Karmiloff-Smith’s ‘integrative’ approach to development, it turns out that this

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ability is interrelated to being able to construct ‘a story’ that has a beginning, middle, and end, so conveying to an uninformed hearer a story that (in this case) is represented in an unfamiliar set of pictures. We suggest that the interdependence between command of reference-making and of overall narrative structure helps explain controversial research findings for the timetable of narrative reference. Only once they have internalized globallevel organization of a text (here, by a narrative schema) can speaker-writers inform their discourse by unambiguous reference to protagonists at each point in the story, applying central control beyond utterance-by-utterance construction. This illustrates that developing language use is best studied in context, anchored in discourse (here, narratives), involving varied cognitive and linguistic abilities concurrently. Different analyses of developing reference-making may also depend on what we mean by knowledge of a given system. Here, again, we rely on the ideas of Karmiloff-Smith, 1986c, 1992). She viewed knowledge as acquired and developed (in her terms, represented and re-represented) from an initial focus on external data, through internally driven representational changes, and on to an integrative reconciliation of internal representations and external data. These transitions take the form of reiterated phases that recur across different cognitive domains, including language (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986b). For example, children make appropriate use of temporal markings in narratives before they master reference-making. This phase-based orientation underscores a key claim of this book: development of linguistic knowledge involves a protracted route from initial early emergence of forms via their acquisition and on to mastery, and the timetable of this route will vary as a factor of knowledge system (temporality, connectivity, action-structure) and communicative setting (interactive conversation, picture-series description, personal-experience narratives).17 Felicitous use of referring expressions across a text involves a complex process of reorganization of linguistic knowledge, rather than a one-step transition from, say, deixis to anaphora, or a simple shift from local to global command of discourse structure, from bottom-up to top-down organization of narrative. In sum, we do not seek to explain the protracted path of reference acquisition (or other higher-order types of language use, for that matter) by complexity of linguistic structure alone. Rather, reference is a cognitively demanding domain, requiring such late-developing abilities as: memory retention across stretches of discourse; grasp of the distinction between new and given information; understanding of mutual knowledge; and the ability to provide sufficient, but non-redundant, information about who or what is being referred to at each point. Coordinating all these facets of information processing while also putting them into words is a formidable task for children, even at school age. It is not surprising that it takes until around 9 or 10 years of age for children to be able to introduce, maintain, and shift reference to characters in a story in an unambiguous, if as yet

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not mature and fully appropriate, manner.18 As we will see in later chapters, this may be an unresolved issue even for college students, particularly in non-narrative contexts.

2.4.4 Elaborating on events With age, children learn to flesh out the eventive details at the core of the story-plot in two ways: they describe the circumstances surrounding these events and they interpret why they happened and with what consequences. The proportion of ‘eventive’ elements (akin to Labov’s ‘narrative clauses’) that form the skeleton of narrative action-structure decreases markedly with age. They sometimes account for as little as one third of the contents of mature narratives, as in the personal-experience accounts illustrated earlier in the chapter. We trace the development of these elaborative elements by the excerpts in (19a) to (19c)— from stories written by native speakers of American English about an experience with inter-personal conflict. (Clauses are marked as (i) EVT = Eventive, (ii) DSC = Descriptive, (iii) INT = Interpretive elements, with (iv) ST-EXT standing for StoryExternal background comments and generalized propositions.) (19)

a. 4th grade boy aged 9 years EVT I pushed my sister] EVT and then I ran.] EVT She ran after me. ] EVT I went to the ground] EVT and she kicked me in the mouth.] EVT My mom said] DSC we had to go to our rooms for ten minutes]. EVT When we came out,] DSC we had to say sorry]. b. 7th grade boy aged 13 years DSC A kid named Phil and I used to get in a lot of fights and arguments]. EVT One day my friends and I doorbell-ditched his house] DSC while his grandparents were home]. EVT His parents found out] EVT and called our parents.] EVT Then our parents made us go up] EVT and apologize to the grandparents]. c. 11th grade girl aged 16 years DSC The conflict between an ex-friend of mine started in my senior year of high school.] DSC She was a junior,] INT and for some reason she suddenly did not like my friend Valerie or me any longer] EVT She claimed] DSC [that I started to give her dirty looks] DSC after my boyfriend stopped attending school with us] DSC [when I did nothing like that at all.] DSC She constantly talked about us behind her back,] EVT [and at times threatened] DSC to beat us up] EVT as she told other friends of ours.] [The friends < that she confided in > INT were better friends of ours,] EVT so of course they told us] DSC what she had said.] EVT When we confronted her about the dirty looks] DSC that she had given] DSC and the things that she had told our friends,] EVT she denied them.] STO-EXT She still hangs around with the same group of

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people]that I do ]. She is still around us at times,] but we usually avoid each other for the most part.] She still does like to stir things up between us though at times for reasons] that are unknown to me.] I usually just ignore her.] She is not worth] getting into trouble over. ] The younger students’ accounts in (19a) and (19b) have relatively more events and descriptions, while the teenager’s story in (19c) contains more interpretation. Besides, she is the only one to add higher level ‘story-external’ elements. Typically in ‘storytelling time,’ these generalized background propositions give voice to narrators’ thinking about the implications of the events they are about to recount when starting to tell a story or else, as in (19c), comment on the present-time consequences of the events recounted. A general motif in analyses of narrative development since the 1960s is that younger school age children tend to focus on events and activities, paying little or no attention to motivational, evaluative, and other backgrounded elements— as shown by the grade-schooler’s story in (19a). Across the school years, the proportion of eventive compared with elaborative material (descriptive, interpretive, and story-external) decreases markedly, to the point where, by adolescence, and more so among adults, the episodes themselves account for only a small proportion of a narrative. These developments, again, depend on more than a larger repertoire of linguistic devices; they evolve along with increased literacy, cognitive sophistication, and storytelling experience. The three texts in (19) illustrate a key claim running across this book: different facets of a given domain—here temporality, connectivity, reference-making, and elaborating on events in narrative—do not develop in isolation, but in tandem. For example, in temporality, eventives and descriptives are typically in the framework of ‘story time,’ while interpretive and story-external commentary lie outside the narrative frame, in storytelling time. Making meta-textual commentary on the contents of a narrative and referring to the narrator’s processes of text production are sophisticated mental operations expressed in words, far beyond the ability of less mature individuals. The interweaving of different facets of story production is even more striking when we consider overall organization of the events described from beginning to end.

2.4.5 Constructing a well-organized story Studies using different elicitation procedures show that from age around 5 years, children are able to talk about more than one or two events in the stories they tell. Peterson and McCabe’s indepth study of nearly one hundred North American children aged 4 to 10 years old who were asked to tell personal experience stories on different topics showed that: the youngest children rarely produced canonically

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well-organized accounts; by age 6, nearly half could tell stories “that contain complete problem-solving backgrounds” (1983, p. 53); and this increased to nearly two-thirds from age 7 up. Research by the authors of this book showed that 4th graders aged 9 to 10 years speaking different languages could in nearly all cases construct canonically well-formed narratives on the theme of interpersonal conflict. Congruent findings emerged in a variety of picture-based studies: age 6 to 7 years appears critical for development of an internalized ‘narrative schema.’ All describe a similar progression: 3-year-olds depict isolated scenes, unrelated to what precedes or follows; by age 5 years, children chain events sequentially, later on connecting them in causally-related networks; finally, around age 10 years, they will subordinate locally connected events to a top-down, global ‘action structure’ (e.g., the theme of the boy’s search for his lost frog). Yet again, it takes until adolescence to construct a hierarchically organized narrative. To do so, narrators must start out with a generalized, typically story-external background as the setting for the events to follow, and they need to wrap up the text as a whole by a conclusion in storytelling time. The shift from local to global narrative organization interacts with linguistic expression of temporality, connectivity, and reference. Narrative foreground—in grammatical simple past tense or perfective aspect—typically concerns events. Consider the first part of the story of an English-speaking high-school boy in (3), repeated here as (3’). (Background components are bolded, and foreground events are in small caps.) (3’)

Not a single life in all of recorded history has been free from obstacles and problems. My own experiences prove that my life is not an exception to this general rule. Throughout my life I have experienced internal conflicts, but I have also had to grapple with problems involving others. At my grade school I had a classmate who was clearly popular because he was feared, not respected or loved. Making my daily life and those of many others miserable was, as it seemed, the highlight of his existence. This classmate, who I had first met in kindergarten retained his malicious streak throughout all of elementary and junior high until he witnessed his behavior cause his expulsion from high school. One morning I was standing in the school yard in the company of friends. While I was enjoying a conversation thoroughly with a friend of mine, he APPEARED. He ENTERED our conversation as an unwelcome intruder and TOLD me to shut up and PUSHED me to reinforce his message.

The narrator as protagonist opens his account with more than twenty predications about the circumstances prior to the events he plans to recount, commenting on his life experiences, his feelings, and reactions. Only then does he move into simple

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past tense with the four verbs that describe the actions of his antagonist—as the core events of the story. Linguistically, the narrator in (3) clearly sets off different segments of his account. He distinguishes between background situations as the setting of his story and the onset of its events by a given point in time ‘one morning.’ Skilled narrators use explicit markers of story segments to indicate thematic shifts—like In one instance in the text in (7), The next morning in (6), or One morning here.19 They also indicate the progression of their accounts by temporal adverbs like at first, later on, as time went by, eventually. And they will shift from storytelling to story time and back again, so departing from the canonical past tense recounting of events to introductory settings and concluding commentary, as in (19c). Younger children tend to link clusters of events together at a local level. It takes until adolescence to package together varied facets of event complexes, subordinated to a global organizing thread.

2.4.6 Developing thematic content—what storytellers talk and write about The content of what children choose to tell also shows striking developmental changes. Stories on the shared theme of interpersonal conflict (‘problems between people’) demonstrated a cline of increased abstractness and generality, from physical contact via social conflict to moral principles, as listed in (20). (20)

Themes of interpersonal conflict • physical-contact fight: blows, hair-pulling, kicking, scratching; • verbal disputation: yelling, cursing, swearing, name-calling; • quarrel about property rights: seat on school bus, desk in class, rulers, sticker-album, thumb tacks; • disagreement about an issue of principle or personal choice: staying out late, winning a game, what movie to see; • negative reaction to unacceptable social behavior: gossiping, telling secrets, ostracizing; • moral stand on issues of social justice (often vis-à-vis an authority): favoritism, exploitation, unfair demands on part of a parent, teacher, or boss.

Developmental differences in the content of stories from childhood across adolescence reflect greater world knowledge and experience. They also mirror the cognitive ability to recognize and filter personal, possibly upsetting or even traumatic, experiences through the lens of social and moral attitudes, beyond physical or affective responses. Returning to the Rashomon effect, Segal’s (2001) study revealed that Israeli schoolchildren manifest different ways of thinking about, interpreting,

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remembering—and so putting into words—their experiences of a threatening event in a neighboring country. Pre-adolescent 6th graders typically constructed stories with a single focus, telling how their everyday lives were disrupted by the traumatic events. They recalled events from several months earlier, relating what for them was some particularly memorable aspect of the situation, like the physical setting (being in the shower, going downstairs), forgetting a personal comfort object, or else how family members were frightened of a younger child being lost or in danger. Middle-school pre-adolescents often started out by saying where they were at the time of the alarm, ending with an affective comment on the events (‘weird, lucky’). High-school adolescents tended to relate to inner states regarding how their peace of mind and feelings of wellbeing were disturbed, but rarely mentioned fresh insights that emerged as a consequence of these events. In contrast, each of the adults interviewed recounted an individual interpretation of what she had experienced. ‘Story-external’ generalized commentary on the current state of affairs resulting from a past event is a sign of mature storytelling, not necessarily achieved by teenagers. In Segal’s study, pre-adolescents typically related to their attempts to keep to routine; adolescents often mentioned emotional reactions to the circumstance; and most adults provided original insights from their own experiences. Segal interprets her findings in line with psychological theories of egocentricity in the developmental transition from a limited subjective viewpoint to a broad multidimensional perspective, such as Kohlberg’s (1984) moral theory of the transition from an instrumental to a principled orientation of self-choice.

2.4.7 Filtering by language and culture We noted earlier the impact of cultural norms on storytelling (having a moral, focusing on path or goal, etc.). Studies of children’s storytelling in different communities and cultures (including African-American, Chicano, Chinese, Hawaiian, and Japanese) show that from preschool age, children learn the narrative mode of discourse favored by their caregivers. Both in thematic content and the social attitudes they express, children’s stories reflect their early assimilation to the narrative conventions of the ambient culture. A related constraint in storytelling is filtering by language. As we note repeatedly, linguistic systems differ in the way they are encoded or ‘grammaticized’ in a given language, including: marking of tense/aspect; type of referring expressions and when and how a language requires pronouns; reference to spatial paths on the one hand, and the manner in which an action is carried out on the other. A few examples should give readers an idea of the types of challenges faced by children using different native languages. Starting with marking of temporality: the twelve clauses in the French 10-year-old’s story in (11) contained only two

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perfective forms; even the verb taper ‘hit, slam into’ is treated as background durative because it is qualified by ‘all the time.’ Young speakers of languages like French and Spanish make use of imperfective forms for durative verbs or to talk about events that they treat as background to the plot-advancing narrative episodes, for which they reserve perfective forms. Like the French text in (11), this languagespecific distinction is demonstrated in (21) by a Spanish-speaking 4th grade girl (with pretérito imperfecto forms in small caps, pretérito perfecto in bold). (21)

pues que yo ESTABA [///] JUGANDO con [///] una amiga ‘well, I was [///] playing with a friend’ entonces nos peleamos. ‘then we fought’ entonces se fue con otras ‘then she went with others’ entonces nos empezaron a insultar y todo eso ‘then they started to insult us and all that’ entonces nosotras también les insultábamos ‘then we also insulted them’ pues no NOS DEJABAN JUGAR con ellas tampoco ‘well, they wouldn’t let us play with them either’

In (21), the child uses imperfective forms to introduce and end his story, while the middle four clauses contain verbs in the perfective, referring to the next event in the affair, and all open with the time-word entonces ‘then’ (redundantly), marking sequentiality. In contrast, the opening and closing lines start with the discoursemarking pues ‘well, okay then.’ Again, different linguistic means conspire to mark background/foreground events in different languages. Compare the French and Spanish accounts in (11) and (21) with (22), an excerpt from the story of a 9-yearold boy, translated literally from Hebrew. (22)

I have an album of stickers. One day my brothers asked to arrange it a bit. I not heard [= didn’t hear] them properly and thought that they just want to have a look so I agreed. Afterwards, I saw my album while some stickers (are) on top of one another and others (are) in a place that I not liked [= didn’t like … I got mad at them (though sometimes I gave them worse troubles) … I arranged the stickers and shut myself up in my room.

[=Hebrew shama´ti] [xasha´vti] [hiska´mti] [raı´ti]

[aha´vti] [kaa´sti] [nata´ti] [sida´rti] [histaga´rti]

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The Hebrew story in (22) is in a language that uses only a single past tense (bold) occasionally interspersed with present tense (zero in copular constructions), with all verbs marked here with the 1st person singular suffix, unstressed -ti.20 Some non-European languages mark another kind of conceptual distinction in talking about past events by the grammatical category of evidentiality, marking the difference between events directly experienced and those known second-hand. Developmentally, children first mainly relate events they have themselves experienced. Turkish-speaking children, for example, initially rely on the past of direct experience (marked by the ending –di), only around 5 to 7 years of age contrasting this appropriately with the inferential ending miș (Aksu-Koç & Slobin, 1994, pp. 331–338). The Tzotzil Mayan language of Mexico also makes this distinction (de Léon, 2009): in different types of narratives, young children used both markers, but first, and far more, the xi of direct experience compared with the la of hearsay. This conceptual distinction can be expressed in other languages too, of course, but it will be done by circumlocution, not grammatically. Turning to reference, English speakers must choose between several terms for making impersonal reference (one, they, you, or the noun people), where languages like French, German, or Swedish have dedicated pronouns like on, Mann for this purpose. So reference-making strategies need to be used, and interpreted, in light of target language typology.21 Other languages have surface morphological cues that help disambiguate reference, like person marking on verbs in Italian and Spanish or gender agreement on Hebrew verbs and adjectives. These grammatical forms are acquired early, and children can rely on them in identifying a given referent. This applies, too, to same-subject elision in different languages. For example, in telling the frog-story, English-speaking children aged 3 to 9 years, like adults, relied heavily on pronominal subjects, Hebrew-speakers used null subjects for maintaining reference in one-third to half of the clauses they produced, while in the identical task the Spanish narrators almost never used pronoun subjects. The fact that topic maintenance showed such language-particular trends across age groups confirms Slobin’s (1996, 2004) insight that, from early on, children’s language is closer to that of adult speakers of the ambient language than to their peers from typologically different backgrounds. Narratives in different languages produced at different ages and by various elicitation methods support this insight: (i) from as young as age 3 years, children tell stories that are clearly English, German, Hebrew, Spanish, or Turkish in pronunciation, lexicon, and grammar; (ii) their storytelling abilities follow a shared developmental path: stories of 5year-olds are similar to one another and different from those of 9-year-olds or adolescents; and (iii) from early on, narrators reflect the impact of their native language on how they express their thoughts in various domains—temporality, reference-making, evaluation, and describing motion events. In sum, children have no choice but to learn whatever is, first, required and, second, available, in their ambient language. As early as age 2 to 3 years,

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Hebrew learners will bundle a great deal of information into the verbs they use, not only past or present, but singular or plural, masculine or feminine, transitive (taking an object noun), or standing alone, etc. And Spanish- or Italianspeaking narrators will early on avoid using pronouns in repeating reference to the same entity. Again, grammatical distinctions that might constitute a formidable challenge for second or foreign language learners are quite natural for native learners. A critical language-dependent development beyond early school age is how speaker-writers come increasingly to narrate with style—going beyond the grammatical distinctions that their language requires. This capacity, which emerges from adolescence and blossoms in adulthood, is realized in two ways: increasing the variety of expressive options that speaker-writers recruit for narration (e.g., using and selectively, together with segment-markers like subsequently, later on, eventually), and in rhetorical choices, how the events recounted are selected and interpreted. The richness of such optional paths of narrative expression goes beyond knowing one’s native language; it means being able to use it skillfully and entertainingly for the enjoyment of the others. This is an ability which not all narrators accomplish by adolescence, if at all. Returning to the theme of the cognitive effect of having a grammatically obligatory form for marking a conceptual distinction. For us, lack of explicit marking of certain distinctions in their grammar does not mean that speaker-writers cannot grasp such conceptual categories. These include cases like: (im)perfective aspect to differentiate narrative background and foreground; or evidentials to mark experienced versus reported events, as noted in this chapter; the difference between immediate present ‘is talking’ and habitual present ‘talks’ (Chapter 3); or between hypothetical and counter-factual conditions (Chapter 4). Some suggest that if a language marks a given distinction in its grammar, and the relevant concepts are relatively more accessible at an earlier age, speakers appear more sensitive to distinctions that are marked linguistically. This claim, while in principle making good sense, is one that needs further empirical investigation to substantiate its validity, preferably by neuroscientific means.

2.5 The path to good storytelling: a developmental wrap-up So what conclusions emerge from our story about the path of storytelling? As in acquisition and development of any kind of complex knowledge, here, too, a cluster of socio-cognitive and (in this case) linguistic factors operate in tandem, supported by maturation of the underlying neural infrastructures. By age 5 years, children are familiar with much of the vocabulary and grammatical structure of their language and are able to recount personal experiences with stories that make some kind of sense.

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By the time they start school, children can provide coherent, if bare-boned and sometimes repetitive, accounts of what happened in sequence, with events following one another in narration as in real time. They may even end their stories with a final outcome (‘and now we are good friends again’). Over the school years, they learn to construct well-organized narratives, and by high-school adolescence they are generally able to make meaningful connections between events, elaborate on events interpretively, and base their accounts on a sense of audience in making unambiguous reference to the participants in these events. In telling a story, as in all complex behaviors, children must learn to coordinate different types of knowledge concurrently—to integrate such components as temporality, connectivity, and thematic content. By adolescence, the type of story involved (picture-book, personal-experience, second-hand vicarious) plays less of a role in how narrators perform—as long as the topic itself is familiar to them from their own experience with life and literacy. Typically developing 15-year-olds can, if so inclined, tell a story that makes good sense to an uninformed interlocutor (a researcher, say) about a fight they had with a sibling or classmate, about a trip abroad, a book they read, or a film they saw recently. Importantly, they can also fill in gaps in information not shared by the interlocutors, while at the same time avoiding redundant or irrelevant information found in younger children’s stories. Some narrative abilities blossom only in adulthood, if at all. This applies particularly to individual style: expressing a personal, often original, perspective on the events in question and selecting less common and everyday rhetorical options for expressing ideas, through use of metaphor and dramatic language. Adults also more often than youngsters shift from canonical past-tense narrative story-time to interpretive story-external states of affairs. The development of semantic and EAM memory systems, mentalizing areas, and increasing cognitive control open up more abstract scenarios, less dependent on direct experience and fixed routines. Mature narrators can tell stories that contain descriptions, explanations, definitions, interpretations, and motivations, content that may be needed more for the interlocutor than for the narrator. These non-eventive elaborations diverge from the two major organizing axes of younger narrators—the chronological sequence of events and local connections between them: proficient narration is hierarchically controlled both cortically and in production by an overall plan and a centralizing core. These addenda to the narrative skeleton depend largely on personal background, world knowledge, and level of literacy (as stored in semantic and EAM memory systems). They reflect maturely divergent thinking, shifting to more original ways of thinking and talking about recollected events. These developing cognitive abilities are sustained by neural maturation of cortical and subcortical regions and enlarged interconnectivity in the brain, while also reflecting increased experience with language use. For narrative, greater exposure

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to verbal renderings of stored recollections (at the stage of post-retrieval consolidation) function as a motor of change. That is why we started our discussion of behavioral development with the topic of narrative.22 Use of language is invariably cast in a particular form of discourse (conversation, description, exposition, poetry). Of these different facets of language use, narrative is the most universal and earliest type of extended discourse—using language in a way not dependent on external scaffolding by interlocutors in conversational interaction. And the narrative genre stands out, too, in the protracted developmental route it displays from early childhood across adolescence.

Notes 1. This account is the authors’ adaptation of the initial scene in the 2018 film The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir directed by Ken Scott and based on the book by R. Puértolas (2016). The Extraordinary Journey of the Fakir Who Got Trapped in an Ikea Wardrobe (S. Taylor, trans.). Random House. 2. By ‘canonical’ we mean here, as elsewhere in the book, generally accepted, conforming to the expectations of a given community. A canonical narrative schema is a mental representation of particular sequences of events, with a beginning, middle, and end. 3. Here, we deal with what is required of ordinary people—rather than authors or professional storytellers—to produce an adequate narrative. We deliberately avoid criteria defined by literary experts on ‘narratology,’ to account for how most people, other than particularly gifted narrators, develop the ability to tell a story. 4. The label TMA, used by linguists to stand for Tense-Modality-Aspect, includes a third grammatical category, Mood or Modality, detailed in Chapter 4. 5. The title of Berman & Slobin (1994). 6. The text is lifted from Peterson & McCabe (1983, p. 73). 7. Why do we rely on picture-based materials? The reason is methodological: picturebooks, and sets of picture-series, standardize the input in eliciting narratives, so neutralizing differences in thematic content and allowing directly content-based comparability across age groups and languages. Thus, the same thematic content (twenty-five pictures) enables a direct comparison of accounts produced by 3-yearolds to adults, in five different languages (Berman & Slobin, 1994). Importantly, they reveal developmental trends consistent with those found for other types of storytelling, although with different timetables. 8. Mentalizing or mind reading is the psychological ability to perceive and understand inner states, one’s own or of others, which underlie overt behavior (as elaborated in Chapter 6). 9. Projects on extended discourse show that, across languages, students of linguistics or psychology have little difficulty in learning how to segment texts into clauses as psycholinguistically well-motivated units of analysis. When dealing with interactive conversational usage, in contrast, we rely on utterances as behavioral units of spoken output marked by intonation or by other features of speech, like turns or pauses in adult-child interactions.

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10. Narratives, like other types of discourse, are also affected by the communicative setting (written or spoken, with peers or family, in classroom or playground) in which they are produced, as detailed in Chapter 3. 11. Material is retrieved from memory in different ways, including free as against cued recall and recognition, and affected by the factors of primacy and recency. See Markowitsch (2013) for excellent discussion of these issues. 12. Transcription of these examples is standardized to exclude false starts, self-repairs, etc. 13. In a language like Hebrew, this can be achieved by alternating verb morphology by using different binyan conjugations; compare halax ‘walked, was walking, had walked’ / hithalex ‘walked around, meandered,’ kafac ‘jumped’ / kipec ‘hopped, skipped.’ 14. Shen’s cognitively motivated research in narrative theory (1990) suggests that children’s path “from isolated event to action structure” (the title of Shen & Berman, 1997) reveals the diachronic development of the narrative genre in the western world in general. 15. Important studies in this domain (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; 1985 and Hickmann, 2003) use picture-series elicitations spanning late preschool age to middle childhood. We suggest that the conflicting results concerning reference-making in children noted by Hickmann (1998) derive from a complex of factors beyond developmental level, including: communicative setting, discourse genre, elicitation methods, target-language typology, and individual rhetorical preferences. 16. In picture-based accounts, young children solve difficulties with reference by nonverbal paralinguistic means like giggling, using high pitched voice, pointing to characters in the pictures, or using deictic terms like this, now, here (Reilly, 1992). 17. Recall that Bates (1979) refers to the impact of task as well as genes and environment in explaining development (see Chapter 1). 18. These abilities are also subject to considerable individual differences, and it takes a long time before they are achieved across the board, if ever. 19. These have an analogous function to dividing texts into paragraphs in writing (Chapter 7). 20. The monotonous use of past tense is phonologically alleviated in Hebrew by the fact that, as a Semitic language, verbs can be formed in different binyan ‘conjugations,’ with different syllabic patterns. For example, the past tense verbs in (22) are as follows, with the -ti suffix standing for 1st person singular, and the stress on the final syllable of the verb-stem (marked by an acute accent as a´): pattern 1—shama´ti ‘I heard,’ xasha´vti ‘I thought,’ ka’a´sti ‘I got mad’; pattern 3—sida´rti ‘I arranged,’ bika´shti ‘I asked’; pattern 4—hiska´mti ‘I agreed’; pattern 5—histaga´rti ‘shut myself.’ 21. Cross-linguistic work of Hickmann and associates (2003) showed different strategies children used for identifying noun phrases in English, French, and German compared with Mandarin Chinese, where pronouns are unmarked for categories of gender, case, or animacy. 22. Behavioral evidence refers to external manifestations of knowledge and use (in this case of language), rather than internal neural operations.

3 Language for actuality Truman Burbank is an ordinary young man, an insurance salesman who lives and works in the seaside town of Seahaven Island, where he has spent his entire life. He is unable to leave because of his fear of water. Married to Meryl, he can’t stop wondering why Sylvia, the love of his life, suddenly moved to Fiji. He hopes to travel to Fiji in spite of his aquaphobia. One day, Truman notices unusual events: a spotlight falling out of the sky, a radio frequency that follows his movements, rain that falls only on him, a shabby, homeless man he recognizes as his late father. Meryl assures him everything is fine, but Truman decides to explore the mysteries surrounding his life. He enters a tunnel he has never ventured into before. Conquering his fears, he sails on until his boat hits the wall of the giant dome which formed the set of the movie Truman had unwittingly been part of, and which constituted his reality until he hit upon the way out. THE END You may remember Peter Weir’s 1998 movie The Truman Show.1 Truman’s entire life was created within an artificial environment for a TV show. But until he discovered the exit, he saw his life as made up of actual events. What was reality to Truman was fiction to outside observers. And it turned into fiction for Truman the moment he realized he had been the object of a trick. The dozens of quotations we examined for this chapter—from the Spanish baroque in the 1600s in (1) to The Matrix (2) four hundred years later— reflect similar fluctuations in differentiating real from illusionary, actual from hypothetical. (1) ¿Qué es la vida? Un frenesí. ¿Qué es la vida? Una ilusión, una sombra, una ficción, y el mayor bien es pequeño; que toda la vida es sueño, y los frenesís, sueños son.

‘What is life? A frenzy. ‘What is life? An illusion, ‘A shadow, a fiction, ‘And the greatest, well it’s tiny; ‘For all life is a dream, ‘And all frenzies are dreams.’ (Calderón de la Barca, 1635/2013, p.134)2

Growing into Language. Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman, Oxford University Press. © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.003.0003

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(2) Have you ever had a dream that you were so sure was real? What if you were able to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream and the real? That’s the question that drives us. (Wachowski & Wachowski, 1999)3 Similar puzzles lie at the heart of novels, movies, and poems, and are endlessly debated by philosophers. Even scientists such as Albert Einstein relate to reality “as merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”4 Yet, as shown later in this chapter, young children can distinguish fact from fiction, even though these differences are blurred in fairytales, often also in movies and television series. It may help us decide if a word we don’t know stands for something real or imaginary by checking the context in which it occurs. Around 400 children aged 3 to 6 years were asked to decide whether a series of nonsense words (i.e., words that don’t exist in current English) stand for real or imaginary things (Woolley & Ghossainy, 2013). Some were given the words in a scientific context (e.g., ‘Doctors use hercs to make medicine’), others in an imaginary setting (‘Fairies use hercs to make fairy dust’). The children were more likely to believe that the words represented real things when they heard them in a scientific context. That is, by age 4 years, children can use the context where they encounter new information to distinguish between fact and fiction. Drawing a clear line between actual and imagined worlds is tricky. Transistors and smartphones, once only imaginary, are now part of our lives. Some fifty years ago, a group of scientists hypothesized that the world would soon be facing possibly irreversible climate change.5 Few facts have become more actual than this somber prediction. Not surprisingly, actual also means ‘current,’ ‘present,’ and in some languages, including French actuel, Spanish actual, and the Hebrew loanword aktua´li, it is the prevalent way of talking about what are called ‘current events’ in English. The meaning of actual lies at the crossroads of three axes: conceptual, logical, and temporal. 1. Conceptually, on the axis of real versus fictional, actual contrasts with imagined, and means much the same as ‘real,’ existing in fact. Curiously, neuroscientists have shown that our brain somehow merges the two. While it makes sense that real people should be particularly relevant to us, individuals may experience personal involvement in fictional realms like computer games. So what is realness in the mind and brain? 2. In logic, necessity is opposed to possibility and impossibility, and actual is the realized rather than the hypothetical alternative. That is, logically, the actual is one, but not necessarily the only, realization of the possible (the hypothetical). Researchers disagree about how far young children can make

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these distinctions. Any object will appear to 4- to 6-year-olds not only as what it actually is, but also as being that way by necessity, because they don’t as yet take into account the possibility of variation or change. Experiments show that to young children, a square turned on one of its corners is no longer a square, since its sides appear to be unequal. 3. On the time axis of temporality, actual is opposed to past and future and means the same as current or present. The ‘present,’ however, is an elusive and transient notion. The comedian and social critic George Carlin (1937– 2008) once commented on an HBO stand-up show that ‘there’s no such thing as the present, there is only an immediate future and a recent past’— and neuroscientists would agree. It takes time for the information registered by our eyes to reach our brain, but we don’t notice the delay thanks to the brain’s predictive powers. This leaves us with the puzzle: is the present really present as it is presented to us from the outside? Some philosophers conceive reality as being in a constant process of becoming rather than as representing fixed, immutable entities. Change is neither illusory nor accidental but the cornerstone of reality.6 Alfred Whitehead’s (1968) ‘process philosophy’ may help conceptualize elusive notions like real, existing, natural, actual. Whitehead locates each such term on a continuum between two basic kinds of entities: actual and abstract. Actual entities exist in the natural world, they are events or processes extended in space and time that concern how something happens and how it relates to other actual entities. Abstractions derive from but are not actual entities; they include intentional or mental entities like desires or thoughts, which do not exist in space, yet do persist over time. Actual states of affairs are common topics of conversation, gossip, newspapers, Twitter, online chats, and other means of communication, and are constantly subject to debate. Our concern in this chapter is with how people talk and write about real, realized, and ongoing issues. We examine communicative contexts in which people refer to actual states of affairs, the discourse functions by which people express these concerns, and the linguistic means they employ for doing so. Here, communicative contexts result from a combination of three parameters: participant(s), location, and medium; who participates (two or more people or alone, intimate friends or strangers, peers or elders, relative social status), where people refer to actuality (at home, school, a supermarket), and in what modality (spoken, printed, digital). Diverse communicative contexts include chatting at the supermarket with a friend; at home alone writing on a computer; working in a lab or newsroom surrounded by colleagues. There are almost infinite possible combinations. Each communicative context employs a range of discourse functions to meet its communicative goals. Serving to describe, criticize, opine, argue, or comment on what is going on or has just happened, these functions result from the combination

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of topic, genre, and register: what is talked or written about (the weather, the news, fashion); the type of discourse to suit a given purpose (informing, gossiping, quarreling); and register, the level of language used (everyday or formal). In any given communicative context, people can fulfill different discourse functions to refer to current issues. Take for example the scene in (3), recorded in 1989 at a school in Barcelona. First-grade children were seated in small groups waiting to start their daily activity. One, 6-year-old Mila, announces: (3) Dali ha mort avui. ‘Dali died today.’ Jordi immediately responds: Ha dibuixat molts quadres, un d'un rellotge aixafat. No està mort. ‘He has drawn many pictures, one of a smashed clock. He is not dead.’ Mila answers back: Si, està mort, m'ho va dir la meva mama ho va veure al diari. ‘Yes, he's dead, my mom told me, she saw it in the newspaper.’ Different children react to this interchange haphazardly, some say that other people have died, others contradict or agree. In the midst of this uproar, one child comes up with a suggestion that puts an end to the argument: Bé, votem! ‘Well let's vote!’ This verbal interchange illustrates different functions of what we later describe as peer talk, conversation between equals (in this case, classmates). It includes informing, making claims for and against, and providing evidence, and so reflects communicative contexts as both engendering and constraining possible discourse functions. For example, in the monologic setting of a public lecture or speech, a single individual may perform different discourse functions to describe or argue about an issue, but it is doubtful s/he will tell a dirty joke. The example in (3) also highlights the multiple facets of discursive adequacy, being ‘good enough.’ Is the children’s proposal to conduct a vote an adequate solution? An excellent way to solve conflicting opinions, voting here is factually inadequate: death cannot be decided by voting. This apparently trivial anecdote points to the many possibilities in reporting on current events. It raises questions of: what counts as a valid justification or piece of evidence, the difference between fact and opinion, and how ways of resolving contradictory information may differ from resolving social conflicts. In this chapter, we consider how people report on what they see, feel, or think, at the moment of talking or writing. Focus is on what is real (for the speaker/writer) as opposed to what is fictive, on the actual as opposed to the possible, and on the now as opposed to the then. We shift here from use of language for recollection of past events (Chapter 2), before moving on to future possibilities (Chapter 4),

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concentrating on the present. Taking a process view of the current state of affairs, we assume that only by integrating past, present, and future along a unified timeline can we understand the meaning of the present. To understand the present, we need to realize that it will become past, just as the future will become present and (in the words of Bob Dylan) the present now will later be past. In the rest of this chapter, you will become acquainted with: • different communicative contexts where people talk and write about the actual world, from conversational interchanges to self-sustained monologic productions; • the discourse functions that people deploy in talking and writing about current states of affairs (describing, arguing); • the linguistic means they use to do so: levels of language use, and grammatical forms of marking time; • the neurobiological foundations of actuality; • developmental trajectories from initial caretaker-child interchanges across peer- and school-related settings in talking about the actual world.

3.1 Communicative contexts dealing with the actual world Different degrees of interpersonal interaction apply when talking or writing about current states of affairs. In interactive settings, two or more participants share communicative interchanges, which used to be typically face-to-face (or over the telephone). Nowadays, these commonly take the form of screen-to-screen interchanges where participants take (often overlapping) turns to present opinions, give information, describe ongoing situations, or argue. In monologic settings, a single participant uses languages without interlocutors who share and give direct feedback—as when writing a diary or lecturing to an audience, physical or digital. Monologic discourse is self-sustained; it lacks external feedback, but it does imply some kind of mentalized coparticipant(s). For example, when constructing an argument, it helps to envision opponents who raise objections to what one is claiming so as to anticipate counter-claims. We will suggest that being able to mentalize an audience affects the quality of monologic discourse and is important in development. We noted that different communicative contexts involve the factors of who, where, and by what means language is used. In what follows, we give examples to illustrate such settings and the type of discourse they engender. We will see that every such piece of discourse conveys more than strictly verbal information—even though in the present context we largely disregard relevant factors of pronunciation or gestures in oral interchanges, or punctuation and paragraphing in

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written communications. Whenever people use language, they broadcast their social status, level of education, relationship with interlocutors, how important the topic at issue is, and how much they know or care about it.

3.1.1 Interpersonal communication Consider, first, dialogical interchanges in which the relationship between participants is hierarchical, as between infants and adults typical in the caretaking situations of early childhood or, say, between doctors and patients. These are asymmetrical both in the amount of talk each partner contributes and in who introduces the topic of concern. In infant/adult interactions, the speech of adult caretakers is filled with comments and queries about the needs or feelings of their charges at the time of speaking (Are you hungry, sweetie? Okay, okay, I’m changing your diaper) without expecting any verbal response. As we note in discussing developmental trajectories (Section 3.5), verbal interchanges from infancy on reveal sociocultural differences that have a powerful impact on language and literacy development. Medical interviews are another context that demonstrate an asymmetrical relation between participants. The protocol in (4), freely translated from Spanish, illustrates different discourse functions and how reference to the past and projections to the future are crucial for understanding the current state of affairs.7 (4) M=physician, P=patient M:Hi, I am Dr. Gomez from emergency. What’s the matter? P: My chest hurts. M:Where on your chest? P: Here, in the middle. [Points with the palm of the hand.] M:When did it start? P: I was walking up the mountain, about an hour ago. I wasn’t feeling well but I decided to go for a walk as usual. M:Is the pain continuous? P: Not at first, only when walking uphill. When I stopped, the pain subsided. But when I returned home, it also started to hurt walking downhill and it didn’t stop when I got home. M:Besides the pain, have you noticed anything else? P: I have some nausea and a cold sweat.

Current state of affairs

Description by means of gesture Recollection to interpret the present

Elicitation of a more detailed description

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M: Have you ever had this pain before? P: For a few weeks now, the pain has sometimes seized me when I go up the stairs, but I didn’t think it mattered, because it went away as soon as I came home. M: Do you smoke? P: Well, I still smoke half a pack a day, but I’ve started quitting. Before I smoked more, but my wife insisted that I quit. M: I understand … Is there a family history of heart problems? I mean your father, brothers … P: My father died at 55 from a heart attack, but he started having problems at 45, and I have a 40year-old brother who has also had a heart attack. … M: I looked at your ECG when I arrived and with the pain that you explained to me, everything makes me think that you are having a heart attack and we must hospitalize you for tests and treatment. P: Will I get out of it, doctor? M: Look, it’s a risky situation so we must act quickly and treat it as soon as possible. We’re going to take you to the coronary unit and do a catheterization.

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Reference to the past in order to interpret the present First mention of internal state of mind

More on the current state of affairs, with necessary reference to the past

Back to current state of affairs

Expression of feelings—fear Projection to the future

Although the circumstances are alarming, both doctor and patient focus on objective information with minimal reference to their states of mind and feelings, constantly moving to the past and projecting to the future to illuminate the current situation.

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A less asymmetrical interchange occurs in the conversation in (5), translated from Hebrew, between two friends in their twenties, a linguistics major Efrat (E) asking her friend, Sharon (S), about her new job. (5) E: Tell me, Sharon, what’re you doing nowadays? S: I work in journalism. I’m editor of a local paper in Ramat Gan. And …. I also study part-time at the university. E: D’you think you made the right choice, or are you just a victim of circumstances at this point in your life? S: Well, there’s lots of other things I’d like to do, I know that journalism, writing in general, it’s something I like a lot, but I feel I’ve reached a saturation point. I can’t say I don’t like my job, at this point I enjoy what I do, but there’s no end to other things I can try. E: Thanks a lot, let’s move on to something else now.8 The interchange in (5) is relatively structured, although in colloquial register. It depicts a communicative setting between friends, but was part of a class assignment where students were asked to interview someone they knew about their parents’ origins and history (past temporal reference), their own current occupation (the actual world of the present), and then move on to their plans for the future. Here, Sharon as the interviewee does not in fact describe what she does on the paper but focuses on her feelings towards her job, which she views as temporary. A well-explored setting for multiparty interchanges is the ritual context of family meals, which may include children and young people talking about daily life and current events with adults. Family dinner-table conversations have been studied as a platform for processes of socialization, a locus for children to learn to behave in a socially acceptable manner, conforming to the values and behaviors of the adult culture (Pan et al., 2000).9 Consider the interchange in (6) between a 4-year-old girl (S) and her 6-year-old brother (B), talking to each other at dinnertime (freely translated from Hebrew): (6) S: They talk about God all the time at school. What’s God? B: Silly girl, there isn’t a God. He doesn’t exist … Studies dating back to the 1980s and 1990s have looked at multiparty dinnertable interactions as telling us a lot about contemporary talk. One reason is that ‘multiple agendas’ are played out at the dinner-table, from serving and requesting food to socializing children in conforming to societal norms of conversation. Blum-Kulka’s (1997, 2004) ethnographic research on dinner-table talk in three middle-class populations—native Israelis, immigrants to Israel from the U.S., and Jewish Americans—found that mealtime talk provides a setting for children to

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learn about culture-related factors regulating discourse, such as choice of topics, rules of turn-taking, and politeness conventions.10 They serve as contexts for children’s transition to adult discourse. Another discourse function in language about the actual world takes the form of explanation, where a person tries to clarify something to someone. This is demonstrated in (7a) and (7b), the first in the context of an adult explaining something to his child at the dinnertable, the second in the context of peer classroom interaction. The excerpt in (7a) is from an American family at dinner, the parents and their two children, Aaron, aged 9, and his sister Abigail, aged 7. (7a) Father: Abigail: Mother: Father: Mother:

Yeah, anyway, we had a big family reunión. What’s a family reunión? [in a low voice] That was all the members of the family, all relations. Well, can’t you be more specific? Not all. All the members of his side of the family (Blum-Kulka, 1993, p. 391)

(7b) Vincenzo: Andrea G: Vincenzo: Andrea G: Alessandra: Frederica:

Bermudas! they were dressed in Bermudas: what are the Bermudas? this thing [pointing to the picture they are all looking at] what? [busy writing] they were dressed in … Bermudas! The short trousers! (Monaco & Pontecorvo, 2014, p. 103)

Explanatory talk typically involves older speakers clarifying something to a younger participant who needs help in understanding something, but it can also involve peers, as in (7b). These examples illustrate only a small slice of conversations about current states of affairs. As we will see, conversational skill is an essential facet of being part of a given culture and adapting to different social settings, one that improves with age—in amount, quality of expression, and variety of topics discussed. The examples so far have all been in the spoken medium, with coparticipants physically present. Equally common today are communicative settings where people interact with interlocutors who are ‘virtually’ present, using a digital medium to express their concerns by means of ‘texting’ or ‘fingered speech,’ as elaborated in Chapter 7. This increasing experience with diverse settings sensitizes young people to socially relevant facets of communication: (i) amount of shared knowledge—more when talking to close friends or family members than with relative strangers; (ii) level of formality or register in language use—from slang to elevated speech; and (iii) attitude or discourse stance—from personal,

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subjective interchanges at home and with friends to more distanced and objective academic intercourse (Berman, 2005; Berman et al., 2002; Du Bois et al., 2000–2005).

3.1.2 Monologic extended discourse We move now to monologic settings where people produce a self-sustained discourse. Unlike dialogic interchanges, other participants are not physically present to provide verbal or visual feedback. Yet monologic discourse also has an audience, existing in the mind of speaker-writers as a mental coparticipant, an act of imagination that takes time to develop. Here, we illustrate such communication by diaries, in writing, and by oral ongoing commentaries. Diaries (from the Latin word for ‘day’) are monologic texts usually produced in the familiarity of our homes, where people keep written records of their daily lives. This is illustrated by the seventeenth-century London diarist, Samuel Pepys in (8a). (8a) Sunday, January 1 This morning (we living lately in the garret) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other clothes but them. Pepys, 1659/60/,1971 People in all walks of life have kept detailed journals regarding their everyday experiences, beliefs, and dreams. The handwritten excerpts in (8a) and (8c), from famous writers, show a clipped style of expression, typical of the genre to this day. (8b) January 25th I have fallen in love, or imagine myself to have fallen in love. It happened at an evening party. I quite lost my head. I have bought a horse which I do not need. Leo Tolstoy (1847–1852) p. 5511 (8c) Sunday, February 6th Best of all things coming home from a holiday is undoubtedly the most damned. Never was their aimlessness, such depression. Can’t read, write or think …. And my brain is extinct—literally hasn’t the power to lift a pen. To lie on the sofa for a week. I am sitting up today in the usual state of unequal animation. Virginia Woolf (1953, p.153)12 These examples include what is sometimes called diary drop, omitting sentence subjects in a way not typical of English, which requires an overt subject (e.g., the

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verbs went, bought in (8a), can’t, hasn’t in (8b)). And they use contracted forms like don’t, can’t, hasn’t, frowned upon in more formal written English. Use of a clipped shorthand style reflects the intimate, even private character of writing about personal experiences not meant for general consumption. Ongoing commentaries are cases where spoken monologues are produced synchronously with the event that is taking place, as when a sports commentator describes a football match in progress. These are typically addressed to a physically present but non-interactive audience at sports events, or to an imagined audience on radio. As such, they contain features both of conversation as prototypical oral interaction and of diaries as highly personal writing about the actual world. They may involve a special style of language use, as illustrated in (9) by an excerpt downloaded from YouTube of a live broadcast of a 2010 soccer match between AC Milan and Manchester United. Players’ names are indicated by initials. (9) Milan finishing strongly now as they chase an unlikely equalizer. Milan are slow to close down as VS takes time out of the game by rolling the ball to the edge of his area before kicking it clear. Eventually a Milan player responds to the catcalls of the crowd … towards the keeper, who makes the clearance after using up a good 10 or 15 seconds …. All happening here, as E fouls R, and C picks up a second yellow card. He must’ve kicked the ball away or something. Bizarre end to a topsy-turvy game. (Lazio 1–2 AC Milan Serie) The text in (9) reflects another type of clipped usage in talking about actual worlds—for example, leaving out the auxiliary verb be in “Milan finishing …”; “Bizarre end to …”; treating the singular noun ‘Milan’ as a plural in “Milan are slow.” Unlike diaries, where the protagonist is the person writing, in sportscasts the subject is overtly mentioned, in order to share non-obvious information with the audience. Here, the commentator uses a vivid and original style to describe events that both he and the audience are witnessing: nouns depicting physical entities, colorful adjectives, dramatic verbs, (e.g., chase an unlikely equalizer, bizarre end, topsy-turvy game, and set expressions high and wide, risk the wrath), as well as genre-specific vocabulary like referee, clearance. This rapid speech goes beyond what we note below (in Section 3.3) about linguistic means of referring to the actual world. It involves a peculiar mixture of generic present tense for describing ongoing events in the immediate or current present (chase, takes time, responds); reliance on non-finite non-tensed verbs—in English, the infinitive (to close down) and the present participle (finishing, rolling, kicking); and statements without a verb to describe the game as broadcast in real time, a type of ‘headlinese’ (Bizarre end to a topsy-turvy game). In sum, in any context of verbal communication—written or spoken, alone or in company—people use language to relate to the actual world for various purposes. In face-to-face, multiparty, or texted interchanges, these functions may co-occur as parts of the same interchange. For example, a group of friends watching a chess

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game may each provide claims for and against a given move. Most studies of discursive abilities are based on analysis of texts produced in monologic settings with a particular communicative function—descriptive, explanatory, argumentative, etc. But in fact, in self-sustained monologic communication a person can talk or write about entities and processes in the real world in varied ways, mixing different genres and interspersing different discourse functions in a single piece of discourse, modulated by the demands of a given communicative context.

3.2 Discourse functions in talking and writing What are people aiming at when they use language about present states of affairs in different communicative settings? What is the purpose of a doctor’s protocol? Ongoing commentaries? News reports? Their basic function is to inform, to transmit information about the state of affairs at issue. Other goals are, of course, associated with this basic function (to provide treatment, to incite action, to recruit collaboration, even to entertain), but conveying information is at the root of these subsidiary purposes. The amount and quality of information involved impose differing constraints. Bits of information need to be ordered in time (what to say or write first?) and in weight (main or ancillary?), taking into account the point of view of both producer and receiver. Besides, depending on their particular goals, people may be more descriptive, focusing on the details of what is at issue, or more argumentative, justifying, explaining, providing opinions or even evidence-based analysis. In (4), for example, a doctor seeks information about the patient’s pains. Since his goal was to get a precise picture before deciding on a course of treatment, the information he received had to be described as objectively as possible. In contrast, in (5), the information required of a friend on a job choice “at this point in your life” takes a more argumentative form; it appeals to feelings, and asks for pros and cons. What we see, then, is that the informational function can be realized variously, as more descriptive, explanatory, or argumentative, often interspersed with one another.

3.2.1 Description Describing a situation, a person, or an object involves presenting relevant facts to create a mental picture of the entity in the mind of the hearer or reader—for example, telling a friend what our new apartment looks like, describing the field where a football game is being played, or relating our current aches and pains. The excerpts in (7) show how the target entity (a family reunion, Bermuda shorts) becomes more precisely depicted as the interchange proceeds: starting with “family” or “wearing” to “his side of the family, short trousers,” a good description sets

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a mood or depicts an object so vividly that if the hearer/reader saw it, s/he would recognize it. Description thus depends heavily on the speakers’ current knowledge about the entity portrayed, and their ability to draw the addressee’s attention to its distinguishing features. Descriptions range from neutrally detached portrayals to depicting by allusion, triggering emotions and esthetic feelings. Compare (10), an excerpt from an encyclopedic entry labeled ‘eagle’ in the Britannica with (11), from Tennyson’s poem ‘The Eagle,’ first published in 1851. (10) Eagle, any of many large, heavy-beaked, big-footed birds of prey belonging to the family Accipitridae (order Accipitriformes). In general, an eagle is any bird of prey more powerful than a buteo. An eagle may resemble a vulture in build and flight characteristics but has a fully feathered (often crested) head and strong feet equipped with great curved talons. A further difference is in foraging habits: eagles subsist mainly on live prey. 13 (11) He clasps the crag with crooked hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ring'd with the azure world, he stands. The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls.14 Both texts describe an eagle. But the description in (10) opens with generalized propositions and then moves to the distinguishing features of eagles. It illustrates an encyclopedic entry as a type of discourse that informs directly and unequivocally (H. A. Clark, 1992). In contrast, Tennyson’s poem opens with a specific personalized reference (“He”), it abounds in descriptive devices like metaphor and personification (“the wrinkled sea … crawls”) that guide readers in visualizing the scene, while only indirectly providing information about the eagle’s actual characteristics. Use of poetic devices for describing may be beyond the abilities of ordinary mortals, and even adolescents have difficulty in understanding them (Peskin & Olson, 2004). On the other hand, as we show below, quite young children can describe relevant facts about people and objects, performing at least a rudimentary informative function (and see, too, discussion of Definitions in Chapter 6).

3.2.2 Argumentation An alternative way to inform about actuality is by arguing: making a claim about a given situation and providing pros and cons to support the claim, ideally in the form of evidence-based information. The genre of disputation or debate goes back to antiquity (van Eemeren et al., 2014) and today figures prominently in media panels, talk shows, and discussion groups. Historians and philosophers may debate the pros and cons of events or decisions from the past and, as we

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will see in Chapter 4, argumentative discourse often takes into account possible future consequences. Yet arguing on issues that are of (sometimes burning) current importance is a common use of language. It involves the processes of reasoning and explanation, as defined in the domain of logical thinking. People may also use language to convince their addressees of their own point of view, by means of ‘persuasive’ discourse. The terms argument and argumentation reflect the two senses of the notion, as product and process: as product, an individual constructs an argument to support a claim; as process, argumentative discourse arises where there is a debate about opposing claims. In dialogical interchanges, opponents are physically present; in monological contexts they exist in the mind of a speaker-writer. Argumentative reasoning plays a role in talking about the actual world, when people discuss something that matters to them. To do so effectively, a person needs to move beyond merely making assertions and ‘opiniating,’ providing well-informed arguments to support or refute their point of view. The philosopher Stephen Toulmin (2012) characterizes ‘practical arguments’ as locating a claim and then providing justifications for it by three basic components: the claim is the assertion provided by the arguer, the grounds are the reasons or facts that support the claim, and the warrant is the assumption—either explicit or needing to be deduced—that links the grounds to the claim. Why do claims need grounds? Because without them, there is no justification, only assumption. As the basis of genuine persuasion, the grounds provide the reasoned motives or facts for accepting or rejecting the claims. Toulmin emphasizes the importance of rebuttals, arguments that go against the initial claim and, if given during the initial presentation of the argument, preempt counter-arguments. The work of Walton and associates (Walton et al., 2008; Walton & Sartor, 2013) on argumentation in everyday, legal, and scientific discourse highlights the role of counter-argument. They argue (sic) that proficient arguers can anticipate objections to their claims and so prepare counter-arguments. These undermine the opposing position by identifying weaknesses which challenge its claims and oblige opponents to strengthen their own arguments. In (12), translated from Spanish, we illustrate the interplay between advancing claims, evidence, and counterclaims in the text of a university student arguing in favor of freedom of moving between countries. (12) Freedom to move The freedom to move between countries is considered a universal right, despite this, there are many people who do not enjoy it. Today, as we can see every time we see the news or the newspaper, it is a very hot topic focused on refugees entering Europe.

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It is not difficult to understand the reasons these people have for emigrating. The places where they live are being destroyed by wars. Every day in Syria ‘terrorist’ attacks take place that kill many. They are surrounded by danger and poverty and see our continent as a springboard to a new and dignified life. The reactions of Europeans to these new inhabitants who join their cities have not been long in coming. They bring new cultures and customs, which creates a diversity and controversy in opinions. Those who are not in favor, protest the inability of these people to adapt to the new place where they live. We are not talking about a xenophobic issue, but rather that, although their beliefs and culture are respected, the country works in a certain way and they must abide by it. We do our bit with economic aid for immigrants, they must do theirs to adapt. Personally, I think it is necessary to give help and attention to these people, but as I mentioned before, it is everyone's job, both Europeans and immigrants must strive for this coexistence to prosper. The text opens with a general impersonal claim (“The freedom to … is considered a universal right”), beyond the author’s own personal interest, immediately followed by a reservation (“despite this, there are many people who do not enjoy it”). As a next step, the author justifies the actuality of the topic (“Today … it is a very hot topic focused on refugees entering Europe”). And in case this does not convince the hearer that the topic is of burning importance, the writer backs up her statement (“as we can see every time we see the news or the newspaper”). She then mentions motives that justify people’s moving and, anticipating difficulty in accepting them, she qualifies her statement (“It is not difficult to understand the reasons”) and provides facts that support the claim that people have reasons for emigrating. The text advances by alternating perspectives of parties to the topic of conflict (“[the immigrants] see our continent as a springboard to a new and dignified life”; “The reactions of Europeans”; “Those who are not in favor”; “they must do theirs to adapt”), grounding these alternative perspectives with facts and reasons. This shows how, in skillful argumentation, claims and counterclaims are qualified in different ways to make them more convincing or to undermine them. Children and even adolescents are not generally capable of maintaining a two-sided argument (by claims and counterclaims), nor are they as flexible in alternating perspectives. They typically concentrate on expounding their own claims, ignoring the position of their opponent (Ferretti & Graham, 2019). Compare the immature argumentative text in (13) with the expert’s in (14), both on the shared topic of drugs. The text in (13) was written by a Californian 4thgrade girl asked about problems at school, the one in (14) by the scientist Stephen Rolles, an advocate for legalization of drugs, writing in the British Medical Journal.

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(13) Some things you should not do are cheat and do drugs. If you cheat you will get in trouble, and you will also not learn anything. The reason you should not do drugs are because they can kill you. They can also make you dumb. (14) Consensus is growing within the drugs field and beyond that the prohibition on production, supply, and use of certain drugs has not only failed to deliver its intended goals but has been counterproductive. Evidence is mounting that this policy has not only exacerbated many public health problems, such as adulterated drugs and the spread of HIV and hepatitis B and C infection among injecting drug users, but has created a much larger set of secondary harms associated with the criminal market. These now include vast networks of organised crime, endemic violence related to the drug market, corruption of law enforcement and governments. (Rolles, 2010, p. 341) The girl in middle childhood writing in (13) provides two claims for why (like cheating) taking drugs is bad. She mentions negative consequences in personalized terms (they can kill you, they can make you dumb), but does not anticipate any counterclaim to these assertions or say anything about what harm they do people in the actual world, nor does she provide any evidence for her assertions. In contrast, the expert in (14) provides data-based evidence for his point of view, stating numerous facts about what drug usage does in the present. These key facets of argumentative discourse are less likely among younger children, perhaps among non-experts in general—not just because they lack specialized knowledge in the fields they talk about, but mainly due to their difficulty in anticipating counterclaims and providing evidence to back up their own claims. In sum, the informational function of discourse can be ranged on a continuum, from neutral descriptions of events and entities to well-grounded justifications of actuality in argumentation. Informing is the major function in numerous different genres and subgenres of discourse, sometimes lumped together under the umbrella term of ‘expository’ discourse, particularly written (Nippold & Scott, 2009), or else referred to as informative or informational texts (Giora, 1993;Tarchi, 2010). However they are labeled, expository/informative texts lie on the logicoscientific side of Bruner’s (1986) contrast with the ‘storytelling’ mode of thought (Chapter 2): they rely on the mental processes of categorization and conceptualization to provide an explicit system of ‘description and explanation’ of the phenomena in question (see, further, Chapter 7). For example, in providing information on social or political actuality, as in (12) or biological species (10), as in other types of expository prose, the content is typically organized ‘top-down,’ starting with generalized propositions which are then elaborated and subcategorized by supplementary information in the form of arguments, illustrations, descriptive details, and so on (Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2007a; Britton, 1994)

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In getting or giving information, hearer-readers are not expected to know as much about the topic as the speaker-writer—except in the lopsided case of classroom discourse, where teachers ask about topics they know more about, presumably, than their students. Rather, the very goal of informative discourse, whether embedded in a conversation or delivered as a monologic lecture or encyclopedic entry, is to increase the knowledge of the audience without burdening them with superfluous information or overloading the amount of information they can absorb. Being able to verbalize all but only information relevant to the state of knowledge of one’s assumed hearer-readers requires two major cognitive capacities: pertinent knowledge of the topic at issue and a representation of one’s interlocutor(s) based on sensitivity to his or her needs and interests. This is a formidable challenge for cognitive as well as social development.

3.3 Linguistic means of referring to the actual world Speaker-writers have different means for talking and writing about the actual world. Here we outline some of these in register, syntax, and lexicon.

3.3.1 Register The notion of register or level of language use is closely related to genre as a facet of language use, including about the actual world (Biber, 1995; Grimshaw, 2003; Halliday, 1978). Termed variously usage patterns, style variation, or codes, register involves the social side of language use, and is important for development of communicative competence. As dealt with here, it refers to level of usage from the everyday colloquial style between intimates to formal, elevated language in more distanced and official settings like encyclopedic entries and analytical essays (elaborated in Chapter 7). There is an intuitively obvious contrast in rhetorical style, in tone, as well as in syntactic constructions and lexical choice between the excerpt from a scientific article on drugs in (14) and the diary excerpts in (8). The latter use an ‘unbuttoned,’ clipped style of writing, shared by emails, text messages, telegrams, postcards, note-taking, and message boards. Different types of informal style occur in conversations between peers—as between two young women in (5) or two schoolboys in (22), while ongoing commentary like the sportscast in (9) represents another such spoken register. Adjusting linguistic register to particular communicative settings requires sensitivity to social constraints, like restricting slang to familiars and elevated style to formal contexts. We will see in concluding this chapter (Section 3.6) that this is a sophisticated and late-developing aspect of language use, so differing from

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earlier abilities in adjusting to different discourse functions and genres of discourse. Differences in register seem specially marked when talking or writing about actual worlds. One reason is that the idea of ‘actual worlds’ is hard to define, since it ranges over communicative settings that vary greatly in levels of language use: from casual interactions between intimates via the mixed styles of diaries or ongoing sportscasts to the carefully monitored, elevated registers of monologic informative texts. In addition, digital communication has given rise to what Bernicot and associates (2018) term ‘the texting register.’ This new register (also termed netspeak, cyberspeak, or fingered talk) refers to the language that has evolved in computermediated communication, reflecting a ‘hybrid’ form of language use since it includes features of both traditional writing and speech. We elaborate on the nature and role of this new register in Chapter 7 as mediating uniquely between the spoken and written modes of language use.

3.3.2 Morpho-syntactic means To express an opinion or describe a current situation, particularly but not only in conversation, a speaker-writer needs to predicate something, in this case about the actual world. This usually involves the use of verbs: the kind of words that refer to activities (run, hit), states (ache, think), changes of state (melt, rot), or causing such changes (hurt (someone), boil (water)). Predications can also be made by adjectives, words that indicate attributes of entities or states of affairs (a rotten egg, an old man, a nervous laugh). In languages like English these may occur together with a helping or auxiliary verb (e.g., be sorry, become rotten, make nervous). Verbs and adjectives describing situations in the actual world are usually in the so-called ‘present tense,’ as part of the system of TMA (Tense-Mood-Aspect)—a linguistic domain that differs from one language to another (Chapter 2). Present tense expressions play a key role in talking and writing about ongoing events, on the one hand, and for relating to things that we know or believe to be true in general, on the other. Consider the following snippets of (constructed) conversations, where the speaker is warning the hearer about something that is in the course of happening in (15a) and (16a), and making a general statement about a car or a boy in (15b) and (16b). (15) a. Look out! That car’s coming straight at you! b. That car comes from Sweden. It costs a fortune. (16) a. Those two boys are speaking about someone you know, that’s why they’re using Amharic. b. But they speak Hebrew with us most of the time.

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Both (15) and (16) say something about what applies in present time, rather than about past events or future contingencies. They predicate something about a car or classmates, using the same verbs ‘come’ and ‘speak,’ so that both somehow refer to the same kind of situation. But they differ in their perspective. In (15a) is coming and in (16) are speaking, are using refer to something that is ongoing at the time of speaking, in the immediate present. In contrast, the forms comes in (15b) and speak in (16) refer to a generalized state of affairs, which could have applied last week or a year ago and may continue to be true in the future as well. In English, unlike many languages (including French, German, and Hebrew), this distinction between the immediate or ongoing present and the habitual or generic present is marked grammatically: by use of the auxiliary verb be + the -ing form of the verbs ‘come,’ ‘speak’ (present progressive) versus the basic form of the verb ‘come’/ ‘comes,’ ‘speak’/ ‘speaks’ (present simple). These are two alternative ways of talking about the ‘actual’ world. In languages where they are overtly marked in the grammar, children use them correctly early on, in contrast to the difficulty of non-native learners in understanding the distinction.15 As noted, not all languages use different verb-forms to talk about the immediate versus the habitual present.16 Yet conceptually, people the world over can perceive this distinction and find ways of talking about both kinds of situations. One way of distinguishing different types of present-time is through the category of Aspect, for example by special markings on verbs or by auxiliary verbs like be or have. While Tense specifies the time when a situation applies or applied, Aspect denotes the temporal contour of an event, as prolonged or durative, punctual or telic (with an endpoint), iterative (recurrent) or one-time, etc. Consider the different comments in (17) that one person might make to another when watching a friend swimming: (17) a. he swims really well = GENERIC, ATEMPORAL, HABITUAL ACTIVITY b. he is swimming really well = IMMEDIATE PRESENT ACTIVITY, AT TIME OF SPEAKING c. he has swum even better, I am sure = PAST WITH PRESENT RELEVANCE d. he has been swimming really well lately = CURRENT ACTIVITY PROTRACTED OVER TIME e. he is a really good swimmer = GENERIC NOMINAL DESCRIPTION The different grammatical forms bolded in (17) reflect different perspectives on the same scene. That is, when talking about the actual world, people can select a more immediate, activity-focused point of view or a generalized, temporally extended outlook on the same state of affairs. As noted, this is differently filtered by individual language. Some languages, like English, Russian, Spanish, and Turkish, do this by grammatical markers of linguistic aspect, using special forms of the verb to characterize the internal contour of a situation.17 Others, like German and Hebrew, have a more restricted range of temporal markings on verbs, so that

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hearer-readers need to interpret them by considering their use in context rather than by grammatical form.

3.3.3 Lexical means People can refer to different types of situations in the actual world by using certain lexical categories (nouns, verbs, or adjectives) more than others. Informative texts at the more descriptive end are largely nominal in style. They refer to entities with nouns and adjectives more than verbs that relate to events as in narratives, and they use predications with the copular verb be (is the popular name, are a line). On the argumentative side, as in the texts in (12) and (14), claims, counterclaims, and evidence appear to rely equally on verbs to make statements and nouns to specify relevant entities for conveying information. Interestingly, in a research project that included languages which mark distinctions between ongoing and habitual states of affairs by grammatical means (English, Spanish, Turkish) and languages that do not (German, Hebrew), we found—contrary to our expectations—that speakers do not seek to compensate for what is not grammatically marked in their language. For example, German and Hebrew speakers did not use more adverbial expressions (like now, always, sometimes, often, occasionally; or at this very moment, once in a while, every now and then) to mark the temporal location and frequency of the situations they reported and the entities they described.18 Instead, with age, speakers of different languages develop more varied and precise use of the means available in their language for referring to actual states of affairs—reflecting an age-related increase in linguistic sophistication and cognitive flexibility, along with expanded knowledge about the actual world.

3.4 The neurobiological basis of actuality We earlier specified actual events as lying at the intersection of three axes: a conceptual dimension that contrasts the real with the imaginary, a temporal dimension that contraposes present to past and future, and a logical dimension distinguishing factual from possible, hypothetical, or impossible. We also suggested that even preschool children can at some level tell the difference between reality and fantasy, fact and fiction. People feel they are experiencing something now while remembering something that happened before and envisioning something that will come afterwards. But does our brain distinguish fact from fiction, present from past, actualized from hypothetical? Neuroscientists have shown that in many ways our brain does not truly distinguish real from imaginary. True, in pleasurable situations like listening to a story our brain releases hormones such as dopamine that stimulates production

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of oxytocin, whereas stressful circumstances give rise to release of hormones like cortisol.19 But this applies similarly both to genuine situations in the present and to imaginary or past situations. Some two decades ago, Alvaro Pascual-Leone (Pascual-Leone et al., 1995) led a study that compared the brains of people playing a sequence of notes on a piano with those who imagined playing the notes. They found that the region of the brain connected to the finger muscles changed to the same degree in both groups, regardless of whether they struck the keys physically or mentally. Recent research has, however, identified two areas of the brain that are more strongly activated when people encounter real rather than fictional characters. These brain regions—in the anterior medial prefrontal and posterior cingulated cortices (amPFC and PCC)—are known to be involved during retrieval of autobiographical memories and thinking about oneself, leading neuro-scientists to suggest that our brains may distinguish reality from fantasy in terms of personal closeness, since real things have greater personal relevance than fictional. Abraham and von Cramon (2009) had participants provide names of close friends and family and read through a list of famous people and of fictional characters to ensure they were familiar with them. Participants were then shown the names of the three groups: friends or family, famous people, and fictional characters. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) showed that when participants answered questions about friends and family (high personal relevance), stronger activation occurred in the amPFC and PCC regions, compared with questions about famous people (medium activation) and fictional characters (low activation). These results confirmed research expectations: how real we perceive someone to be depends on how personally relevant the person is for us. Yet personal relevance is not unequivocally related to what is real, since some individuals may experience personal relevance in fictional realms like computer games or religious rites, which would then yield similar activation in the amPFC and PCC as real situations. Although further research is needed on how our brain distinguishes reality from fantasy, personal involvement seems to be at the heart of our perception of realness. How do our minds perceive present circumstances as different from those in the past or future? We tend to perceive the ‘now’ as an instant with no duration. But if the current instant were timeless, we wouldn’t experience a succession of ‘nows’ as time passing. We wouldn’t be able to operate in the world if the present had no duration. So how long is it? Neuroscientific evidence indicates that now lasts on average between two and three seconds. This is the now we are aware of—the window within which the brain merges what we are experiencing into a ‘psychological present.’ Consider the experience of motion like catching a ball. Research has shown that it takes several dozen milliseconds for information from the eye to reach the brain and about 120 milliseconds before a person can do something with this

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information (Thorpe et al., 1996). During this time the ball continues to move, so that the brain’s information about where the ball is located will always lag behind where the ball actually is. In sports like tennis, cricket, and baseball, balls travel at speeds well above 100 kilometers per hour, meaning that the ball can move more than three meters in the course of this time-lag. Clearly, if we were to perceive the ball’s position on the basis of the most recent information available to the brain, we would never be able to catch or hit it with any accuracy. So how does the brain let us see where the ball is, rather than where it was? Why don’t we notice these delays, and how does the brain allow us to feel as if we are experiencing the world in real time? Predictive mechanisms which drive sensory representations ahead of delays in neural processing may be the answer to this question, by allowing the brain to compensate for neural delays. As long as events unfold predictably, these mechanisms enable the visual system to reduce the impact of the kind of delays in perception of ‘the present’ that we are talking about (Hogendoorn, 2020; Spinney, 2015). Szpunar and associates (2007) had college students recall a specific incident in their past and then imagine themselves in a related future scenario. Subjectively, the two situations seem to be very different. Yet fMRI brain scans showed the same patterns of activity in both cases: areas scattered all over the brain lit up, showing that our temporal perception is distributed. The same researchers also instructed participants to imagine a future event in their lives, recall a personal memory, or envision a familiar individual—based on events like being at a barbecue. fMRI scans found that one set of regions (including the left lateral premotor cortex, left precuneus, and right posterior cerebellum—which previous research had shown to be active when participants imagined body movements) was more active when people thought about the future than when they recollected past experiences, or when imagining another person. A second set of regions (bilateral posterior cingulate, bilateral para-hippocampal gyrus, left occipital cortex, known to activate for remembering known visual-spatial contexts) showed similar activity on tasks envisioning future and past situations, more so than when thinking about activities performed by another person. These findings have led researchers to conclude that differences between brain activation on future- versus past-related tasks are due to differences in the demands placed on regions underlying motor imagery of bodily movements. In contrast, they attribute similarities between the two conditions to reactivation of visual-spatial contexts with which participants have had previous experience. That is, people appear to locate future scenarios in visual-spatial contexts that are familiar to them. It might seem easier to identify the neural underpinning of specific future episodes than of the ubiquitous present, but this does not appear to be the case. There is no straightforward way for researchers to compare activation patterns of the brain when a person is thinking, say, about some event in the future

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(like an upcoming birthday party) with what goes on in the brain when one is at rest (sitting around waiting to start a task, say). This is because, when the brain is at rest—in the so-called Default Mode—it ponders the future, what the owner of the brain will or must do next. What about the distinction between the actual world and possibilities of how the world could be? This is clearly a hallmark of human thought. Many languages have special grammatical devices for expressing possibilities and necessities, like the English ‘modal auxiliaries’ might or must. When we say ‘It is raining,’ the here and now comes to mind, whereas the modal utterance It might be raining suggests a possibility displaced from the here and now. Studying how these devices are sed (in Chapter 4) allows us to discover whether the two processes (updating or displacing the here and now) mobilize different neural mechanisms. Another way to address the same question—the existence of different neural mechanisms for treating the actual versus the possible—is by asking people to ‘invent’ alternatives to actual uses of certain tools. If people say that a knife serves for cutting bread, they are mentioning its actual, most prototypical use, but if asked to invent alternative functions they may suggest that a knife can be used for making woodcarvings. Controlled studies of the neural correlates of actual versus possible situations show that our brain mobilizes different kinds of neural processes and different levels of activation for the two. For example, factual utterances relating to the here and now (‘it is raining’) showed increased activity compared with modal utterances (‘it might rain’). Similarly, different kinds of neural processes are involved in thinking and talking about actual or alternative uses of an implement. In addition to different neural processing of the actual (this chapter) versus the (im)possible (Chapter 4), increased brain activation in relating to the actual world is also sensitive to perspective. More activation was found in the right temporoparietal area when updating representation of someone else’s beliefs, whereas more activation occurred in the frontal medial areas when updating one’s own beliefs. Recall that to explain actuality, we took into account conceptual, temporal, and logical dimensions of thought. What we learn from neuroscientific research is that our brain responds to different factors when making such distinctions. Real is distinguished from imaginary in terms of personal closeness and relevance; ongoing events form part of the past and are perceived as such due to our being able to predict the future; location in real space (like time) is modulated by familiarity. Different neural mechanisms are activated when thinking and talking about actual as opposed to hypothetical situations: wondering about the future or hypothetical contingencies occur when we (our brains) are not occupied in solving a particular task. The abstract comparisons that have intrigued philosophers for centuries may well be accounted for by the basic distinction between familiar and current versus unfamiliar and distanced, with creative alternatives flourishing in our minds when we move away from actual entities.

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3.5 Developmental trajectories in using language for actual worlds With age, children accomplish more and more social actions through language by a wider scope of the communicative contexts in which they talk, write, or text about ongoing states of affairs. Adolescents employ diverse discourse functions that call into play different socio-cognitive resources: social empathy in conversation, selfawareness in diaries, powers of observation in description, world-knowledge in conveying information, analytical thought in argumentation.

3.5.1 A broader scope of communicative contexts Young children interact mostly with familiar partners in limited locations and in the spoken modality, with caretakers doing the bulk of the talking. From age 2 or 3 years, children are increasingly responsive to verbal input addressed to them. By late preschool they become more active and independent partners in verbal interchanges (Holmes, 2011; Siegel & Surian, 2011), as their conversations change in form and content and in the time they allocate to these interchanges. During lunchtime at nursery school, for example, 3-year-olds already talk more with their peers than with adults, whom they address mainly when they need help, mostly about food, family, and daily events (Holmes, 2011). Veneziano (2018) sees conversational interactions as privileged settings for two developmental functions of language use: gaining linguistic proficiency in using the ambient language and acquiring pragmatic skills to communicate effectively. These involve making requests and responding to those of their interlocutor; giving and getting information about people, objects, and situations; taking into account the state of knowledge of their conversational partner; and deploying appropriate registers of language use. Older children comment on what is going on, interchange impressions with more or less familiar people, with peers and older participants, at home, in the schoolyard, on the playing field—in spoken, written, and digital modalities. This diversity of communicative settings enriches children’s social and linguistic experience, exposing them to different kinds of feedback, discourse styles, and registers. Child-adult relationships and how they interact verbally differ from one culture and social context to another in how they foster processes of acculturation (how children adapt to cultural norms) and socialization (learning to become functioning members of the ambient society) (LeVine et al., 1994) . For example, in societies where extended families are still the norm, siblings rather than adults do much of the caretaking. And in some cultures, convention frowns on, rather than encourages, children to initiate a topic in the presence of adults (Schieffelin, 1985). Studies in industrialized societies have shown that the breadth of communicative contexts children are involved in explains, perhaps more than anything else

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in the environment, the differences in language and literacy proficiency between children from low and high SES backgrounds (Fernald et al., 2012; Ravid, 1995; Sirin, 2005). Middle-class caretakers chatter constantly to their infants without expecting any verbal response, whereas socially disadvantaged or less educated parents do not treat their children as conversational partners until they can ‘talk,’ and even then they address children largely by directives and prohibitions rather than introducing them into the world of reality. Families burdened by economic difficulties tend to confine talk to their offspring to instrumental communication like instructions to carry out everyday actvities. Hart and Risley’s pathbreaking (1995) study of the impact of early family experiences on children’s subsequent mental development detected what they later termed in the title of their 2003 book ‘the early catastrophe’: a huge gap (of around 30 million words!) in the vocabulary of 3-year-olds as a function of SES, a gap that is rarely closed. More recently, Romeo and her associates (2017) refined this insight by neuroimaging techniques examining how 4- to 6-year-old North American children from different SES backgrounds perform non-verbal and verbal tasks. Children who experienced more conversational turns directed to them by an adult showed greater activation in left inferior frontal regions (Broca’s area) during language processing, a finding that explains the relationship between children’s exposure to language and their verbal abilities. Importantly, it was not so much the number of words they heard as the amount of conversation directed to them that made a difference. Again, the quality of environmental input affects brain functioning, which in turn impacts further developments. In industrialized societies, school is a major site for communicative interchanges, at least in the amount of time spent there by children from ages 6 to 16 and in the fact that it introduces writing—both printed and digital. True, this is aimed at obtaining knowledge and achieving academic success, rather than for interpersonal communication, but these added modes expand school-goers’ experience with different genres and registers. School is the habitat for different types of multiparty interchanges, some more egalitarian like peer talk between classmates, others less so, confined to the classroom, dominated by the teacher as a more or less authoritarian figure. Peer talk becomes a critical conversational setting at school age, improving both in amount and quality up to adolescence. Children’s pragmatic skills progress dramatically in the content and relevance of conversations dealing with ongoing matters on different topics. And this goes along with age-related advances in use of grammatical structures and increased length of such talk interchanges: from under 3,000 words at ages 2;0 to 2;6, to nearly 6,000 at ages 4 to 5 years, and well over 8,000 among 2nd graders aged 7 to 8 years old (Cekaite et al., 2014; Levie et al., 2020). Classroom talk, which Edwards (1987) described as “organized for the controlled transmission of knowledge,” is a setting for a special brand of socialization

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in the form of school-based learning. In some cultures, teachers are responsible for directing the discourse. They tend to monopolize discourse functions like topic initiations, directives, and evaluations, so restricting students’ access to taking the floor. The example in (18) reflects a ‘didactic’ rather than ‘dialectical’ interchange, where T=Teacher and P=Pupil. (18) T: Why do you think the creature [an ammonite] used to live inside a shell like that? P: [numerous bids to speak] T: No, put your hands up please. Er, Carl? P: For protection. T: What does protection mean? Any idea, Carl? P: Sir, to stop other things hurting it. T: Right, stops other things hurting it. Now if it came out of its shell, and waggled along the sea bed, what would happen to it? Yes? P: It might get ate. T: It might get eaten by something else, yeah. Um, why do you think this is made out of stone now? …. Why isn’t—er, why don’t we find the remains of the creature inside here? P: It would have rotted away. T: It would have rotted away. Why didn’t the shell rot away? P: Sir, because it’s too hard. T: It’s too hard, good. (p. 222) Such talk is basically non-egalitarian, although in theory tailored to the needs of children at different levels of schooling.20 It shows classroom discourse as formal and distanced compared with more casual peer talk and family get-togethers. Courtney Cazden’s (2001) pioneering work addressed the issue of giving the floor to students in an egalitarian fashion, in “the drama of teaching and learning with speaking parts for all,” (p.5) highlighting scaffolding activities, where a caretakerteacher aids children in performing tasks like doing a puzzle or answering a question. Many studies on classroom talk concern grade-school children in middle childhood rather than high school. They often deal with second language or multilingual classes, and their approach is, again, not developmental, with pedagogical rather than psycholinguistic motivations. The nature of classroom interchanges in high-school settings is still open to research. A special kind of peer talk evolved with digital media used for interpersonal communication from childhood to adolescence and beyond—as detailed in Chapter 7. Youngsters (mainly from pre-adolescence) have ready access to digital diaries like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr, as sites where adolescents actively discuss the issues that shape their current experiences. Ehrenreich and associates’

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(2020) study of cell-phone activities of 200 ethnically diverse high-school students used on-site observations rather than the more common self-reporting, to show that adolescents cocreate their own individual internet environment in cooperation with their interlocutor(s). Text-messaging frequency increased as a function of age, peaking in 11th grade (age 16 to 17 years), as a phenomenon that characterizes a phase in the life of young people, which lessens but does not cease later in life. Adult texting tends to be more instrumental, getting things done or conveying information, while adolescents more often use it as a medium for ‘letting off steam,’ unhampered by parental or other authoritarian constraints (in keeping with the emotional exuberance of this period of development noted in Chapter 1). The fact that adolescents interact mainly with peers, and less with family members or romantic partners, underlines texting as a special type of peer talk.21 Overall, research shows that digital communication provides teenagers with a readily accessible platform for using language in an unmonitored, unbuttoned fashion to talk about issues of concern to young people freed from external authoritarian constraints. Social networking digitally has not done away with the most intimate form of monologic discourse in the life of teenagers: a personal diary. Research shows that no fewer than 83% (!) of North American high-school girls aged 16 to 19 archive their lives in a private notebook, suggesting that digital and handwritten diaries complement one another. Anne Frank, perhaps the most famous teenage diarist of all, begins by describing what the very idea of writing a diary means to her (19). (19) Saturday, 20 June, 1942 I haven’t written for a few days, because I wanted first of all to think about my diary. It’s an odd idea for someone like me to keep a diary, not only because I have never done so before, but because it seems to me that neither I—nor anyone else—will be interested in the unbosoming of a thirteen-yearold schoolgirl. Still, what does that matter? I want to write, but more than that, I want to bring out all kinds of things that lie buried deep in my heart. Similar concerns about issues and experiences in the present are reflected in the topics that schoolchildren and adolescents relate to in different communicative settings.

3.5.2 Shifting themes about the actual world Another shift from early to later childhood in using language about the actual world is in content. Across different settings, development progresses from talk about what Whitehead termed actual entities that exist spatio-temporally in the natural world to abstract conceptual entities. An obvious and common topic of mealtime talk is commenting on food, as in the examples from a mother’s

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interaction with her 5-year-old daughter in (20a) and of an American family with their 8-year-old son, Jordan, in (20b). (20) a. Child: Mom, can I have a sausage? Mother: Yes you may, help yourself. Mother [later]: Oh, you ate that up with gusto, honey. Please be careful, okay? (Pan, Perlmann, & Snow, 2000, p. 215) b. Jordan: Mother: Jordan:

Mommy (.) you know what? Yes, dear. As um Snappy Smurf would say ”I wish we didn't have to eat the vegetables.” I didn't (.) I just wish we could eat the little good things inside them. Observer [laughs]: Oh, sounds like that commercial for Nutrasweet in vitamins. Mother: Put Nutrasweet in broccoli? Mommy that's what Snappy Smurf said when Jordan: Farmer Smurf told him that there are little good things in - vegetables and that's why you had to eat them. (Blum-Kulka, 1994, p. 35)

Similar themes emerge in studies that use peer talk as a site for studying grammatical and lexical development (Levie et al., 2020) as well as research that treats peer talk as a locus for socialization (Maybin, 2014; Mercier, 2011; Tagliamonte, 2016). For example, in arguing about possessions, schoolchildren will talk about physical objects like a favorite toy or their iPads, while adolescents may quarrel about property rights like a seat on the school bus or who to include in group activities. In quarreling, children at first talk about physical-contact fights, later moving to verbal disputation, a shift reflected in the vocabulary they use, starting with blows, hair-pulling, kicking, subsequently employing social terms like yelling, cursing, name-calling. Later on, these topics are extended to disagreements on matters of personal choice (like staying out late, winning a game, what movie to see), attitudes to unacceptable social behavior (like gossiping, telling secrets, ostracizing), shifting eventually to issues of principle like moral stands and social justice (often vis-à-vis authority) in situations of favoritism, exploitation, or unfair demands on the part of the adult world. Digital communication is a rich source of information about young people’s concerns at different phases of development. In texting, too, schoolchildren are mainly concerned with situations that directly affect their own lives rather than past states of affairs or future contingencies. Adolescents relate to more varied topics such as how they navigate conflicts with parents,

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teachers, and classmates, establishing self-identity, mentioning intimate details about themselves and friends or partners, discussing sexually charged topics. With age, young people talk about more abstract issues and also relate to more varied topics. This is shown in the following excerpts from peer talk between grade-school children from different countries. In (21), Italian children aged 8 to 9 years were asked to describe what they saw in sections of the Bayeux Tapestry (depicting the Norman conquest of England) (Monaco & Pontecorvo, 2014). (21) Matteo: Francesca: Matteo: Francesca: Tonio: Lorenzo: Matteo: Lorenzo: Matteo:

Some of them are eating some are eating and some others and some others … some are doing so, wait! and some others … according to me and some others are doing with the sword according to me, some characters represented here are Norman people yes, well it is quite clear that they are Norman people (p. 101)

These children were performing an in-class assignment with a set topic, an example of task-related peer talk, like when teenagers help each other with their homework or preparing for a test, a cooperative type of verbal conversational interchange. The interchange in (21) is a good example of what du Bois (2014, p. 360) calls dialogic syntax, “a verbal engagement that entails ‘a structural coupling’ between two or more stretches of discourse, where the present utterance is linked to a prior one.” Here we see how children (like adults) take up and repeat in part at least previous utterances of their classmates (some people) or their own (according to me). But giving a clear idea of what is depicted in the tapestry proves beyond the abilities of these four children working in cooperation across a set of fifty turns, most of which consist of single utterances. Only midway through does Lorenzo say Some of them are eating, and what are they doing? According to me, they are celebrating something, only to return to the old theme of some of them are eating. The dialogue excerpted in (22) is another example of peer talk, here between two 9-year-old Israeli boys (Ofer and Oz) outside of the classroom, complaining about a third boy called Nadav, a topic that they themselves initiated (Blum-Kulka, 2004b), with present-tense verb forms marked in bold. (22) Oz: He drove me crazy with his play-station what a pain … Ofer: He drives me crazy every day, can I come to you can I can come to you? [Mockingly, in a deep voice] That way all year long. Oz: Me too!

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L ANGUAGE FOR ACTUALIT Y Ofer: I say to him no, no, my parents aren’t at home, say t-I say to him no my mother doesn’t let me. I don’t want to, he’ll break down our house the crazy … Oz: Yes, me too, psixolog [“psichi,” in Hebrew ‘nuts’] Ofer: … We played with my hedgehog ball, I’ve got a ball … you know, that little one? Oz: But how can it [=the window] splinter? [In a tone of amazement]. It’s a rubber ball. Ofer: [Nadav] that crazy kid—he thinks that he’s in a playground. He goes vu-vu-vu pa, boom blows up the windo- he’s made a huge crack, broke th- the whole thing by mistake … (p. 205)

The bulk of this interchange is badmouthing and aping another boy. The boys use present tense verbs to comment on a habitual state of affairs together with temporal adverbials indicating iterative and protracted aspect (every day, all year), and iconic repetitions regarding his behavior. And they use an everyday, colloquial register of speech, suited to conversational interchanges between familiar peers. The interchange in (23) illustrates another type of interaction between two 11year-old English children, talking about the movie Titanic. (23) Mel: … my heart will go on ah: I love how The Titanic, it’s becoming one of my favorite films now. I just love it so much, now Jess: I don’t really watch it very much Mel: me neither but I just love it Jess: I like it when it’s flooding, the room’s flooding Mel: yea Jess: and big … that’s one of my favorite bits of all Mel: my favorite bit is when Jack’s holding Rose against, that bit, and then they’re like and then they kiss. Hm: that was me! (Maybin, 2014, p. 119) In (23), two pre-adolescents express their emotional reactions to the fictive world of a film they have seen, as in (21) they relate to current feeling in talking about something from the past.22 They use numerous descriptive elements in subjective terms like “my favorite bit is when …”; and linguistically, they mix the habitual ‘simple’ present in I just love it, I don’t watch it so much with progressive forms to talk about what they perceive as ongoing events (the room’s flooding, when Jack’s holding Rose) transforming the content of the film into the world of their reality. And, like (21), the excerpt is rich in ‘dialogic syntax.’ These examples underline adolescents’ concerns about quite abstract and complex situations, in reacting to their own personal states of mind and emotions. Scholars have remarked on the special stylistic features of ‘teen talk’ as relying heavily on particular discourse markers (ya know, I mean, basically) and

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patterns of intonation (like ending utterances with a raised rather than lower tone). Tagliamonte (2016) illustrates this with the excerpt in (24) from a 16-year-old Canadian girl talking to her younger sister about her school record. (24) Daddy doesn’t think that I get high enough marks to like his standards. Because you came along and got all nineties! But like I don’t know [=dunno], like I understand that it’s hard for me because I’m different from you. But I’m like just not—my learning strategies and stuff , the way I learn are totally different from you … (p. 9) Expressions like ‘standards,’ ‘learning strategies,’ ‘totally’ in (24) differ from the everyday lexicon used by younger children, and reflect a more elevated style, the effect of school studies and literacy. Yet the excerpt also has numerous colloquial discourse markers—‘like,’ ‘dunno,’ ‘just,’ ‘and stuff.’ These are used in unconventional ways, both in meaning and grammatical function, to serve varied communicative purposes—place-holding, marking beginnings and ends of utterances, or establishing common ground with an interlocutor. Discourse-marking elements occur in more formal monologic discourse as well, as in the excerpt in (25), from a talk given by a girl attending a private high school in California, asked to talk about ‘problems between people.’ Again, as in the conversation in (24), her text shows a mixture of high-level vocabulary and colloquial, slang-like discourse markers (elevated vocabulary in non-cursive, discourse markers in bold). (25) Well I just think that a lot of times um little problems get blown way out of proportion, like I think the only ones the only problems worth really telling like an adult about is verbal or physical abuse, because everything else like drugs, like addiction to drugs and bad grades and um you know those are all brought upon like yourself and so you should be able to get yourself out of them without having to like blow it out of proportion. Like everyone at my school is just so drama about everything, like you get a bad grade on a report card and you go crying off to your parents, and like you did that yourself. It's not anyone else's fault but your own and you should just deal with it. That's what I think, but I don't know whether they do that at other schools, but so I think. The teenager in (25) talks of matters of concern to teenagers across the world— verbal or physical abuse, addiction to drugs, and bad grades—taking a more distanced and objective perspective on these issues than schoolgoers in middle childhood. A fascinating look at discourse-marking elements is given by a study of underprivileged Portuguese-speaking youngsters in a Brazilian favela (Roth-Gordon, 2007). The author describes their talk as being full of slang and pragmatic

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expressions which mainstream Brazilians might not understand. Yet the speakers themselves question this style of talking, showing they are aware that those are not ‘normal words,’ as in the interchange between two youths in (26). (26) Babu: ´ T’a ligado? (‘You know what I’m saying?’) He says t´a ligado all the time. Karate: Ooh, if she [Jennifer] talks with Cyclone, man´e (‘man’). Ooh, if she talks with Cyclone, caralho! (‘shit!’) He won’t say one normal word! (p. 329) Frowned on by purists and pedagogues, these usages play a role in establishing in-group solidarity, among teenagers of mainstream and not only disadvantaged backgrounds. A study of English- and Hebrew-language narratives produced by middle-class students showed that adolescents used discourse markers significantly more than either younger schoolchildren or adults (Ravid & Berman, 2006). In sum, we observe a marked shift between schoolchildren and teenagers in what they talk about when contemplating the actual world, and also in how they do so, in the stylistic features of the language they use and the attitudes and perspectives that they express.

3.5.3 Varying discourse functions This greater communicative variation in talking about the actual world (family meals, peer talk, classroom discourse) extends the range of topics that children entertain—from concrete to abstract, from individual to social, etc. It also expands the range of discourse functions they deploy, elaborating on how they provide information about current states of affairs by describing (Section 3.5.3.1) and arguing (Section 3.5.3.2), both of which take a long time to develop.

3.5.3.1 Description The Italian schoolchildren’s talk about the Bayeux Tapestry (21) and the American teenagers’ on the Titanic (23) illustrate how hard it is to describe entities or experiences in interacting with peers. A longitudinal study on the structure of descriptive texts by Spanish-speaking schoolchildren showed that even by 4th grade, children were largely unable to produce a complete descriptive schema—including an introduction, descriptive features of the entity, justification, and conclusion. Description requires advanced cognitive and linguistic abilities: differentiating between general and particular facets of an entity, being able to focus on relevant facts and properties, on key rather than marginal attributes, and distinguishing one’s personal approach to the entity from its objective features ‘in the real world.’ The text in (27)—divided into numbered clauses)—scored relatively

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high on the study (Tolchinsky, 2019), which had Spanish-speaking schoolchildren write descriptive texts in response to the prompt ‘What’s a good teacher like?’ (27)

1 Me gustan las profesoras y los profesores 2 porque nos enseñan cosas nuevas 3 y si no los entendemos 4 nos lo vuelven a explicar 5 Son muy Buenos 6 pero cuando nos portamos mal 7 nos empiezan a gritar 8 o se quedan con los brazos cruzados 9 Así son los profesores y profesoras

1 I like the teachers (FEM./MASC.) 2 because they teach new things 3 and if we do not understand them 4 (they) explain it again 5 (they) are very good 6 but when (we) behave badly 7 (they) start to yell at us 8 or (they) stand there with their arms crossed 9 That is what teachers are like (p. 19)

The text opens with an introductory comment on the entity to be described (Clause #1) in evaluative tone, followed by a justification giving reasons for this evaluation (#2–#4), and by a generic description of the target entity (#5), again evaluative, and further reasons describing circumstances (#6) and the entity’s response to them (#7 and #8), before ending with a concluding summary generalization (#9). This 8-year-old 3rd-grader’s text is a satisfactory description since “it opens with an introduction, followed by clauses that give reasons for the general statement, and closes with a concluding statement.” Languages have rich expressive means for conveying what something is like. A key linguistic feature of descriptive language is use of adjectives like ‘strange’ or ‘natural’ in (28). One can describe a house as big or enormous, a bed as soft or comfortable, a person as mean or spiteful, kind or generous—with the second word in each pair in a higher register, so less frequent and often semantically more specific than the first of the two adjectives. Use of adjectives develops later than nouns and verbs in different languages (Ravid et al., 2016). In a study of how 5- and 6-year-olds reconstructed the story Hansel and Gretel, the children clearly distinguished between writing the narrative events and describing the witch’s house, using only nouns and very few adjectives (Sandbank, 1997). Further, younger children mainly use adjectives as syntactic predicates, like ‘may sound strange,’ ‘it’s natural’ in (28). Older speaker-writers will also use adjectives in attributive contexts, in English preceding the noun, in Spanish following it, like ‘a strange noise = un ruido extranˇo,’ ‘his natural instinct = su instinto natural.’ As we pointed out earlier, descriptive adequacy depends on speaker-writers’ current knowledge about the entity portrayed, along with their being able to target its distinguishing features and to spark the addressee’s interest in its most relevant facets. Tower (2003) showed that by 4th grade but not before, children are able

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to provide relevant information on a topic familiar to them—as in the text on butterflies in (28). (28) Butterflies have most of the same senses we have, like smell, taste, sight, and touch. But they don't have any nose to smell with. Instead, they use their feelers to smell things. Also butterflies have something called a proboscis that they eat with, but they don't taste with their tongue or nose, like we do. Butterflies taste the pollen they eat with their feet. This may sound quite strange to you, but to the butterfly, it's just natural. (p. 28) The girl who wrote the delightful text in (28) provides a lot of factual information about butterflies, yet much is of secondary relevance. She fails to start with a top-down—what Tower calls an “outside-in” (p. 15)—definitional statement of the natural category to which butterflies belong (a kind of insect); nor does she generalize about their critical physical property of having wings, so being able to fly, and that they are very colorful, unlike many insects. Her text also lacks reference to the functional properties of butterflies, like their role in pollination. These comments underscore how difficult it is to perform the seemingly simple task of providing all, as well as only, relevant information about an ‘actual entity.’ It demands rich world knowledge and the cognitive ability to distinguish facts of primary versus secondary relevance. So it is not surprising that it takes until middle school, around pre-adolescence, for students to be able exploit such texts for eliciting relevant information on topics they encounter in their school studies and even in their daily life (largely in interaction with digital media). Only by adolescence (if at all) can students write well-organized informative descriptions structured around a main theme with relevant supplementary details—in a way approximating encyclopedic entries of experts. Older students give more detailed and informative descriptions relying on greater world knowledge and the cognitive skill of moving between generalization and specification.

3.5.3.2 Argumentation Argumentation is a particularly challenging type of discourse. On the one hand, researchers have confirmed what parents and kindergarten teachers know perfectly well: even 3-year-olds are quite skilled at presenting reasons to justify why they did or wish to do something (Why aren’t you eating your salad? Because it tastes yucky/Cos I’m not hungry). Yet there are serious weaknesses in the argumentation of even older children and adolescents, who seldom construct two-sided arguments in support of their claims and are often unable to take alternative perspectives or approach a topic from an impersonal point of view or adopt a generalized stance on situations (Felton & Kuhn, 2001; Ferretti & Graham, 2019). For example, 9-year-olds asked to reach agreement about a historical claim spent the bulk (81%) of their utterances on expressing and justifying their own claims, but were unable to anticipate objections or produce counterclaims.

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Similarly, a group of young adolescents and community-college students arguing about capital punishment (Felton & Kuhn, 2001) concentrated on claims supporting their own position, whereas young adults tended to also address their opponent’s arguments, often through counter-argument. However, even adults tend to react to what is going on in the world or in their daily lives at home and at work with subjective, often entrenched opinions, expressing personal convictions rather than providing well-justified points of view. Building a well-motivated argument giving reasons for a preference requires considering one’s interlocutor by decentering, i.e., considering multiple aspects of a situation. Although Piaget regarded this ability to be attained by around age 12, we all know how difficult it is for people to move from their own center, to consider various aspects of a given state of affairs. Decentering and the distanced, divergent thinking involved in taking different perspectives into account are crucial in arguing. Being able to coordinate different facets of what is happening so as to argue for what one regards as ‘true’ or ‘real’ and to counter spurious claims are heavy cognitive demands. They recruit resources from various intellectual domains, which include, according to Coirier and associates (1999), logic, dialectics, pragmatics, rhetoric, and persuasion. In a recent study of argumentative texts, Stavans and associates (2019) asked Hebrew-speaking schoolchildren aged 7 to 12 years to write compositions on different topics: a longer school day, five days a week and no school on Friday, installing vending machines at school, or requiring school uniforms. They found that texts with a more adequate argumentative structure, containing both ‘core’ (genre-specific) and ‘peripheral’ (introduction and conclusion) components, occurred from 3rd grade (age 8–9 years) up, and increased significantly over the next two years. Constructing well-structured and explicitly reasoned argumentative texts develops into and across adolescence. A study (Coirier & Golder, 1993) which had French-speaking students conduct a classroom debate and write an essay on a controversial topic detected three developmental stages: (i) pre-argument, where an explicit position may be stated but is not supported by argument—before age 7 years; (ii) minimal argumentative structure, a standpoint plus one supporting argument—achieved by most 7- and 8-year-olds; and (iii) the most developed structure, providing two related arguments—attained by three-quarters of high schoolers and college students. An Italian study (De Bernardi & Antolini, 1996) revealed similar trends among students asked to write different kinds of argumentative texts. Younger children (3rd and 5th graders) produced few argumentations. High-school adolescents organized their argumentative moves to produce more complex texts; they articulated their opinions coherently, and used suitable linguistic means for analyzing the topic. These developments are seen in texts lifted from the study—(29) from a

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pre-adolescent in 7th grade, (30) from a high-school adolescent—on the pros and cons of using cars to go to work. (29) Stefania, 7th grade Lately, people have been using their cars to go to work. In my village the problem of pollution does not exist, but in big cities and in industrial towns this problem is serious. Cars emit smog, a gas harmful to our health, and so they are not a good thing. It isn’t fair for people (especially in big cities) to go to work using their cars, especially for the serious ecological damage. I hope the pollution problem will soon be resolved both in Italy and other nations. (30) Paolo, 11th grade To have one’s own car is very useful for working people, because they have to be self-sufficient: especially those people who need a car all the time, as they must continually move from place to place on business …. Since many working people go to work by car at the same time, a large amount of traffic builds up: this is very dangerous because it sometimes causes serious delays. Besides, it must be underlined that another pressing problem comes up: pollution. The thousands of cars on the road in the city produce a very high amount of toxic exhaust fumes, which affect us humans …. Therefore, I think it is evident that using public transport is the best way to go to work. (p. 185) The younger student’s text in (29) provides argumentation as to why using cars to go to work is a bad thing, particularly in big cities. The high-school text in (30) provides arguments both for and against use of cars, and also suggests a solution to the problem (public transportation). In sum, then, using language for the informative functions of describing and arguing requires cognitive capacities manifested by adolescence but rarely before, including: divergent thinking, different perspectives on affairs, and taking account of interlocutor knowledge and needs.

3.6 The verbal construction of actuality As against narrative discourse (Chapter 2), relating to the actual world calls for the ability to convey verbally to others (or express in privacy) knowledge about entities that concern one at the moment of talking or writing, and states of affairs viewed as real and realized, rather than hypothetical. Speaker-writers do this by various combinations of describing and/or arguing. In successful description, reader-hearers will be able to visualize what is being described and to confirm or add to what they previously knew about the entity—as in reading the description

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of butterflies in (28). Should evaluative comments be added, as in the description of the teacher in (27), the addressee will probably share the positive or negative feeling conveyed by the writer. Adequate argumentation means that information is supported by reasoning, anticipating possible reactions and motivations and alternating perspectives on the state of affairs at issue—as in (12). For informing both by describing and arguing, discourse is constructed top-down, starting with generalized propositions (of the topic being described or the controversy being discussed) and moving to specific features, arguments, illustrations, commentary, etc. We have seen that some characteristics of adequate descriptions and argumentations are displayed by childhood, with more and better skills emerging on the way to puberty. Yet many are established only in adolescence, and some are not fully available even to adults. Relevant advances depend in part on the broadening of the communicative settings children encounter in growing up, providing interaction with different people, contrasting opinions, and differing styles of language use in the spoken, written and digital modes. Research points to restricted participation in diverse communicative circumstances as a major factor explaining disparities in language and literacy development. Proficient use of language for the actual world depends largely on having access to relevant types of discourse—debates, discussions, descriptive passages, encyclopedic entries, news articles and broadcasts, blogs, talkbacks, chats, and so on. As noted, peer talk and texting blossom in the teens, providing important outlets for expression of ideas, emotions, and opinions. But attaining command of how to provide an adequate description or make convincing arguments are protracted learning processes which, in addition to varied communicative settings and related socio-cognitive development, might also need explicit instruction (Chapter 7). Two rather unexpected insights emerged for us in writing this chapter. One is that talking about the present is no less complicated than talking about past events (Chapter 2) or even about future contingencies (Chapter 4). Yet, surprisingly, this has not been the focus of dedicated developmental or (psycho)linguistic research.23 Second, while the juvenile hic et nunc ‘here and now’ of early child speech is well-recognized, it concerns talk that is physically confined in place and time. Little attention has been paid to the what of such talk, in the sense of Whitehead’s continuum of entities, from concrete to abstract. The present is elusive for research from both linguistic and neurological standpoints. Reference to the past and projection to the future are almost inevitable when talking about the present. And neurobiologically, the construction of actuality depends on two processes relating ‘now’ with ‘before’ and ‘after.’ On the one hand, predictive mechanisms enable past events to be perceived as present, and previous knowledge of personal relevance turns people and events real as opposed to imaginary. On the other, different neural mechanisms are activated

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when thinking and talking about actual as opposed to hypothetical situations: wondering about future contingencies occurs in the default mode network, when our brains are not occupied in solving a particular task. Paradoxically, neurobiology indicates that the abstract distinctions motivating philosophical discourse across the centuries appear to reside in the basic differentiation between familiar and close versus unfamiliar and distanced, while the opening up of possibilities occurs in our minds once we are freed from the pressure of current tasks.

Notes 1. This account is the authors’ adaptation of The Truman Show plot, a 1998 American science fiction satirical film directed by Peter Weir for Scott Rudin Production. 2. Calderón de la Barca (1635/2013). La vida es sueño. Alianza Editorial. 3. This account is the authors’ adaptation of one scene from the 1999 science fiction movie The Matrix, the first of four in The Matrix film series, directed and produced by the Wachowski sisters (Lana and Lilly Wachowski) for Warner Brothers. 4. Albert Einstein is reported to have written in a letter of condolence to the family of his deceased friend Michele Besso from 1953 that “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” 5. In the late 1970s the Ad Hoc Group on Carbon Dioxide and Climate submitted ‘The Charney Report,’ the first comprehensive assessment of global climate change due to carbon dioxide emissions. 6. In contrast, the classical model viewed change as illusory (Plato) or accidental (Aristotle). Reality was taken as ‘timeless,’ and process as non-essential or even non-existent. 7. Thanks to Dr. Gustavo Tolchinsky Wiesen for this example. 8. The interchange was recorded as part of a class project on discourse in the linguistics department at Tel Aviv University. 9. Pan, Perlman, and Snow (2000) list eleven major corpora of mealtime data as a context for observing parent-child discourse. Projects in this area often include members of a nuclear family, siblings of different ages and their parents, observed by a researcher who, over time, becomes like another family member. 10. Ethnographic research is a sub-branch of anthropology using qualitative rather than quantitative approaches to describe the researcher’s on-site interactions with participants in their real-life environment. 11. L. Tolstoy (1852–1917). The diaries of Leon Tolstoy 1847—1852. C.J. Hogarth & A. Sirnis (Eds.). Published in 1917 by Turnbull & Spears, this is the only translation authorized by the Russian Editor Vladimir Tchertkoff. 12. Virginia Woolf (1953). A writer’s diary. Hogarth Press. 13. Encyclopedia Britannica, April 3, 2020. https://www.britannica.com/animal/eaglebird. Accessed May 28, 2022. 14. Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892). The Eagle. https://www.public-domain-poetry. com/alfred-lord-tennyson.

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15. For an insightful explanation of the special nature of progressive aspect in English, the bane of teachers and students of English as a foreign language, see Goldsmith & Woisetschlaeger, 1982. 16. We avoid reference to the so-called Present Perfect (e.g., has gone, have left) which some call a tense, others an aspect. Its use differs from one language to another, even from one dialect to another. Thus, it is far commoner in British than American English (see the examples in the text on drugs in (14)—has not only failed, has exacerbated, has created). In both dialects of English, it expresses ‘current relevance of past events’; in Iberian but not Latin-American Spanish, it is the common way of referring to the immediate past; in French the same form is the colloquial way of talking about the past (passé compose) while in German it serves different functions from one dialect to another; and Hebrew does not have any such form at all (Slobin, 1994). 17. This does not mean that the same surface forms, say have + Past Participle like English has eaten, French a mangé, Spanish ha comido, ‘mean’ the same thing or have the same semantic and discursive functions. 18. This same cross-linguistic finding applies to other domains, too, for example in different ways of describing spatial paths of movement, where Hebrew, Spanish, and Turkish contrast with English and German, two languages which use spatial particles like fall down, look up (Slobin, 2004). 19. Hormones are chemicals secreted by specialized glands (endocrines) into the bloodstream. They are essential for all facets of daily life, including digestion, metabolism, growth, reproduction, and even mood control. 20. This is particularly noticeable in the context of the British boys’ school recorded over thirty years ago in (18). 21. Ehrenreich et al., (2020) note that more research on media like Twitter and Instagram is needed to understand how texting fits into the broader domain of digital communication. 22. The author describes this type of talk as evaluation, as discussed for narrative discourse in Chapter 2. 23. An exception is the rich literature in linguistics and child language research on the grammar and semantics of present tense in different languages.

4 Language for (im)possible worlds We talk about imagination as the power of generating possibilities—new ideas, alternative perspectives on a situation, mental images of objects which may not even exist, potentials for future action regarding past events. The poet Emily Dickinson described herself as “dwelling in possibility,”1 the psychologist Daniel Todd Gilbert (2006) describes the ability to entertain different perspectives as “the greatest achievement of the human brain,” reminding us that the philosopher Daniel Dennet (1986) characterized the human brain as an ‘anticipation machine,’ for which “‘making future’ is the most important thing it does” (pp. 4–5). Any idea or action that gets realized must have existed previously as a possibility; and a possibility, once conceived, will generally breed other possibilities. We cannot observe any of these possibilities directly, we can only conceive them, they result from our inner world.2 Yet something of our world-knowledge and previous experience is transported to every act of imagination. We even construct utopias—non-places, non-existing societies—out of knowing what should be preserved or changed in the actual world. Gifted writers like Proust (1871–1922) can even represent unknown entities to themselves and others. I did not then represent to myself towns, landscapes, historic buildings, as pictures more or less attractive, cut out here and there of a substance that was common to them all, but looked on each of them as on an unknown thing, different from all the rest, a thing for which my soul was athirst, by the knowledge of which it would benefit. (Proust, 1982, p. 922)

Anticipating outcomes and generating options are rooted in a fundamental property of the human brain, its capacity to envisage the future. These two mental processes have a powerful impact on people’s thought and behavior and are required for divergent thinking, a flexible and inventive way of thinking that explores alternative solutions to problems (Guilford, 1959). In everyday life, anticipating what might happen when we walk prevents us from falling, imagining where we might have left the keys saves time looking, lamenting missing an opportunity makes one miserable. In fact, scientific hypotheses are educated guesses about possible outcomes, based on previous data or a formal model incorporating familiar procedures.

Growing into Language. Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman, Oxford University Press. © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.003.0004

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Take an example of making and testing hypotheses from the domain of writing, further dealt with in Chapter 7. Studies of how writers produce texts indicate that proficient writing proceeds top-down: local decisions (like choice of words and sentence-construction) are controlled by a global writing schema involving knowledge (principles of discourse genre and stylistic conventions, say) that is stored in long-term memory (Kellogg, 2008). This led McCutchen et al. (1997) to predict that such top-down control develops as a function of increased writing proficiency. To test this hypothesis, they had middle-school students at different levels of writing proficiency revise narratives written with spelling errors and disrupted sequences of events. They found that skilled writers rapidly noted both spelling mistakes and flaws in discourse structure, whereas the less proficient detected errors in spelling but paid little attention to more global issues. That is, their findings supported their hypothesis that proficiency in writing makes people more sensitive to overall discourse structure. We can (re)formulate the predictions of the study as follows: if there are differences (under the conditions tested), then there is a relation between level of writing proficiency and awareness of discourse structure. When people reason about states of the world that might obtain just in case certain conditions are satisfied, they often use conditional constructions (like ‘If there are differences’). In so doing, they depart from the world of actual entities and situations (whether realized in the past, as in Chapter 2, or referring to the present, as in Chapter 3), shifting to hypothetical eventualities. We earlier proposed that people can understand the meaning of the present only by integrating past, present, and future along a unified timeline. That is, to understand a present state of affairs, we need to realize that it will become past, just as the future will become present and then past. Here we confirm that only by integrating actuality, (im)possibility, and necessity along a unified line of logical reasoning can reality be conceptualized. In order to understand the possible (the hypothetical), we need to recognize that it is already (potentially) present in the actual, and reciprocally, the actual is one (although not necessarily the only) realization of what is possible. After reading this chapter you will be acquainted with: • the centrality of thinking and talking about possible worlds in everyday life and in scientific study; • the linguistic forms that indicate whether an utterance is factual, and so has a truth value, or whether it makes a modal judgment (expressing desire, doubt, hypothetical reasoning, and so on) and so can only be evaluated for its feasibility; • differences in the grammatical resources languages use for talking about future contingencies; • neurological correlates of idea-generation and the networks involved in factual, hypothetical, and counterfactual conditional statements;

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• how, over time, children show increasing command of the linguistic forms that mark different types of unrealized possibilities, and how these reflect socio-cognitive development in the propositional attitudes they express.

4.1 Linguistic means for referring to possible worlds As stated in Chapter 2, linguists (unlike, say, philosophers or poets) relate to time through the categories of Tense, Mood, Aspect (TMA). Here, in talking about (im)possible situations that may but need not occur in the future, we focus on the category of Mood: how speakers express their attitude toward what they are saying by means of irrealis mood.3 As explained by Marianne Mithun (1991) “The realis portrays situations as actualized, as having occurred or actually occurring, knowable from direct perception. The irrealis portrays situations purely within the realms of thought, knowable only through the imagination” (p. 173). People constantly make modal judgments about what is likely, necessary, or impossible. Consider examples (1) to (3): all report on the same fact— confinement during the COVID-19 pandemic. But in (1) this is judged as necessary, as though there were no other possibilities; (2) suggests that there were other possibilities, but one was preferable; and (3) implies that one of these possibilities (the worst) was not realized. (1) During the Corona pandemic, people had to be confined for three months. (2) During the Corona pandemic it was better to remain confined. (3) During the Corona pandemic we were confined for three months but it could have been much worse. The referential content of each of these propositions is modulated to convey the attitude of the speaker toward the necessity, desirability, or (un)likelihood of the particular state of affairs expressed in the proposition. In (1) and the first part of (3), we can inquire about the truth value of the proposition, is it true or false (eliciting a yes or no answer), because the assertion directs us to realized possibilities, possibilities that are or were actual, in realis mood. If someone asks you—how do you know that during the Corona pandemic people were confined? You can answer—because I was there, I experienced confinement directly. But what if someone asks, how do you know that it could have been worse? You can give many different answers: I just feel that way, that’s what people say, look at what happened in other countries, importing information from other places or times, or you can even provide a full-blown epidemiological theory. Yet you cannot rely on your direct experience because you are talking about unrealized possibilities, your statements are expressed in irrealis mood. All and any modal judgments are open to diverse potential answers—based on intuition,

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conceivability, imaginability, deduction, theory, and similarity (Anand, 2017)— different people can have different answers to the same question. Modal judgments open up numerous alternatives, none of which are actually realized in this world at this time, but which are possible, impossible, or necessary in other worlds or at other times. Of particular interest are two modal categories defined as Deontic and Epistemic respectively (Chung & Timberlake, 1985; Papafragou, 1998). Deontic (also termed root) judgments express socially prescribed attitudes about how the world ought to be, what is desired, permitted, necessary, or obligatory according to speakers’ norms and expectations (want, can, must, need to, etc.) Epistemic commentaries involve speakers’ cognitive judgments of a given state of affairs, their evaluation of the likelihood that it will be realized, the degree they believe in the truth of a proposition, if it expresses a hypothetical possibility rather than an actual situation (using terms like may, might, could be, likely, probable). Deontic propositions involve a single, unique response to a situation, whereas epistemic attitudes open up the path to alternative possibilities. We will see that the distinction between these two ways of relating to future contingencies is particularly relevant to development from middle childhood to adolescence. As they mature, speakers exploit varied linguistic options for expressing their intentions or beliefs about whether a proposition is true, obligatory, desirable, or actual. Given the plethora of terms used in this domain (see note 3), we adopt the definition of modality given by Bybee and Fleischmann (1995), as the semantic domain that adds an overlay of meaning to the most neutral, factual, and declarative value of an utterance. Notions like those they list (jussive, desiderative, intentive, hypothetical, potential, obligative, dubitative, hortative, exclamatory) all serve to express the subjective attitudes of the speaker in relation to a situation (Aksu-Koç, 1988). A rich array of these and other attitudes toward possible worlds is illustrated by the excerpt from the text in (4), written by a student at a Californian university on the topic of interpersonal conflict.4 Linguistic forms expressing propositional attitudes are bolded and the semantic category is specified in curly brackets in small caps. (4) Conflict is a matter that I believe {BELIEF} needs to be handled {NECESSITY/OBLIGATORINESS} in a case by case manner. The manner in which people decide to {INTENTION} handle conflict needs to be {NECESSITY/OBLIG.} thoughtfully considered, as the person or people with whom the conflict is with [sic] and the reasons for the conflict will warrant {DESIRABILITY} a different approach for different instances. Sometimes conflict will need to be {NECESSITY/OBLIG.} addressed directly since it can harm {POSSIBILITY} an individual's well-being. It may cause {POSSIBILITY} damage emotionally and/or physically …. In this case I only advise it {DESIRABILITY}.

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L ANGUAGE FOR (IM)POSSIBLE WORLDS If addressing {CONDITION} the conflict will cause {PREDICTION} additional problems and {PREDICTION} worsen the situation … addressing some conflicts may put {POSSIBILITY} an individual in danger and should simply be handled {ADVISABILITY} by shrugging it off and/or walking away …. In sum, conflict must be resolved {NECESSITY} whether directly or indirectly {ALTERNATIVITY}.

Nearly every clause expresses some modification of the neutral referential content of its propositions. The entire text relates to possible states of affairs, the contingencies surrounding them, the consequences they might incur, and the author’s thoughts and feelings about the decisions or actions that should be taken with respect to these possible states of affairs. Complex and varied propositional attitudes like these lie at the heart of the present chapter. The text in (4) shows the rich and varied linguistic constructions for expressing irrealis modality in English. These differ grammatically and lexically from one language to another, but the domain is typically expressed by diverse forms in any language. Following Reilly et al. (2002), we summarize four classes of linguistic forms for expressing propositional attitudes to possible or hypothetical states of affairs: modal auxiliaries, modal predicates, predicating adjectives, and adverbials.5 • modal auxiliaries: in most European languages these items generally attach to a non-finite verb (not marked for tense) before the verb (e.g., can swim, may be swimming).6 English has a grammatical category of nine modals for expressing irrealis: can, could (ability, possibility), may, might (possibility, permission), must (necessity, obligation), shall, should (future, advisability), will, would (future, likelihood). This set of terms is unique to English since it constitutes a grammatical paradigm.7 They are also each ambiguous, since they can be used with both deontic and epistemic senses (Sweetser, 1990). For example, English should ranges from mild advisability to strong necessity; can expresses both ability and permission, may—both permission and possibility; and must can express obligation or an inference about a state of affairs as in ‘You must be here by 4 o’clock’ versus ‘He’s late, he must be delayed by traffic.’ Each of these terms also has a more open-ended counterpart, called ‘semi-modals’ (can ~ be able to, may ~ be allowed to, must ~ have to, need to, should ~ ought to, will ~ be going to), followed by an infinitive with ‘to.’8 These are akin to their counterparts in languages like French, Spanish, or Hebrew (have to = devoir/deber/tsarix; be able to = pouvoir, poder, yaxol respectively). But they differ syntactically from other mental state verbs like those meaning ‘want’ or ‘know,’ since they must occur with a grammatical subject.9 • modal predicates: these are similar in form to semi-modals (e.g., English need to, be able to; French devoir, pouvoir; Spanish deber, poder, Hebrew tsarix,

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yaxol) but they can occur in impersonal constructions—with a ‘dummy’ subject like it in English or French il, and without any grammatical subject in Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew. Compare English ‘It is necessary that you practice a lot,’ French Il faut] s'entraîner beaucoup, versus Spanish 0 Hay que] practicar mucho. Hebrew 0 tsarix] le-hitamen harbe—where the zero indicates no grammatical subject, and the bracket] the beginning of the complement clause. • predicating adjectives: terms like necessary, possible, likely, and their counterparts in other languages have a modal function in constructions following verbs like be, seem (it is possible to, seemed likely that …). These sound rather formal in English, but they are common usages in, say, Spanish or Hebrew, where they occur without a grammatical subject (es posible, es probable). • adverbials: expressions that modify an entire proposition modally (e.g., necessarily, perhaps, possibly, probably, most likely). Each language reflects the special status of its modal elements in different ways. English, as noted, has a grammaticized set of modals; French is mixed, using impersonal il faut as a favored device for expressing obligation rather than the subject-oriented modal verb pouvoir for possibility; Spanish uses both impersonal expressions of obligation like hay que, tener que, and the modal verbs deber and poder; and Hebrew uses morphologically irregular modal operators in impersonal constructions with tsarix ‘must, have to,’ asur ‘be prohibited, not allowed,’ and efshar ‘be possible,’ followed by infinitival or ‘that’ clauses. The peculiar nature of these modal terms in different languages reflects the conceptual complexity and special linguistic status of irrealis expressing propositional attitudes toward future states of affairs. An important function of irrealis mood is to make predictions about what is expected for some time in the future. The term future tense indicates how irrealis mood interacts with tense.10 Many languages have two different forms for predicting the future: (i) a synthetic future form—like French finira, Spanish terminaré, Hebrew egmor—all meaning roughly (I’ll) finish (with the same base form or stem as the infinitive); (ii) a so-called ‘long form’ with an auxiliary-modal verb, often meaning ‘go,’ as in English going to finish, reduced in speech to gonna; French aller finir, Spanish voy a terminar, Hebrew omed ligmor ‘stand = about to finish.’ Germanic languages like English and German lack an inflected form of the verb but use a modal will or werde as in I’ll finish, ich werde beenden as the basic form of future ‘tense.’ As we see below, use of future tense forms also plays an important role in conditional constructions (e.g., If you want me to, I’ll help you with that).11

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Some languages have a special subjunctive form of verb to talk about possible but as yet unrealized contingencies in some future world. In English, this special marking of irrealis mood is confined to formal usage with the verb be—were instead of was (e.g., from Macbeth Act 1, vii: “If it were were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly”), and even more occasionally with the basic form be, as in Leonard Cohen’s song “If it be your will.” In other languages, the subjunctive form of verbs is required following verbs that entail irrealis mood, for example, French Je veux que tu saches ‘I want you to know,’ Il faut que je parte ‘it is necessary for me to leave, I have to leave’; Spanish Quiero que no tengas frı´o ‘I hope (want) that it will not be cold (you will not be cold),’ dile a ella que lleve una chaqueta ‘Tell her she (should) wear a jacket.’ Grammatically, these are part of what is called ‘complex syntax,’ since they are generally formed by joining two or more clauses, a dependent clause expressing the condition and the main clause, its consequence. They are illustrated for English in (6) to (9) below: semantically, the validity of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the existence of the circumstances expressed in the dependent clause, which is generally introduced by a conjunction like if or negative unless. Conditional sentences are an important means of realizing irrealis mood. We have seen how they serve in formulating hypotheses about possible outcomes, in case certain conditions are satisfied. But conditionals can also be used for situations that involve different degrees of possibility—factual or actual, as in (5) and (6), hypothetical (7), and counterfactual (8).12 (5) Factual: If short-sighted people wear glasses, they see better. (6) Actual: If you look carefully you’ll find your glasses. (7) Hypothetical: If you looked more carefully you’d find your glasses. (8) Counterfactual: If you had looked more carefully you’d have found your glasses. In (5) and (6), speakers express maximal certainty about whether the consequences of the condition mentioned in the first clause will be realized in actuality, which is why factual conditionals are sometimes used to express general truths (e.g., If you heat water to 100 degrees, it boils). In both factual and actual conditionals the speaker is talking about a real or present possibility: s/he is performing a speech act making a suggestion or giving an instruction to the hearer. In hypotheticals like (7), with the English modal would, the possibility is hypothetical, it it is more remote but still realizable; it can be followed by a statement like I’ll help you if you like. The counterfactual conditional in (8), in contrast, expresses an unreal condition, one which it is too late or impossible to realize, and so is considered contrary to fact (Goodman, 1947). A suitable follow-up comment to (8) might take the form of But you didn’t, so now it’s too late to find them. Sentences like those

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in (7) and (8) both contain a false if-clause, but each calls for a different type of reasoning: to work out a hypothetical conditional like (7) you need to suppose something, to take into account different possibilities (if x then y, if not-x then noty, etc.); but to derive a consequence for a counterfactual condition—If you had looked, you’d [=would] have found your glasses—you need to consider a factual situation that was not realized (the fact that you didn’t look) in addition to what you supposed to be the case. These accounts appear to take the form of logical reasoning, but truthconditional logic (based on syllogisms like P true Q true = P→ Q true; P false Q true = P→ Q true; and P false Q false = P→ Q true) is not the same as linguistic understanding. As Pinker explains: “When the antecedent is known to be false or necessarily false [as in the example If short-sighted people wear glasses then they do not see better] we’re tempted to say that the conditional was moot or irrelevant or speculative or even meaningless, not that it is true” (Pinker, 2021, pp. 78–79). Languages have different grammatical means for marking the element that connects the two clauses.13 Many also use a distinct syntactic form of the verb phrase to mark counterfactual mood. In English and German subjunctive mood distinguishes counterfactual conditionals from those which do not imply real-world violations. In this case, the antecedent of the subjunctive clause either has a truth value (factual) or an undetermined truth value (hypothetical), which are stated in the indicative (Kulakova et al., 2013). Unlike Germanic (English, Dutch, etc.) and Romance (French, Spanish) languages, Slavic (Russian, Polish) and Semitic (Hebrew, Arabic) languages do not mark the distinction between hypothetical (7) and counterfactual (8) conditionals by grammatical means. Consider the Hebrew translations of (6) to (8) in (9) and (10): (9) im texapes, timtsa et ha-mishkafayim shelxa If 2SG.MS.FUT. look, 2SG.MS.FUT.find ACC the-glasses of-you14 ‘If you-will-look, you-will-find your glasses’ (10) im / lu hayita mexapes, hayita motse If / if was2SG.MS looking, was2SG.MS finding ACC et ha-mishkafayim shelxa the-glasses of-you ‘If you looked ~ had looked, you would find ~ would have found your glasses’ As shown in (9), Hebrew, like Arabic and Russian, does not distinguish grammatically between hypothetical and counterfactual conditions, as in (7) versus (8) in English and other West European languages.15 Typological studies find that most languages do, in fact, make a grammatical distinction between hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals, though they mark this by different means.16

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Languages also differ in the grammatical forms they use for conditional constructions (e.g., the past perfect plus modals in English ‘If you had told me, I would have helped you,’ Spanish preterit pluscuamperfecto ‘preterit pluperfect’ followed by condicional compuesto ‘complex conditional’ as in Si me lo hubieras dicho, te habrı´a ayudado). These constructions, as noted, form part of complex syntax and rely on sophisticated grammatical forms in different languages, reflecting their conceptual and pragmatic complexity. We will see at the end of this chapter (Section 4.4) that, however such constructions are marked grammatically, the cognitive demands in entertaining hypothetical and especially counterfactual possibilities are a heavy load for children across the world. It turns out that entertaining the type and level of reasoning implied in each type of condition consolidates at different developmental stages. As discussed earlier with regard to Tense/Aspect markings, it makes sense to ask if the lack of overt linguistic distinctions means that speakers in general (not only children) do not recognize the conceptual difference between hypothetical and counterfactual conditions. We return to the issue below (in Section 4.4). Other features of linguistic structure in addition to the form of verbs also play a role in talking and thinking about future contingencies. As Palmer (2001) pointed out (see note 3), irrealis mood refers to the status of a proposition as a whole rather than only to its predicate. As a result, modality is expressed linguistically not only in the verb phrase, but also in the grammatical subject noun or noun phrase. For example, the distinction noted earlier between deontic and epistemic modality shows up in the contrast between use of personal, specific subjects reflecting an agent-oriented perspective—as in (11a) and (12a)—compared with an impersonal, generic, or abstract subject noun phrase expressing a generalized propositional attitude—as in (11b) and (12b), from texts produced by English-speaking adults, with subject nouns and pronouns in bold. (11) a. She [=the bride] said my boyfriend could come for dessert and dancing. b. If people with a conflict or problem would try and consider the other person's point of view, perspective, and reason for being at the opposite side of the problem as them, then maybe a resolution to the problem could be easily reached. (12) a. I should clarify that I interpret conflict to be a negative term. b. Addressing some conflicts may put an individual in danger and should simply be handled by shrugging it off and/or walking away. The same modal—could and should respectively—occurs in both examples in (11) and (12), but the subject in the (a) sentence is a personal pronoun she, I while in (b) it is an abstract noun phrase resolution to the problem, addressing some conflicts. This difference corresponds to a difference in modality: in (11a), the modal

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could has the sense of permission and is predicated of a specific person (the narrator’s boyfriend) who was being allowed by another specific person (the bride) to attend her wedding; it thus refers to a protagonist who is potentially an agent—in this case, of coming for dessert and dancing. But in (11b), the same modal could expresses possibility, predicated of the abstract nominal a resolution to the problem; here the subject has the semantic role of patient or undergoer, an entity that may experience but not cause the eventuality, since the modal occurs in a passive construction (could be reached, should be handled). Example (11a) could be reworded as She allowed my boyfriend (= gave my boyfriend permission) to come, while (11b) has a generic referent People/We/One could reach a solution, or could take the form of an impersonal statement: It would be possible to reach a solution. Similar contrasts emerge between (12a) and (12b): in the first case I should means something like it is my personal duty to … while Addressing such conflicts should be handled means something like ‘It is people’s duty in general to.’ That is, modals used with personal subject reference have a deontic sense, while the same modals used with generalized, impersonal subjects are epistemic. It is no coincidence that the first examples in each pair, (11a) and (12a), are taken from narrative texts, whereas the impersonal references of (11b) and (12b) are taken from discursive essays (Reilly et al., 2002). How we interpret a modal expression depends, then, on the entire statement in which it occurs. This in turn reflects a general property of language use: different facets of the grammar interact in certain types of propositions—here, sentence subjects (personal, specific versus generalized, abstract) and types of modal verbs. Such expressive options may also be affected by discourse genre— here more personalized narratives versus distanced, less subjective essays. We will see that this mirrors a developmental difference, too: younger children use mainly personal, specific reference in expressing modal attitudes, whereas older speakers relate modality to abstract subjects, reflecting a more cognitive or ‘topic-focused’ approach. In sum, grammatically conditional clauses belong with ‘complex syntax,’ since they are formed by joining two or more clauses, a dependent clause expressing the condition and the main clause its consequence, as illustrated for English in (5) to (8)—with their order reversible in most cases (e.g., If you looked harder, you’d find your glasses ~ You’d find your glasses if you looked harder).17 Semantically, the validity of the main clause of the sentence is conditional on the circumstances expressed in the dependent clause, introduced by a conjunction like if or negative unless. Across cultures, conditionals are critical for sophisticated use of language, for making inferences, and for scientific and logical reasoning, since they convey the hypothetical relationships that lie at the heart of deductive and inferential thinking. We move next to the neural networks involved in the generation of alternative ideas and the ability to distinguish different forms of hypothetical thinking.

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4.2 Neural underpinnings of imaginative language We started by defining imagination as an outcome of a process of creative ideation entertaining new and even impossible alternatives. How is this broadening of horizons neurologically supported? In order to identify how the brain works in the course of creative ideation, researchers (Rominger et al., 2019) have used ‘divergent thinking tasks,’ in which people need to find alternative uses for everyday objects.18 Objects generally have prototypical uses, which children (and adults) may change in play, turning pencils into arrows, umbrellas as hobby-horses, and so on. The ability to imagine differentfrom-default uses for everyday objects illustrates how thought goes off in different directions (Guilford, 1959), offering numerous possible solutions. In two related studies (Fink & Benedek, 2014; Rominger et al., 2019), researchers had participants propose original novel uses for everyday objects (e.g., an umbrella as a basket for fruit, turning a brick into a pencil-holder). Researchers scanned participants’ brains before and after deciding on the best alternative. Participants, and also a group of external judges, were asked to score these proposals for originality, and whether they were possible in principle (not fiction or fantasy).19 The results pointed to three phases during the creative ideation process, revealing differences between more or less original ideators (Rominger et al., 2019).20 In the first phase, participants’ thinking follows various paths of associative thinking, searching in semantic memory with relatively low executive control. Second, the necessary information from semantic memory is already retrieved and integrated, allowing for people to derive alternatives, together with the onset of central executive control processes. Eventually, the transitional phase is followed by evaluative functioning at the highest level of executive control, enabling people to decide on the best alternative. Interestingly, the more creative thinkers showed a stronger internal focus of attention at the initial phase of the ideation process, facilitated by a more rapid recruitment of control functions. That is, their memory searches and semantic retrieval processes were more effective because they inhibited irrelevant information, along with improved evaluation and selection of alternatives. People who scored higher on creativity showed increased neural activity during the first and final phases of the ideation process, whereas less original people did not show this kind of U-shaped behavior across time (Rominger et al., 2019). In general, changes in neural oscillations were accompanied by a steady increase in long-distance functional cooperation between frontal and parietal-occipital sites, particularly in the left hemispheres, and increases were more rapid in more creative people. This three-phased process can be summed up along the following lines. During the first phase of creative ideation, neural activity increases, especially over posterior and occipital cortical sites where attention is shifted from stimulus processing

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to internal processes such as the retrieval of associative information from memory. This phase shows relatively low executive control due to reduced cooperation between frontal and parietal areas and low working memory load. The associative thinking processes that characterize this phase are supported by the default mode network (DMN), interacting brain regions that are active during resting states.21 Resting is a rather paradoxical characterization, because this network is known to be involved in episodic and autobiographical memory retrieval and overlaps with brain regions associated with semantic processing, and planning—all of which account for its relationship to the associative processes involved in the generation of creative ideas (Buckner et al., 2008). These processes enable the attainment of personal goals but are also responsible for all the cultural and technological developments that humans are capable of while in a resting state (Sowden et al., 2014). The second phase shows diminished activity accompanied by a rise in functional coupling and neuronal integration of long-distant areas, perhaps reflecting the onset of central executive control processes. The final stage exhibits the highest level of functional coupling together with a marked reincrease in alpha power— indicating prevalence of executive control functions operating under increased internal attention demands. This combination of increased power and functional coupling suggests that evaluative and elaborative functions are fully realized at this final stage. The salience network is, so far, the most likely candidate (Menon & Uddin, 2010) for this shift from more to less controlled thinking processes, between the DMN and the central executive network. This network incorporates the anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) that become active shortly before an insightful solution is reached (Subramaniam et al., 2009). These results point to different kinds of neural processes, some relatively decoupled from a central executive network, others more under executive control (coupled to the frontal network). The less controlled processes underlie the opening up of alternatives, the more controlled processes involve comparing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. Researchers typically describe the less controlled kind of thinking as intuitive, fast, automatic, and associative, in contrast to the more controlled reflective type, which is characterized as slow, effortful, and analytic. However, as noted, both kinds of processes appeared with differing degrees of more or less controlled access rather than as dichotomous. Although much remains to be worked out in the mapping between brain networks and processes of creative thinking, the consistent involvement of the ACC in shifting between types of thinking suggests that ACC activation could be a useful indicator of shifting between conscious and intuitive thinking as people work on creative problems. Where do the alternative notions generated during creative ideation come from? Paulus and Brown (2007) suggest that it is misleading to interpret them as purely intuitive, as though they respond directly to the actual context. Rather “both the

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retrieval of existing knowledge from memory and the combination of various aspects of existing knowledge [give rise to] novel ideas” (p. 252). Think about the rapid and supposedly intuitive diagnostic of a physician in response to a patient’s symptoms. Years of effortful study lie behind this apparently gut reaction. Again, an unexpected move by a chess master who defeats an adversary might be praised as intuitive but in fact results from many hours of practicing strategies. Specialists in any field have expert intuitions, the effect of training turns reflective, effortful thinking into automatic and rapid reactions when confronting similar situations and enables rapid adaptation to new situations. But the opposite is also true, underlying reflective thinking are automatic abilities which, due to their speed and automaticity, facilitate reflective and effortful thinking. To illustrate, because the physician almost automatically recognizes similarities and differences between the current symptoms and previously encountered cases, s/he can reflect more carefully on possible causes and treatment. In every domain of knowledge, generation of ideas and the opening up of possibilities are rooted in previous experiences enabled by a rapid, unconscious recognition of the similarities between current and stored situations. The nature of the interaction between the different kind of processes shifting from one to the other is a key source of creative thinking (Sowden et al., 2014). We have just described the neurological underpinnings and processes involved in creative ideation and how they stem from previous experiences. However, does the thinker distinguish between possible, conditional, and counterfactual alternatives? Is this distinction also rooted in stored experiences? To test people’s ability to establish relevant distinctions in hypothetical thinking, researchers have participants think about hypothetical scenarios while their brain activity is being scanned. They might be asked to think about events they have experienced, that is, to perform episodic simulation (Schacter et al., 2008).22 When asked to draw on elements of past experience to envisage hypothetical scenarios that might occur in their future, people are performing episodic future thinking. And, if they are asked to think/talk about what might have occurred in their personal past, they are performing episodic counterfactual thinking. For example, people who participated in the Schacter et al. (2015) study were given a few words to cue their remembering of specific events in their past such as a birthday party or a barbecue, or to imagine events in their future like a trip they were planning. The researchers registered what happened in participants’ brains both in a construction phase, during which they generated the past or future event in response to the cue words, and during an elaboration phase, when they generated as much detail as possible about the said event. In spite of the differences between talking about the past and envisaging the future, PET scans showed similar activity in several prefrontal regions, as well as in the medial temporal lobe (including the right hippocampus and bilateral parahippocampal gyrus) for both personal and general events. The regions that show similarly increased activity during episodic simulation and

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episodic future thinking—most prominently, the medial temporal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate, retrosplenial cortex, and lateral temporal and prefrontal regions—have been referred to as a ‘core network’ (Schacter et al., 2008), within which subsystems can be identified that are preferentially associated with, respectively, remembering and imagining. Several neuroimaging studies reveal neural differences between remembering the past and imagining the future, with most such studies showing greater activity in regions such as the hippocampus and frontopolar cortex in imagining compared with remembering (Schacter et al., 2013). Is the same core network implicated in episodic counterfactual thinking? What happens in our brain when we speculate about an utterance like If I had left the office earlier, I wouldn’t have missed my train? fMRI results have shown that episodic counterfactual thinking, just like episodic simulation and future episodic thinking, recruit core network regions. Interestingly, the core network, in turn, overlaps with the default mode network (activated during resting). The overlap shows, as noted, that this supposedly resting state is involved in various kinds of mental processes, in this case to construct episodes, irrespective of whether or not they have occurred in reality. Although both future and counterfactual thinking require similar constructive processes, the two operate on material that is differentially constrained by reality. The future is inherently uncertain, and so there are many degrees of freedom in simulating prospective episodes. Counterfactual thoughts, however, are more constrained by the context of past episodes, and mental transformation of the past may clash with our knowledge of the wider context of an event. The two forms of episodic simulation may thus require different cognitive processes to cope with the specific nature of the imagined events. There is also some evidence that they differ in their associated pattern of neural activation: episodic counterfactual thinking preferentially engages posterior aspects of the medial frontal cortex, which reflects processes associated with conflict detection (Van Hoeck et al., 2013), as distinct from the neural activation operating for episodic simulation and future episodic thinking. The activity in anterior regions of the right hippocampus increased as a function of how likely participants perceived the simulated counterfactual event. The activity of the anterior regions of the right hippocampus decreased for episodic future thoughts that were perceived as more likely to occur (De Brigard et al., 2013). Hypothetical reasoning is involved both in events or circumstances that might occur under certain conditions and ones that have not occurred at all. Consider the difference between the hypothetical statement If it rained the streets would be wet with the counterfactual If it had rained the streets would have been wet. To understand the conditional statement, we can rely on suppositions (If then or If not not ) that express regularities; the counterfactual statements require us to import a specific eventuality from the real world (that it did not rain). In order to understand a counterfactual, people must coactivate both the factual

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and a suppositional content, whereas for hypotheticals the suppositional mode of thought is enough. As shown in the next section, until the age of around 12 years children apply a basic conditional reasoning, and their ability to reason counterfactually is not fully developed. So it is interesting to ask whether the two kinds of reasoning are supported by similar brain networks: the coactivation of suppositional and factual reasoning underlying counterfactual reasoning as against the activation of only suppositional thinking in conditionals leads us to expect a different neural basis. To test this hypothesis, Kulakova and associates (2013) presented a group of German-speaking adults with two groups of sentences to probe their hypothetical as against counterfactual reasoning. As translated into English, the initial clause described a factual state of affairs, in (i) in (13) below, and was the same for both groups of sentences (hypothetical and counterfactual). For the hypothetical condition, the statement of fact in (i) was followed by a conditional clause describing a different state of affairs at another time, leaving the value of the antecedent undetermined (ii–a), followed by a question in the simple past tense (ii–b). For the counterfactual condition, the factual sentence in (i) was followed by a clause (iii–a) in past perfect that contradicts the state of affairs existing at the same time, followed by a question in the the past conditional in English (iii–b), in the subjunctive in the original German (p. 267). (13) (i) ‘The motor is switched off today’ (ii) a. If the motor had been switched on today b. would it have burned fuel? (iii) a. If the motor was switched on yesterday b. did it burn fuel? The only difference between the conditions in (13) (ii) and (iii) was the explicit contradiction between the factual sentence (i) and the antecedent clause in the counterfactual condition (iii–a), which was absent in the hypothetical condition in (ii–a). Participants read the visually presented sentences or listened to them audially and then answered the questions. Analysis of fMRI scanning comparing responses to the hypothetical versus the counterfactual conditions showed a stronger activation for the counterfactual condition in the right occipital cortex (cuneus), associated with the construction of a visual scene in the absence of the appropriate external stimulus that might be created by processing of counterfactual sentences, which seem to require higher imagery loading and integration. There were also marginal differences in right basal ganglia (caudate nucleus), usually activated in integration of linguistic information (relating sentences in discourse), in this case playing a role in integrating two contrasting and incompatible states of affairs into

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discourse. This differential activation of basal ganglia might result from differences in the linguistic expression of irrealis mood (subjunctive for counterfactual conditionals, indicative for hypothetical conditional) (Hagoort, 2003). The same effect was obtained in the auditory modality. This is important because it rules out the possibility that the observed differences relate to the visual nature of the reading task (the occipital brain regions are where visual association processes and mental imagery take place). In processing counterfactual conditionals, participants in the study needed to revise the consequences of assumed events that they had been informed were true in the real world (the factual (i) sentence), so making the antecedents of the counterfactual conditionals explicitly contradict the stated facts. For hypothetical conditionals, participants knew the facts, but had to think about different hypothetical events which did not contradict the initial information they were given. In sum, a similar core system is activated for remembering past events (episodic simulation) and envisaging future circumstances (episodic future thinking), both personal and general. However, within this core system, some regions are specifically mobilized for remembering and others for imagining. Counterfactual thinking has a similar neural basis, but there are indications of activation of the posterior frontal cortex (a region that serves to manage conflicts), anterior hippocampus, and right hippocampus. Hypothetical conditionals (that open up possible eventualities without contradicting an initial state of affairs) have a different neural basis from counterfactual conditionals, which require a higher loading of imagining to integrate two contrasting and incompatible states of the world into a piece of discourse. Counterfactual conditionals imply a combined use of factual and suppositional information, and both need to be kept in mind concurrently. In contrast, hypothetical conditionals suggest a switch from the foregoing real world to a hypothetical scenario, such that one can even ignore the real world information. The need to keep both factual and suppositional information in mind at once could explain why understanding of counterfactual conditionals is such an arduous task with such a protracted development.

4.3 Developmental trajectories Four-year-olds can imagine fictive worlds, create imaginary companions, and engage in pretend play, for example shifting blocks and saying choo-choo as if driving a train. They are also able to entertain hypotheses about the location of a hidden object, although they don’t as yet know how to test how alternative states of affairs would affect its truth. As children develop, their language reflects an ever-increasing opening up of alternative worlds. Conceptualizing alternative possibilities is a formidable mental challenge, and learning to talk about them is no easy task. There are many ways to do so, so it is hard to pinpoint a single

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developmental trajectory. Yet one cluster of facts is clear across the terrain: with age and maturity, speakers can conceive of more alternatives, they can entertain less likely possibilities, and move further away from the actual to more distant eventualities. To chart a coherent story about how children learn to use language to talk and write about (im)possible worlds, we approach the development of such learning process from three perspectives: (i) its initial instrumental function, talking about future contingencies as a way to get things done or to prevent them from happening—by giving orders, expressing requests, pronouncing prohibitions (Section 4.3.1); (ii) the shift from deontic modality, requiring a single unique response to what should or must be, to epistemic modality, opening the way to many alternative possibilities (Section 4.3.2); and (iii) the increased distancing along the axis of irreality, from conditions that are likely to be realized (factuals), via possibilities that can or may still be realized (hypotheticals), and on to those that are no longer in the realm of possibility (counterfactuals) (Sections 4.3.3 and 4.3.4).

4.3.1 Instrumental use of irrealis mood Young children depart early on from realis use of language. By their third year, they use modal expressions to express desires, needs, and abilities in what we called deontic mood (Chung & Timberlake, 1985; Papafragou, 1998; Reilly et al., 2002). At first, these perform largely instrumental functions, getting what is wanted from caretakers. They can do this by using imperative mood to make demands and requests, as in English gimme!, sit down!, leave me alone! or to express prohibitions, don’t touch! A common early way to express possibilities is by giving voice to personal needs and desires (English wanna, French je veux, Spanish quiero, Hebrew masculine rotse, feminine rotsa). Three-year-olds soon afterwards talk about situations that are possible or necessary, using terms like English can, hafta; French il faut, pouvoir; Spanish tener que, poder; Hebrew tsarix, yaxol. In other words, children first conceive of possible worlds from the subjective point of view of their own needs and desires, as something that will happen (if/because) they want it to happen, or will not (if/because) they do not want it to happen. Even a seemingly straightforward domain like imperatives has a longish developmental route filtered by sociolinguistic conventions. Children need to grasp the relationship between the interlocutors (are they intimates or is the setting more formal?) and to learn how to ‘save face’ (valued more in some societies than others) so as to preserve their self-respect and avoid possibly embarrassing situtations. For example, making requests—asking for help or advice—emerges later than demands. Requests need to be linguistically well-formed and culturally appropriate. As speech acts, they typically take politeness markers like please, perhaps, could you be so kind as to and other downgrading or softening expressions

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(Blum-Kulka & Olshtain, 1984, p. 203). Theories of politeness (Brown & Levinson, 1987) show that being polite in a specific context depends on advanced social and pragmatic skills. It involves being able to adjust how to directly word one’s requests (Can/could you help me with this? versus I simply can’t do it on my own) and understanding that both are requests for help. Besides, degree of directness or formality in making requests differs across languages and cultures—from very polite or indirect to forthright (from Japanese via British to American English to German and on to Israeli Hebrew as the most dugri ‘outright’ of all) (Katriel, 1986).23 Children accommodate early on to sociolinguistic conventions of the culture in which they are raised (see Chapter 2), but they do not necessarily command the particular verbal forms that serve as politeness strategies for requests in their language. For example, Japanese has a number of different markers of formality and politeness, and Chinese uses certain forms of polite address when talking to elders or people of higher status. Baba & Lian (1992) found that Japanese children used the appropriate terms of respect from an early age, as part of their grammar, whereas for speakers of Chinese differences in age are more important than status. As second language learners of English, Japanese speakers used the conventional politeness marker corresponding to English ‘Please’ more than speakers of other languages, and they followed it by an indirect expression of desire (I would like you to … ).24 Modal auxiliaries mark requests in many languages, including English (British more than American). When in past tense, they distance the request even further from reality (compare: Can you help me/could you help me? Will you do it for me?/Would you do it for me? May I come with/Might I come with?). Young children have a hard time gaining command of these distinctions in politeness and distancing when they are not part of their grammar, as in Japanese. One reason might be that early language use is typically informal, conducted between intimates like family members or peers. It takes until well into adolescence for speakers to master relevant strategies of politeness in languages where they are rhetorically optional (as in English, Spanish, or Hebrew), while even proficient second language speakers may fail to master them appropriately. An important function of talking about possible worlds is by indirect speech acts, like using modals non-literally to make requests: Could you pass the salt does not ask whether the interlocutor has the ability, but rather whether s/he is willing to perform the act; Why don’t you tidy your room? is not a request for information but a suggestion for action. Understanding an indirect speech act requires the pragmatic ability to shift from a literal to an alternative frame of mind (further discussed in Chapter 5). This, too, is a late-developing skill that progresses across school age to accord with norms of polite behavior in a given society. As we saw in talking about appropriate use of register in Chapter 3, such sensitivity to social and communicative context is a particularly elusive facet of language use for second language learners.

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By school age, speakers express dos and don’ts (injunctions and prohibitions) by means of verbs in the infinitive or some other non-tensed form, as well as in imperative mood (a teacher can say either ‘sit still!’ or ‘no talking in class!’). In many languages, this is the way of wording public prohibitions (e.g., no fumar, lo le-ashen ‘no smoking,’ prohibidio escupir, asur li-rok ‘spitting forbidden’). Negative injunctions are shown in texts written by 9-year-olds in Spanish (14) and Hebrew (15), languages which both have grammatically inflected imperative forms, unlike English. (14) Como por ejemplo no echar papeles al suelo, no discutir entre ellos, y por supuesto no pelearse por nada y no matar a nadie y no charlar. y estudiar mucho y atender a los profesores … y todos aprendían qué era la amistad … y ayudarse y pensar bien de sus compañeros. ‘Like for example not to throw [= don’t throw / you shouldn’t throw] papers on the floor, not to argue among yourselves, and of course not to fight with one another for anything (at all), and not to beat up on anybody] and not to gossip, and to study hard and to listen to the teachers … and everyone will learn what friendship is … and to help one another and to think well of your classmates.’ (15) ma tsarix la’asot kedey lo lehagia le-makot ve-klalot: lo leha’atik, lo lignov mashehu shel mishehu axer ve dvarim ka’ele ‘What must to-do [=what should one do] in-order not to-get to beatings and curses: Not to copy, not to steal something from somebody else and things like that.’ Using imperative mood thus involves complex abilities. It takes until school age for children to make use of culturally approved forms of politeness for requesting and granting permission and use different grammatical constructions to express injunctions and prohibitions. These observations lead us to a key development in use of irrealis mood, the shift from deontic, readily answerable situations to a more abstract, epistemic level of entertaining different alternatives.

4.3.2 From single response deontic to multiple alternative epistemic Using language for talking about (im)possible worlds involves what it means conceptually as well as in grammatical marking. We can sum this up as the shift beyond instrumental to deontic and then to epistemic modality, going from wanting, needing, and judging to more remote eventualities of probability, enablement, and likelihood. Up until middle childhood, around age 9 to 10 years, children speaking different languages use mainly deontic modal expressions. They talk and write about how they view non-actual events judgmentally, as being good or bad, and

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express ability or necessity by terms such as can, know how to, or must, should, have to, or negative not right, mustn’t. Such attitudes are reflected in (16) by the texts written by English-speaking Californian children and in (17) by native speakers of French, Spanish, and Hebrew, all aged 9 to 10 years old, on the topic of ‘problems between people.’ Items expressing irrealis mood are in bold. (16) a. I do not think fighting is good. You do not make friends that way. If you do not fight, you can have many many friends. But when you fight, you can hurt the person’s feelings you are fighting with. You should always be nice and respectful to other people, and if you are not nice, you will end up not having any friends. That is why you should not fight. b. Some things you should not do are cheat and do drugs. If you cheat, you will get in trouble, you will also not learn anything. The reason you should not do drugs are because they can kill you. They will also make you dumb. c. If you have a problem, go to a parent a teacher or another person you know. If something is wrong, do not get in a fight. Tell a grownup. (17) a. C’est bête de se battre pour une chose ou pour une autre. Le plus intelligent c’est celui qui arrète le premier. Quand on se fait racketer c’est une exception. Il faut s'éloigner le plus possible de la personne. Quand on refuse la paix c’est qu' on a envie de se battre. Les bagarres peuvent commencer à partir de très peu. Il faut toujours et toujours pardonner. ‘It’s stupid to fight for one thing or another. The smartest is the one that stops first. When someone gets extorted that’s an exception. It is necessary [= one should] keep as far from that person as possible. When someone refuses to make peace it’s because they want to fight. Quarrels can start from very little. It is necessary [=one should] always always forgive.’ b. No está bien lo que hay en el vídeo porque hay muchos niños que se fijan de los demás y tienen que mejorar su actitud porque está mal insultar a la gente que no te ha hecho nada no te ha pegado. ‘It’s not good what is in the video because there are lots of kids that notice others and must that [they should] improve their attitude because it is bad to insult people that haven’t done anything to you that haven’t hit you.’ c. Kol yom roim be-bet hasefer beayot she-marbicim ve mekalelim ve kol miney dvarim she-lefi da’ati chayavim le-hipasek. Im anachnu rotsim chayim tovim yoter anachnu tsrichim lehafsik et ha-alimut hazot bimhera …

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L ANGUAGE FOR (IM)POSSIBLE WORLDS ‘Every day (you) see at school problems that (kids) hit and curse and all kinds of things that in my opinion must stop. If we want a better life we have to stop this violence right away …’

The 9-year-old texts in (16) and (17) use different forms of expressing irrealis: modal verbs, conditionals, future tense, etc. But they all give voice to similarly prescriptive attitudes to the topic they are writing about. These reflect beliefs and biases that children have absorbed from their surroundings—from parents, teachers, siblings, peers—they do not relate to possible contingencies on the basis of their own individual evaluations. Using language for (im)possible worlds in middle childhood expresses conventional, socially moderated beliefs and attitudes, often couched in judgmental terms of do this, not that. In writing about the topic of interpersonal conflict, schoolchildren adopt a moralizing tone quite different from that of adolescents and adults. And this is not simply an idiosyncratic phenomenon: similar attitudes are expressed both across and within groups of children in English, French, Hebrew, and Spanish (Reilly et al., 2002). Compare these to the attitudes expressed by high-school students aged 16 to 17 years in (18) in excerpts from essays on the same topic. (18) a. Now I do not let anyone use those terms, but I tend to solve problems verbally as opposed to physically. b. I don't believe the experience was anything more than his rage and my unwillingness to let it affect all of the people around him. c. Some solutions on how to avoid these conflicts would be to express your views in a non-aggressive manner and not allow your ignorance to get in the way of seeing the other person’s side. By confronting the person nonaggressively, you are allowing yourself to stay calm and clearheaded. d. An open mind and a desire to think the situation through rationally might possibly have prevented the confrontation from occurring in the first place. An unwillingness to listen can often escalate to both verbal and even physical aggression. These adolescents express individual, cognitively generated epistemic attitudes to possible contingencies. They relate to various alternative scenarios rather than adhering to shared, socially prescriptive points of view. Unlike the normatively judgmental perspectives of younger children, older speaker-writers take into account possible causes and consequences of such states of affairs; they approach topics of social relevance from a reasoned, cognitively anchored, or objective point of view. The shift from deontic to epistemic thinking is shown also in choice of the noun phrase that functions as a subject, as illustrated earlier in the excerpts from adult texts in (11b) and (12b). Older speakers refer to possible situations not only for people as agents, but also for abstract entities and situations which can give rise to

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alternative solutions, as in (18c) and (18d): some solutions on how to avoid these conflicts; an open mind and a desire to think the situation through rationally; an unwillingness to listen. Other examples are given for abstract subject nouns phrases followed by modal propositions in (19). (19) a. b. c. d.

English: Conflict can be a good thing Conflict resolution could be taught in our public schools Tremendous amounts of time and patience need to be invested French: L’avis à propos du pompage peut être divisé ‘Opinions as concerns cheating might be divided’ e. Les autorités ou les instances chargées de régler ce problème devraient prendre en compte … ‘The authorities or agencies charged with handling the problem must take into account …’

Such heavy, abstract nominal subjects are rare in the language of children before adolescence; and they are commoner in the written language of adults than of high-school students, a sign of educated language use. Older speaker-writers depend not only on a larger lexicon, but also on a conceptually more distanced and abstract, so less realis, point of departure in expressing modal attitudes. This reflects a more cognitive or ‘topic-focused’ approach than younger schoolchildren, who use mainly personal, specific reference in relating to modal possibilities. The developmental leap in generation of alternative ideas in the shift from deontic to epistemic modality illustrates an important aspect of developing language in general. Changes in a given domain (here, possible eventualities) flourish in different domains at around the same time. Moving from deontic to epistemic modality reflects a major cognitive leap in being able to entertain diverse alternatives simultaneously; it shows social growth in shifting from conventionally accepted judgments and attitudes to ideas based on individual conceptions; it demonstrates the linguistic ability to use abstract generalized subjects as the point of departure for contemplating possibilities; and it shows lexical growth in both the quality and variety of modal expressions that speaker-writers can apply.

4.3.3 Marking the epistemic move Here we consider development of morpho-syntactic marking of irrealis mood. We start with subjunctive mood, as an instance where the ‘iffiness’ or inconclusiveness of an eventuality is marked grammatically on the verb in certain languages. Whether in native language acquisition or foreign language learning, subjunctive forms of the verb are highly marked, in the sense that they (i) are confined to relatively few languages, (ii) occur only with particular types of predicates, (iii) make use of a distinct and infrequent set of grammatical forms of verbs; and (iv)

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represent a particular facet of irrealis mood, referring to as yet unrealized eventualities. This means that learners need to know both what types of predicates trigger use of subjunctive forms, and how these are marked grammatically. As beautifully expressed by Craik (1943), “If the organism carries a small-scale model of external reality and of its own possible actions within its head, it is able to try out various alternatives, conclude which is the best of them, react to future situations before they arise, utilize the knowledge of past events in dealing with the present and the future, and in every way to react in a much fuller, safer, and more competent manner to the emergencies which face it” (p. 61). Spanish children produce subjunctive forms from as young as age 2 (Collentine, 2010; López-Ornat et al., 1994), as in the following example from Hernandez Pina (1984), from a 2-year-old boy named Rafael: No bebas, sufa ‘not drink [+SUBJUNCTIVE], dirty’ = ‘Don’t drink, it’s dirty.’ But subjunctive forms occur at first only to express orders or prohibitions. Around age 4, they are still limited to deontic contexts of desire, volition, or prohibition (Blake, 1983), as in Deseo que me compres [+SUBJUNCTIVE] algo ‘I want you (to) buy me some thing,’ ‘Quiero que te vayas’ I want you to leave,’ ‘Es imposible que sepan ‘It’s impossible for them to know’ (from Collentine, 2010). Children later extend use of subjunctive forms to relative clauses (e.g., Una persona que arregle la tele ‘A person who fixes [SUBJUNCTIVE] the TV’) and temporal adverbials (e.g., Llegó antes de que empezara a llover ‘(he) came before it started to rain’). In other contexts, such as complement clauses (e.g., Me alegra que vengas ‘I’m glad you are coming’), use of subjunctive mood takes until 6 or 7 years of age; before that, children use ‘simple’ indicative forms of the verb instead. Knowing when to use these special forms of the verb is a cognitive as well as linguistic challenge, since children need to form mental representations of events that are independent of, or even incompatible with, reality. Use of subjunctive mood is to this day emphasized in both first and second language instruction—probably because such forms are sociolinguistically valued as indicators of elevated register, hence high educational level (Silva-Corvala´n, 1994). Most studies of acquisition of subjunctive marking in French or Spanish deal with second language learning. As such, Howard (2008) defines the use of subjunctive as a “fragile zone in advanced learner language” (p. 171) of Canadian French, a notion akin to what Slobin (1994) terms ‘vulnerable’ linguistic systems like present perfect, which are particularly given to change over time and across dialects and also variable across speakers of a given language. (This is shown, too, by how rare subjunctives are in current English.) Collentine (2010) notes for Spanish: “In spite of its low communicative value and relatively infrequent occurrence in native speaker production, the subjunctive continues to be the focus of formal instruction and is given ample attention in the L2 research” (p. 49).

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4.3.4 Marking (im)possible conditions In moving to the hypothetical dimension as a way of using language about (im)possible worlds, we start with conditional constructions, where one eventuality is dependent on another. Conditionals are often marked grammatically on the verb (like the subjunctives noted earlier). They are syntactically complex, typically consisting of at least two clauses in the form of the classic syllogism if x, then y. In this, they differ from deontic and epistemic judgments that are generally expressed by lexical items, like modals, semi-modals, and adverbs (as in (4) and (17)). This may be why conditionals are often treated in developmental research as part of acquisition of complex sentences. As noted, children early on encounter hypothetical language in the form of promises (If you eat all your supper, you’ll get ice-cream) and threats (If you make a mess, you will have to clean it up), sharing some type of future tense. These future forms are acquired later than present and past tense forms in different languages, not because of grammatical difficulty but because they relate to eventualities rather than actualities. Children also early on encounter factual conditionals like if it rains, we’ll call off the picnic, but even schoolchildren around aged 7 to 8 years do not fully command them. Children have an especially hard time interpreting sentences where the if clause follows the main clause, as in I’ll take a bus if it starts to rain rather than the more typical If it starts to rain, I’ll take a bus, both in English (Emerson, 1980) and Hebrew (Ravid & Doron-Geller, 2009). Negative conditionals—Unless you hurry up, we will be late = If you don’t hurry up, we will be late—are a particular stumbling block for children, even as late as age 9 years. Children apparently have difficulty in taking into account the consequences (here, of being late) of not doing something, of something failing to take place (Amidon, 1976). Several studies, using both naturalistic and experimental procedures, query such conclusions. For example, Harris, German, and Mills (1996) suggest that “young children, including 3-year-olds, can consider counterfactual scenarios in trying to figure both what has caused a particular outcome and how it might have been prevented” (p. 249). And E. V. Clark (2005) points out that even “two-yearolds are already able to represent certain causes and effects within the causal chain, and understand the general relations between a causing action and the result it produces” (p.179). We suggest, rather, that young children understand a promise as a motivated relation between antecedent and consequent in terms of a general state of affairs (promises are to be fulfilled); but they tend to interpret such statements as conjunctions rather than conditions—as co-occurring rather than as mutually dependent, If I behaved well and you gave me the ice cream, you fulfilled your promise, so it is true. Younger children are unable to conceive other alternatives to the combination of behaving well/getting ice cream.

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Melissa Bowerman (1986) explored young preschoolers’ use of conditional constructions in their spontaneous speech in different languages (English, Finnish, Italian, Polish, and Turkish), to understand why counterfactuals appear late in children’s grammar, relative to other complex sentence types, and why hypothetical conditionals seem easier to acquire. Bowerman rejected formal complexity “as the cause of lateness on grounds that conditionals share overall structure with many earlier-learned complex sentences” (p. 303), leading her to conclude that: Formal complexity was ruled out as the cause of lateness on grounds that conditionals share overall structure with many earlier-learned complex sentences. Despite the widespread assumption that conditionals are late because they are cognitively difficult, a review of skills and concepts relevant for conditionals turned up no cognitive reason why conditionals could not be acquired earlier. Nor did the pragmatic factors investigated—speech-act function and discourse cohesion—seem to be responsible. These negative outcomes suggest that further work is needed on our theoretical assumptions about what determines timing of acquisition. (p. 304)

In what follows, we attempt to meet the challenge voiced perceptively by Bowerman over three decades ago. Consider, once again, what is involved in conditional sentences as a way of talking about hypothetical situations and their consequences. They combine two clauses and are called conditionals because the validity of the main clause is conditional on the circumstances expressed in the dependent clause (the clause usually preceded by if, unless) (Badger & Mellanby, 2018). They serve a diversity of functions, from a behavioral promise (If you eat your vegetables, you’ll get ice cream) to data-based predictions in scientific writing (If plants receive no light, they die).25 In the promise, there is a clearly interpretable relation between the condition (eating your vegetables) and the consequence (getting ice cream). The fact-based prediction also contains a cause-consequence relation, but its interpretation requires knowledge of the scientific domain for which the hypothesis is formulated (the role of chlorophyll in photosynthesis). It makes sense that both experientially, in terms of their current world knowledge, and cognitively, in terms of their powers of reasoning, young children will find the first of these two conditionals easier to interpret correctly, even though they are grammatically similar in form and both are logically factual conditionals. Conditionals may, however, express an arbitrary relation between the antecedent and its consequence, as in If a circle is red, then the star is black. Here a logical relation is established by the connectives If-then …, but the relationship is pure invention on the part of the researcher, (Markovits et al., 2016); it cannot be justified by previous experience or conceptual knowledge. This is typical of cases where logicians and mathematicians apply formal logic, which deals

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with forms, not content. Developmentalists have used this kind of statement in picture-based experimental designs to probe children’s capacity to apply logical reasoning, as compared with how they reason about statements with real world content. If, given the arbitrary conditional If a circle is red, then the star is black, you accept the invented relation it entails, then the only statement that can be considered false is The circle is red, so the star is not black because here the condition is fulfilled but the consequence is not. Here, to establish the truth or falsity of the statements, we applied (formal) logical reasoning. Since the relationship between the two parts is arbitrary, it cannot be interpreted by recourse to its empirical truth, there is no experience to prove or refute it. A group of researchers used what logicians call ‘truth-table tasks’ with 9- and 12-year-old French-speaking students (Markovits et al., 2016) using two types of conditionals:26 Ones involving arbitrary relations, like If a circle is red, then the star is black, and non-arbitrary conditionals that had a conceivable category/property relation between the two clauses, like If an animal is a bori, then it has red wings.27 For each type of conditional, the experimenters showed in writing the initial rule, for example If a circle is red, then the star is black, followed by four statements expressing all the combinations of affirming or negating either the antecedent or consequent terms.28 The researchers then asked the children just to mark which combination made the rule true from a list of three alternatives: (1) true, (2) one cannot know, or (3) false. Their results showed that for arbitrary (i.e., purely formal, logical conditional statements), most of the 12-year-olds and the younger children accepted as true only statements expressing a conjunctive possibility, for example, A circle is green and the star is black (

), judging all other combinations as false. A few children in these age ranges also accepted A circle is blue and the star is green (not-P and not-Q). Results differed for non-arbitrary conditionals (If an animal is a bori, then it has red wings), but even then many of the older children judged that only statements under a conjunctive interpretation made the rule true. However, both among 3rd and 6th grade students, a significantly greater proportion judged the non-arbitrary imaginary conditionals (an animal is a bori and it has blue wings) as the only one that made the rule false, while they judged as irrelevant the other options (e.g., an animal is a malabar and it has red wings, an animal is a malabar and it has white wings). That is, most of the children generated more possibilities for the non-arbitrary conditions, although they considered some of them as not relevant for deciding whether or not the statement was true. Understandably enough, children’s reasoning about the truth value of conditional statements depends on their content, on the nature of the relationship between condition and consequence, rather than on the application of formal logical inferences. The researchers concluded that the “full conditional interpretation … should only be possible for much older adolescents and adults” (Markovits

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et al., 2016, p. 1908). Other research shows that reasoning based on formal logic is exceptional (almost non-existent!) even among adults (Pinker, 2021). Counterfactuals lie at the far end of the developmental scale of language for possible worlds. They combine conceptual with grammatical complexity in different languages, requiring people to conceive of what might or could have happened if things in the real world had been different (when they weren’t). Compare, once again, the hypothetical statement If you hurried, we could still catch the train and the counterfactual If you had hurried, we could have caught the train. Both kinds of conditional sentence allow us to reason in relation to a set of suppositions (If then or If then ). But counterfactuals require that we import a given circumstance (that you did not hurry) from the real world. Hypotheticals are inherently uncertain, so there are many degrees of freedom in simulating prospective occurrences/states of affairs. Counterfactual thinking is more constrained by what has already happened, so that the two forms of simulation (hypothetical and counterfactual) may require different cognitive processes to cope with the specific nature of the imagined events. In order to understand a counterfactual, we need to coactivate both the factual and a suppositional content, whereas in the case of factual or hypothetical conditionals, it is enough to activate the suppositional mode of thinking. Children find it particularly difficult to modify the regularities expressed by the conditional clause in order to respond correctly to a counterfactual question (what would have happened if … ?). To demonstrate this difficulty and trace how understanding of counterfactuals evolves, Rafesteder et al. (2013) presented children with a story about two puppets as protagonists, a girl and a boy. The girl was too small to reach the candy on the top shelf, whereas the boy had his leg in a cast and so could not bend down to reach the candy on the lower shelf. In other words, if the boy looked for the candy on the top shelf, he could take it with him to his room, and the girl could do so if it was on the lower shelf. After acting out several such scenes, participants were asked, for example, What if the little girl had come instead of the boy, where would the candy have been? To answer this counterfactual question correctly, the child needed to take into account the fact that the candy was on the top shelf, and so outside the reach of the girl-puppet. These and similar types of questions were generally not answered correctly until 12 years of age, revealing great variability as late as around 10 years. Even pre-adolescents (11 to 14 years) are less proficient than adults in completing counterfactual sentences like those in (9) (Nippold et al., 2020). These findings confirm numerous other observations regarding the late emergence of counterfactuals in different languages. The varied neurological underpinnings as well as the logical and conceptual constraints involved in processing counterfactual statements highlighted in this chapter may resolve Bowerman’s query as to why children until well into middle childhood continue to apply a

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basic conditional reasoning, with their ability to reason counterfactually not fully developed until around puberty. Some suggest that difficulty with irrealis conditions is because they are often grammatically complex, using sophisticated constructions like subjunctive mood or past perfect in different languages. But, as noted, this was ruled out by Bowerman, rightly in our opinion, for young preschoolers acquiring different languages. Besides, from our perspective, this structural complexity reflects conceptually abstract notions, such as taking into account hypothetical possibilities and alternative explanations for as yet unrealized states of affairs projected into future time. Such abilities involve the sophisticated executive functions of divergent thinking and formal reasoning, known to flourish only around adolescence. The cognitive abilities involved in using these constructions (whether to understand or produce them) rely critically on causal reasoning. In a Piagetian framework, these capacities emerge quite late in development, in contrast to psycholinguistic research cited earlier suggesting that even toddlers can process verbal relations between cause and effect, as well as counterfactual situations. In addition to the importance of semantic topic and situational context, and whether these are concrete or abstract, familiar or foreign, literacy appears to be crucial for processing conditionals. Hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals are uncommon in everyday conversation yet figure dominantly in school language. Comprehending them is important for many aspects of academic study, particularly in subjects like science and history, where hypotheses and alternative explanations are important. Take the following examples (cited from Nippold et al., 2020): “If the continental plates—the Indo-Australian and Eurasian plates— had not converged, the Himalayas would not have been formed,” or, relatedly, “If oceanic plates—not continental plates—had converged, there would have been more subduction and therefore the Himalayas would be volcanic” (p. 2). It is not surprising that Badger and Mellanby’s (2018) study of British children aged 5 to 8 years old found a positive correlation between success at comprehending constructions including counterfactuals (e.g., If Peter had bought some ice cream, he would have shared it with his friends) and other school-related skills. Using language for relating to possible as yet unrealized conditions is a domain where conceptual and linguistic complexity combine to defer mastery to late school age, one that is largely literacy-dependent and confined to scientific writing and thinking.

4.4 Using language to move away from reality When we started thinking about using language for (im)possible worlds, we little realized what a lengthy and even convoluted path it would take us—and this proved to be true also of the route taken by language learners in achieving

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command of the domain. The topic turned out to shed light on several more general themes. Linguistically, different systems of grammar interact and supplement one another in the expression of form-function relations in this domain: indirect speech acts and conventions of politeness in expressing requests; modal predicates and syntactic subjects in shifting from deontic to epistemic modality; grammatical morphology for subjunctives and complex syntax for understanding and producing different types of conditional sentences. We found that the domain has a lengthy trajectory, with an assumed endpoint that may never be reached. Starting with early pragmatic use of irrealis for instrumental means, its use moves to making polite requests in culturally appropriate ways; proceeds from deontic to epistemic modality to express more sophisticated and abstract propositional attitudes; and progresses from actual probabilities to contrary-to-fact contingencies. Along all these dimensions, language use moves increasingly beyond the realm of actual reality to more distant and abstract imagined worlds. Both conceptually and linguistically, achieving proficiency in generating alternative ideas about the future, imagining various (im)possible future scenarios, turns out to be a challenging aspect of later language development and of growth in logical forms of reasoning. At the same time, increased levels of schooling and literacy both feed into and are fed by these abilities. The fact that a major cut-off point in these areas emerges between middle childhood and adolescence is consistent with Piagetian and neo-Piagetian characterizations of cognitive and moral development (Hersh et al., 1979). It closely mirrors the stages of moral development articulated by Kohlberg (1984) and Power et al., (1989), where younger schoolchildren are still at the Level I or ‘preconventional’ phase of ‘avoiding breaking rules,’ when ‘reasons for doing right’ are defined as ‘avoidance of punishment and superior power of authorities.’ These are exactly the attitudes expressed in middle childhood, whereas adolescents have progressed to a more mature, principled level of socio-cognitive and moral development, of being aware that people hold a variety of values and opinions, and that most values and opinions are relative to your group. The fact that around adolescence speakers begin to express epistemic modality relating to a level of knowledge or degree of belief about hypothetical situations shows they can entertain individually conceptualized abstract mental attitudes to possible contingencies in the future. Talking and writing about possible worlds thus turns out to be a linguistic and conceptual pivot in the shift from the socially conditioned attitudes and ways of thinking typical of middle childhood to the more abstract, logical reasoning of adolescence discussed in Chapter 1. We also observed a marked shift in this domain between the usage of adolescents and adults, suggesting, first, that language development does not end with high school and, second, that there is a difference between less and more literate users of a language. The essays written by university graduates in their 20s and 30s differed from those of adolescents in attitudes to possible contingencies in

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three relevant respects. First, although by and large adolescents and adults express epistemic rather than deontic attitudes to much the same extent, only adults relate to the semantic dimensions of probability (as in English it is likely that, Hebrew yitaxen) and enablement (e.g., ‘language allows us to do certain things’). Second, while high-schoolers use a broader range of modal expressions than younger children (e.g., not only English should, but also must and need to), it is mainly educated adults who give voice to richly and varied means of talking or writing about alternative future scenarios. This is illustrated by the examples from the excerpts from essays written by Californian and Israeli university graduate adults in (20). (20) a. Whether in the political, career, or interpersonal realm, discussions must be managed carefully in order to avoid the appearance of condescending or belittling judgement. Even with groups with significant differences in viewpoint … a polite civil discussion is key. This is a difficult goal, but is absolutely essential in preventing misunderstanding, conflict, and communication breakdown. b. Open and thoughtful communication has the potential to reveal each person’s needs and desires to those with whom he or she interacts. c. It is exhilarating to imagine a world devoid of class conflict, to picture a world in which the majority of the major problems did not fester. This ideal is not utopian, it is something concrete with the possibility of coming into fruition. d. ha-derech letafked be-matsav shel konflikt nitenet le-limud. yesh mispar drachim efshariyot liftor beayot. ‘The way to function in a situation of conflict is given to-learning [=susceptible to study]. There are several possible ways to solve problems [= problems can be solved in several ways].’ Generally speaking, adults speakers make use of more sophisticated, indirect linguistic means, like predicating adjectives (‘is absolutely essential’) and nominalizations (‘the possibility of ’) to express ideas that can be grammatically encoded by modal auxiliaries like should, can, might. Several adults but not adolescents in our sample used such devices, and they did so not only in discussion essays as in (20), but also in personal-experience narratives as in (21). (21) a. Essentially we had planned to spend three weeks together, but she felt it necessary to leave for home after only a few days. b. It was my argument … that the school had an obligation to rigorously enforce its own policies as well as ensure its own reputation. Third, only adults embed propositional attitudes in metalinguistic commentary (as discussed in Chapter 6)—often in the context of inner-state mental verbs—in a way that differs from anything observed among schoolchildren:

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(22) a. I should clarify that I interpret conflict to be a negative term … I cannot believe that there is a single person of at least school age that does not see alternatives to conflict. b. En ce qui concerne l’exclusion, j’ai pu remarqer qu’elle est très présente à tous les niveaux scolaires. ‘A s far as ostracizing is concerned, I could comment that it is very common at all levels of schooling.’

These observations together support the developmental proposal that, with age, more and more recently acquired linguistic forms are recruited to meet earlier established functions in expressing propositional attitudes. Moreover, they express a broader range of ideas than earlier. This expanded range of verbal devices signals a larger repertoire of advanced vocabulary and greater sensitivity to elevated language use among well-educated, literate adults. It also reveals a higher level of individual rhetorical flexibility (Nir-Sagiv & Berman, 2010), reflecting more multifaceted cognitive perspectives on an issue. This echoes earlier findings from the oral narratives of adults compared with children. Maturely proficient “thinking for writing” (Slobin, 2003, p. 166–167) requires a combination of abilities: (i) the cognitive ability to adopt multiple perspectives on the situations that are verbalized; (ii) linguistic command of an extensive repertoire of lexico-grammatical devices; and (iii) rhetorical expressiveness, flexibility, and metalinguistic textual awareness in deploying these devices in extended discourse (topics we return to in the following chapters). We conclude by returning to an earlier theme: the particular way similar ideas are expressed is filtered through the obligatory (grammatical) and optional (rhetorical) devices of a given target language. Nonetheless, highly similar developmental trajectories are observed across speaker-writers of different languages. Irrespective of whether or not the language marks the difference between the two types of false if-clauses overtly, actuals come first, followed by hypotheticals and then counterfactuals. In languages that differentiate grammatically between all three, like English (Emerson, 1980) and Greek (Demetra, 1998), children produce and understand actual conditionals like example (7) early, even before age 3, but it takes until middle childhood (around age 8 years) before they understand the implications of hypothetical conditionals, and even later for them to fully conceive of counterfactual situations. As late as pre-adolescence, around age 12 years, children tend to interpret counterfactuals as expressing cause rather than condition (McCabe et al., 1983). A similar developmental trajectory applies to children acquiring Hebrew, a language which uses the same verb forms for both hypothetical and counterfactual conditions (Ravid & Doron-Geller, 2009). And Au’s (1983, 1992) extensive study of bilingual English-Chinese speakers (aged 15 to 21 years) showed that speakers of Chinese, a language which likewise lacks special marking

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of counterfactuals, had no difficulty in giving counterfactual interpretations of a counterfactual story. We are left, then, with a further puzzle in the mystery of the relationship between language and thought. Does the existence of an obligatory, grammatical form for expressing an idea make the idea behind it more conceptually accessible to users in general, and to children acquiring the language in particular? This question seems particularly relevant in using language for talking and writing about (im)possible contingencies.

Notes 1. E. Dickinson (1999). The poems of Emily Dickinson. R. W. Franklin (Ed.). Harvard University Press. 2. In Piaget’s (1976) words, “they are the subject’s active constructions” (p. 3). 3. The topic has a rich history in linguistics and philosophy, with often arcane terminology and overlapping categories. In traditional grammar, mood refers to the distinction between three types of sentences: declarative (statements), interrogative (questions), and imperative (orders), while modality concerns the status of a proposition—factual or counterfactual, possible or unlikely, necessary or optional. Our view is closer to that of the Danish grammarian, Otto Jespersen (2007), (originally published in 1933) for whom mood expresses a speaker’s mental attitudes toward the contents of the sentence, either (i) containing an element of will (e.g., compulsory = obligatory; hortative = encouraging or discouraging a course of action; and jussive = ordering, commanding) or (ii) not expressing will (e.g., assertive = making a claim, presumptive = assuming something to be true, and dubitative = expressing doubt about the truth or validity of a claim). Along similar lines, the philosopher von Wright (1954) distinguishes between the alethic modes of truth, epistemic modes of knowing, deontic modes of obligation, and existential modes of existence, to which the British linguist Frank Palmer added volitive modality, expressing volition, intention, or desirability. We follow Palmer (1986, 2001), in favoring realis and irrealis mood over the traditional opposition between modal, non-declarative versus declarative, with mood referring to the status of a proposition as a whole rather than only to its predicate. 4. Our discussion relies on the study of Reilly et al. (2002) examining irrealis constructions in texts written by schoolchildren, adolescents, and adults, native speakers of English, French, Hebrew, and Spanish, in the two genres of narration and discussion. Their analysis included a variety of categories of ‘propositional attitudes’ (certainty, desire, judgment, etc.), across the variables of age, language, and discourse genre. 5. Some analyses include negation as a modal category, since it, too, refers to nonrealized states of affairs. For example, Barbara Kaup (2007) and associates suggest that a negated sentence (e.g., ‘The eagle is not flying’) is first perceptually simulated in its affirmative form (e.g., an image of an eagle in the air with wings outstretched), which is then converted by a symbolic process into a negated version. In contrast, Stephanie Huette (2016) suggests that both meanings may be partially active before the affirmative case fades. We acknowledge the importance of this category, but focus here on more direct expressions of (im)possibility.

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6. Features like these, which are shared across different European languages, including Germanic, Romance, and Slavic, are often classed together under the umbrella term of Standard Average European (Haspelmath, 2001). 7. A grammatical paradigm is a restricted set of interrelated items in a particular grammatical category that can replace one another in the same syntactic context (e.g., tense–go, goes, went; pronouns–I, you, he, she, they, or person marking on verbs in Spanish–hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos, hablasteis, hablaron = present tense ‘speak/s.’ Modals can also be negated (e.g., shouldn’t = not advisable, mustn’t = not allowable, couldn’t = was not able to). 8. The fact that these semi-modal expressions have attained the status of a grammatical subcategory in English is shown by their condensed pronunciation: hafta, wanna, gonna, oughta. 9. In Spanish poder and deber are the only modals that can make a statement about the possibility of the proposition (Silva-Corvala´n, 1995). 10. In logic as in linguistics, tense is analyzed as a three-way division of time in relation to a deictic center (time of speaking): coinciding with = present, preceding = past, or following = future. Some scholars regard grammatical marking of evidentiality in languages like Turkish (Chapter 2) to belong to irrealis mood rather than tense. 11. The exact distinction between the ‘short’ and ‘long’ future forms is debatable. Some consider the longer form with a verb like go to indicate a more immediate, hence more likely, future; others view it as expressing deontic mood versus the grammaticized epistemic forms; still others as a mark of register, longer forms for colloquial and shorter for more formal uses. 12. Conditional statements are traditionally divided between the condition (protasis) and the result (the apodosis), also termed the antecedent and consequent respectively (e.g., if you come on time, we will go together ~ We will go together if [=on condition that] you come on time). 13. Ferguson et al. (1986) note: “Conditional markers are most commonly particles, clitics, or affixes … placed in or next to the ‘if ’-clause. These ‘diacritics’ may be semantically opaque or in varying degrees transparent (e.g. Russian esli ‘if ’ is a form of ‘be’ plus the interrogative particle, thus ‘be it that …’). In some languages the conditional marker is related to or identical with ‘when’ … or is closely related to markers of modality …. Other markers also occur, most notably intonation and word order …. Many languages have special markers for negative conditionals, again varying from transparent (e.g. Latin nisi) to opaque (English unless)” (p. 6). 14. The rather arcane 2nd line in (9) and (10) stands for a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss labeling each grammatical category rather than a free translation (given in the 3rd line) of each word in Hebrew, thus: 2SG.MS.FUT. look, 2sG.MS.FUT.find ACC = 2nd person, masculine singular future look, 2nd person, masculine singular future find accusative (= the object marking element et). 15. The same conditional conjunction if is used in English for both the hypothetical conditional in English (7) and the counterfactual in (8). But there are crosslinguistic differences. For example, Hebrew has a special hypothetical conjunction (i)lu for the latter cases. This distinction is currently falling into disuse, especially in everyday spoken language, with a single conjunction im standing for ‘if, whether’ in all kinds of

NOTES

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17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

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conditional constructions. A similar situation exists in Arabic, where Classical Arabic differentiates between ‘iidha ‘if ’ (non-counterfactual) and law ‘if ’ (counterfactual), but less in colloquial spoken varieties of the language. The largescale cross-linguistic survey of Martı´nez and Lester (2021) concludes that most languages signal counterfactual constructions overtly, while Yong’s typological survey (2016), shows that only a few languages lack a formal morpho-syntactic differentiation between hypothetical and counterfactual conditionals. In linguistics as in traditional grammar the main clause can generally stand alone, with other clauses (in this case the conditional) dependent on it. Termed ‘Guilford tests,’ these are based on the 1967 model of the structure of the intellect developed by the American psychologist J. P. Guilford (1897–1987), famed for his psychometric study of human intelligence and the distinction between convergent thinking that focuses on finding one defined solution to a problem and divergent thinking open to alternative solutions. The battery includes the alternate uses task which requires participants to think of many different, innovative uses for a conventional object. Participants had to press a button as soon as they decided on their best idea. After the button-press and before verbalizing their idea, participants rated it on a six-point Likert scale for uniqueness and feasibility. The many different neurophysiological measures that have been applied in this domain might be responsible for the fact that there is as yet no conclusive picture of the potential neural mechanisms underlying creativity. These regions are the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and the inferior parietal lobule. Neuroscientists use the term simulation as a synonym for thinking, on the assumption that the process involves some level of reproduction of events experienced. A respected professor of English at a leading university in Israel served as Dean of Humanities for several years. While fluent in Hebrew, he retained the politeness strategies of his native Philadelphia and would preface his ideas by a ‘hedge’ or softener like ‘I suggest,’ ‘Maybe,’ ‘Possibly,’ ‘It might be better.’ His native Hebrew-speaking Israeli colleagues tended to discount his remarks as tentative suggestions rather than imperatives. Israelis are typically viewed as rude because they do not see any need to say ‘Please’ or ‘Would you’ when a direct request like ‘Close the window, I’m freezing’ seems to them to do just as well. Conditional ‘if ’ clauses and temporal ‘when’ clauses typically use the neutral or unmarked present tense form of verbs in a language like English (if you eat … when plants get no light … ), causing considerable difficulty for learners coming from a language like Spanish where a subjunctive form of the verb is required, and many other languages like Hebrew, which would take a future form of the verb. A truth table is a mathematical table used in logic. It has one column for each input variable (for example, P and Q), and a final column showing all possible combinations of the truth (affirming) or falsity (negating) of the two variables that result from the logical operation indicated by a certain connective (e.g., and, or, if-then).

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Ludwig Wittgenstein is attributed with inventing the truth table in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. 27. In order to avoid differences in children’s previous knowledge of category/property relations in animals and other creatures, the researchers made it clear that they were talking about creatures from another world. 28. The four statements that were derived from the rule If a circle is red, then the star is black are (1) A circle is green and the star is black; (2) A circle is red and the star is black; (3) A circle is red and the star is white [the only one FALSE], and (4) A circle is blue and the star is green.

5 Language for imagery Some years ago, Ray Gibbs, a leading scholar of metaphor, arrived at Tel Aviv airport after a flight from abroad. At check-in, he was asked by Israeli security personnel: Why are you flying to Tel Aviv? I’m invited to a conference on metaphor, responded Gibbs. Oh, and what’s metaphor? inquired the interviewer. Gibbs hesitated, momentarily at a loss for words. So, you’re going to a metaphor conference and you don’t even know what a metaphor is? came the sharp follow-up. The professor was hustled away by security guards and interrogated for almost an hour (Glucksberg, 2001). Now imagine another scene: Glancing at Sarah, Tom says: “Here she comes, the new iron woman.” You know that Sarah is not made of iron and that Tom is talking about Sarah’s character. You know Tom does not mean what he says. Tom is alluding to Sarah’s character as iron-like in strength metaphorically, creating a gap between what he says and what he means. In so doing, Tom is expecting his interlocutor to fill the gap between what he has said and what he meant to suggest about the woman’s character. As depicted by the great Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges: I no longer believe in expression: I believe only in allusion. After all: what are words? Words are symbols for shared memories. If I use a word, then you should have some experience of what the word stands for. If not, the word means nothing to you. I think we can only allude; we can only try to make the hearer imagine. The reader, if he is quick enough, can be satisfied with our merely hinting at something. (Borges, 2000, p. 117; emphasis ours)

In so doing, Tom is expecting his interlocutor to fill the gap between what he has said and what he meant to suggest about the woman’s character. Languages create such gaps between what is said and what is meant by using figures of speech like idioms, proverbs, jokes, riddles, irony, and lies. Figurative usages like these contrast with literal language and are common in everyday usage, not only in literature. One estimate has it that in the U.S., people utter an average of 5.9 non-literal expressions per minute of speech. And in time they may become highly prolific in using them.

Growing into Language. Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman, Oxford University Press. © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.003.0005

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I done wrestled with an alligator, I done tussled with a whale; handcuffed lightning, thrown thunder in jail; only last week, I murdered a rock, injured a stone, hospitalized a brick; I’m so mean I make medicine sick. Muhammad Ali, 1942–20161

Many speakers that can usually judge when an utterance is meant figuratively find it hard to explain what causes the effect (Pollio et al., 1977). Psychologists have a hard time describing how people make the distinction, while philosophers and linguists have struggled to define how figurative and literal language differ. Is the literal easier to grasp than the figurative? Which comes to mind first? How deliberately do people use one or the other? And how do children develop the ability to use figurative language? To further confuse the issue, using ‘literally’ metaphorically is literally spreading like wildfire.2 In order to highlight what they are saying, people have abandoned the original (literal) sense of the one word whose use is supposed to be strictly constrained. Scholars have proposed several distinctions to solve these puzzles, for example: • literal meanings are basic while figurative senses are extensions of basic senses; • context is more crucial for detecting figurative than for literal senses; • figurative senses require greater inference-making; • figurative language involves more ambiguities. These proposals suggest that people access the literal sense more easily and automatically; yet research shows that it takes no longer to grasp figurative than literal expressions. Where all agree is that literal usage has developmental precedence: young children typically interpret language literally, and it takes until adolescence to grasp some types of figurative language. Below, we attempt to resolve this paradox. The chapter aims to acquaint you with: • scholarly attempts to specify the difference between literal and figurative uses based on processing time, the role of context, making inferences, or perceiving ambiguities—and why these fail; • varieties of figurative use—how idioms and proverbs differ from metaphors, linguistic humor, and irony—and what is involved in understanding and producing each; • the brain structures that underlie non-literal language, and the networks shared by most figurative usages as well as those activated for specific varieties; • the protracted developmental pathways involved in gaining command of non-literal usages, where varieties of figurative use show different trajectories from childhood on.

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5.1 Literal and/or figurative language The attempt to distinguish literal from non-literal interpretations has a long history. In rabbinical exegesis, literal readings (Hebrew pshat ‘simple’) concern the plain meaning of the words. This sense of literal coincides with the etymological origin of the word, as taking words in their natural meaning, and it contrasts with the three other interpretations of the sages: moral (drash), allegorical (remez), and mystical (sod), which are the stuff of books. The criterion of literal as the basic, natural meaning was sustained for centuries. In medieval rhetoric, it served to oppose the ‘proper’ sense of words to figurative senses, termed ‘tropes’—figures of speech where words or phrases are used “in a sense other than that which is proper to it as when we call a stupid fellow an ass” (Online etymology dictionary (n.d)). Moving to the twentieth century, in the standard pragmatics view of philosophers like Grice (1975) and Searle (1979), figurative meanings (implicatures for Grice) are regarded as common resources, with their ‘deviant’ use being derivable from their literal meanings by standardized procedures of ‘meaning substitution.’3 That is, speakers first go for a literal interpretation and only when this fails, mainly because it does not fit the realworld context, do they turn to a figurative interpretation. But if figurative usages are violations of the primary or strict sense of a word, we need to specify how the primary sense is established. We suggest that, for isolated words, as listed in dictionary entries, primary forms are those that naïve speakers take for granted, without further speculation. Take the listings for the word ‘mouse’ in the Webster English Dictionary. a: any of numerous small rodents (as of the genus Mus) with pointed snout, rather small ears, elongated body, and slender tail b: plural also mouses: a small manual device that controls movement of the cursor and selection of functions on a computer display c: a timid person d: a dark-colored swelling caused by a blow Speakers of English may seek a reason for senses (b) to (d), but they will rarely question why a mouse in sense (a) is called ‘mouse.’ Yet once the metaphorical sense of a word enters everyday usage, it comes to exist side-by-side with and may even overtake its original ‘basic’ meaning. As the entry illustrates, many figurative usages occur so frequently that dictionaries incorporate them as additional senses.4 In Silicon Valley, the word mouse might come to mind in its computer-related reference before the animate rodent. What is natural in one speech community might not be so for others, making it hard to identify a hard-and-fast dichotomy between plus or minus literal in a given language (certainly not across languages).

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Extensions of meaning typically apply to everyday, concrete objects, yet such words may have a metaphorical origin. For example, the Spanish noun grifo ‘tap’ derives from Greek gryphus meaning ‘animal fabuloso.’ Yet the English word ‘griffin’ from the same origin has retained its ancient sense, applying to a fabulous monster, far from everyday ‘tap,’ while ‘tap’ but not ‘faucet’ is used metaphorically (Davies & Gardner, 2010).5 Besides, extensions of literal meanings are for the most part produced or understood unconsciously by speakers who are unaware of their origin. If ‘extension of meaning’ is such an unreliable criterion, how do people recognize when an utterance is literal? Scholars have proposed that literal senses, unlike non-literal ones, remain the same regardless of context (Turner & Katz, 1997) and can be interpreted in the absence of context (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002). But context-dependence does not seem adequate as a criterion for identifying a usage as figurative. Many non-figurative terms can only be interpreted in light of context. These include deixis (here, there, now, then), logical connectors (unless, thus), quantifiers (a few, many), gradable adjectives (good, tall, expensive), and pronouns (he, she, they). Deictic terms (as detailed in Chapter 2) take different meanings in different times and situations; quite a few will mean one thing when talking about how many books a professor has written compared to how many s/he has read; and the adjective expensive applies differently to a handbag or an apartment. Once language is set in motion, once we move beyond meaning in a null context—in sentences like John loves Mary, Mary is loved by John common in linguistic discourse but unlikely in ordinary language use—even apparently literal uses are open to contextually differing interpretations. Understanding any piece of language demands a bi-directional adjustment between the words themselves and their context of use. Cognitive scientists suggest making inferences as an alternative criterion for qualifying figurative language. Glucksberg’s distinction between decoding and interpretation is useful in this connection. Decoding involves strictly linguistic operations—phonological, lexical, syntactic—that yield a literal meaning (Glucksberg, 2001). But even literal interpretation requires decoding. Once we begin “doing things with words” (Austin, 1955), we need to mobilize presuppositions to get at what an utterances implies; and the self-same words may be interpreted differently depending on by, to whom, and when they are said. We see this in the examples in (1) (1a) Utterance: Context: Response: (1b) Utterance: Context: Response:

It’s hot here picture of a door interlocutor opens the door It’s hot here picture of a desert description of the picture (Van Ackeren et al., 2012, p.8)

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Inferring from context is particularly necessary with speech acts or performatives, utterances where the act of speaking involves ‘doing by saying.’ For example, both the explicit utterance I promise to be on time and the implicit I’ll be on time involve the act of promising; while He apologized for being late or He said he was sorry he was late involve the act of apologizing and the presupposition that he was late. Even more cognitively demanding are indirect speech acts (Searle, 1979), where the speaker says something different from what s/he actually means to convey, relying on the hearer’s knowledge to fill in the gaps. For example, if a mother says to her little boy Your room is a total pigsty, he is supposed to infer that she wants him to tidy it. In other words, interpreting any utterance, any instance of authentic language use, we argue, needs context to guide inferences and implicatures. Using language also requires us to resolve ambiguities, whether lexical, as in The first horse motel was opened to provide animals with a stable environment, or syntactic, as in Did you hear about the cannibal who wanted to stop where they serve truck drivers? (Ashkenazi & Ravid, 1998).6 Context, inference-making, activating presuppositions, and resolving ambiguities all play a role in both literal and non-literal language use. Once they have been decoded, utterances must be interpreted: literally, figuratively, or both. But, if literal and non-literal meaning rely on the same principles and mechanisms, which is most accessible to speaker-hearers? In the philosophy of standard pragmatics, literal comes first. Yet empirical research shows that figurative senses are perceived whenever and wherever they occur. And metaphorical meanings can be accessed as quickly as literal ones, while some figurative interpretations take no more effort than literal ones (Schwoebel et al., 2000). The failure to find language-processing principles exclusive to one variety of language use led Giora (2003) to dismiss the opposition between literal and nonliteral in favor of what she terms graded salience. To her, people access both figurative and literal meanings by the contrast between salient (i.e., foremost in one’s mind, highly familiar, least obscure) and non-salient senses in context, with salient meanings accessed more rapidly. The mental lexicon combines with contextual information to evoke appropriate meanings and to suppress locally incompatible ones.7 Empirical research leads to straightforward conclusions: people interpret literal and metaphorical usages in parallel, with the same time-course shared by both.8 Neither has priority; rather, alternative interpretations operate competitively. Whenever a person comes across an expression, s/he can anticipate part of the upcoming information from context, before encountering it in full, as bottomup input. As soon as a message begins to take shape, the information it conveys is matched to predictions, which may call for successive adjustments or updating as the utterance proceeds. This echoes the idea of belief updating discussed in Chapter 1. Whenever we use language, the cerebral cortex functions as an

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‘anticipation machine’ that generates predictions, detects anomalies, and reacts on the basis of previous experiences with similar expressions and contexts.

5.2 Types of figurative language use Just as there is no clear demarcation between literal and figurative senses, there are no clear boundaries between different types of figurative language. Figures of speech cover a cluster of phenomena—idioms and proverbs, metaphors, irony, jokes, and lies—and take varied forms: single words (mouse, literally), phrasal verbs (turn down=‘reject,’ turn up=‘appear’), compounds (U-turn, turn table), and whole clauses or sentences (speaking out of turn, one good turn deserves another). Yet all figurative uses share certain properties: they are strongly impacted by culture, with each speech community having its own sayings and jokes, some of which are popular, frequent, and predictable, others sophisticated or confined to certain in-groups. They also differ in how easy they are to interpret, depending on popularity, salience, or predictability, a diversity which conspires against assigning them clear-cut boundaries. Rather, we agree with Cacciari’s (1993) proposal that different figurative usages lie on a continuum of level of conventionalization from absolutely new or innovative to completely set and conventional. Below we start with the more conventionalized varieties, moving from idioms and proverbs to irony and lies.

5.2.1 Idioms Idioms are a subset of the fixed, Multiword Expressions (MLEs) of a speech community. Jackendoff (1995) estimates that there are about the same number of such expressions as there are words in American English, roughly 80,000—suggesting that people have at least 160,000 items memorized and available for use. This in turn means that people tend to follow Searle’s (1979) advice “Speak idiomatically unless there is some special reason not to” (p. 50). Fixed expressions include, in order of relative frequency, compounds (e.g., frequent flyer program), idioms (sitting pretty), names (Prince Charming), clichés (no money down), titles of songs, books, or movies (All You Need Is Love), quotes (Here’s looking at you, kid!), and familiar foreign phrases (vis-à-vis). Like Jackendoff, for us these MLEs are as much part of the mental lexicon as are single words. A given word may connote different things in different idioms.9 Compare I’ll eat my hat ‘I’ll be surprised if that turns out to be the case,’ eat your words ‘go back on what you said,’ eat humble pie ‘be publicly humiliated.’ As a culturally conditioned facet of language use, idioms are specific to a given language, so not directly translatable even in related languages.

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What is special about idioms, and what sets them apart from many other MLEs, is that on the surface they don’t make sense; there is often no discernable relation between their word-for-word and idiomatic meanings. As instances of verbal convention, their meaning is unpredictable, it cannot be derived from their component parts. Compare the meaning to die with the words in kick the bucket. Some expressions, like take advantage of, are more overtly combinatory—reflecting Cacciari’s continuum of conventionality. Further, idioms are inflexible, they are not freely composed but occur in a limited number of lexical and syntactic frames. For example, a person can be forced to eat humble pie, but not to chew, taste, ingest … humble pie. Speakers need to know a great deal about their language to use an idiomatic construction like let alone appropriately (Fillmore et al., 1988; Numberg et al., 1994). Some idioms are derived from metaphors and can be partially motivated by mappings between domains (for example, the expression pure-driven snow comes from the metaphor as pure as the driven snow). This has led some scholars to query whether idiom processing is possible without recourse to metaphors. But idioms are not the same as metaphors. Idiomatic meaning is fixed and conventional, it can be modified but not changed in different contexts. Metaphoric meaning, in contrast, is flexible, it may vary by context, and so always requires online interpretation (Caillies & Butcher, 2007). This difference, as we will see, is reflected in distinct neural correlates.

5.2.2 Proverbs Proverbs are short sayings that express a general truth and typically carry a moral or give generalized advice on how to behave. To understand proverbs, too, people must interpret strings of words conventionally grouped together in their intended rather than their literal sense. But proverbs have unique structural, semantic, and pragmatic properties: they are worded as generalized propositions, in habitual present tense; they do not refer to someone specific; they are morally and socially prescriptive, laying down general truths that need to be observed; and they are culturally bound, expressing folk wisdom handed down over the ages. Collections of such maxims go back as far as the ancient Egyptians. In Don Quijote de la Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1859/1994) wittily captured the key features of proverbs: Los refranes son sentencias breves, sacadas de la experiencia y especulación de nuestros antiguos sabio. ‘Proverbs are brief statements, drawn from the experience and speculation of our ancient sages’ (p. 452). Proverbs, too, are language specific: compare adages against boastfulness in English blow one’s own trumpet, German Maultiere ru¨hmen sich, dass ihre Vorfahren Pferde waren ‘Mules boast that their ancestors were horses,’ Afrikaans Jakkals prys sy eie stert ‘The jackal praises his own tail,’ Spanish Aunque la mona se vista de seda, mona se queda ‘A lthough the monkey(FEM) dresses in silk,

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monkey(FEM) it remains,’ Hebrew en hanaxtom me’id al isato ‘The baker does not bear witness to his own pastry.’ All convey the same idea of boastfulness as something negative, and are based on implied comparisons with various worlds and objects—a musical instrument, animals, an occupation. They thus realize two general features of figurative language: they are used in an intended rather than a literal sense and they differ by language and society. Proverbs, like idioms, are thus a special challenge for translators, they are rarely commanded or used felicitously by non-native speakers and, as we show in the section on developmental trajectories (Section 5.4), they are mastered relatively late in language development.

5.2.3 Metaphor So far we have used the term metaphor like Professor Gibbs at the airport, without defining it. The fact that metaphors are so pervasive and intuitively recognized may explain, perhaps, why they are so hard to characterize. Here, we abandon perspectives that treat metaphors as literary resources or focus on their linguistic properties. Rather, we take as our starting point Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) proposal that “many of our experiences and activities are metaphorical in nature, and much of our conceptual system is structured by metaphor” (p.147). As detailed in Chapter 1, this idea of metaphor as embodiment, as bridging the transition from physical experience to abstract domains comes from the belief that cognitive activity invariably involves the mediation of the body. Importantly, the process may function differently in novel and established metaphors. Familiar metaphors (nerves of steel) tend to be drained of their sensorimotor source, relying on more abstract representations. But when people encounter a novel metaphor (a steely will), they need to process from scratch the relation between its concrete source and its abstract target, which requires activating sensorimotor areas. This indicates, again, that the metaphorical/literal dichotomy fails to explain how people process metaphors, let alone clarify the neural underpinnings of the process. However, insisting on bodily experience as the sole source of a figurative expression may lead to error. Glucksberg (2001) illustrates this nicely for the idiom the spitting image, referring to the striking physical resemblance of one person to another (for example, Martha is the spitting image of her mother). While we may suspect that the expression has a metaphorical source, we are unlikely to know that it originated as a contraction of the phrase the spirit and the image. Etymological information about the historical origin of words may help us evaluate (and perhaps discredit) our intuitive theory about where a metaphor comes from, but this knowledge is usually not available to non-specialists. Thus, although embodied simulation is a factor in metaphor comprehension, it is not necessarily the only, or the best, explanation. Rather, concept-based metaphors like time is space have structural mappings which are grounded in

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image schemas like SOURCE-PATH-GOAL and CONTAINMENT. These are constantly activated in our minds because they are neurally entrenched. Besides, the actual words that make up a metaphor—lexical class (noun, verb, adjective), as well as their frequency, novelty, or familiarity—affect both how it is processed in usage and how it is instantiated in the brain (Schmidt et al., 2010). Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) pathbreaking work took into account both conventional metaphors already established in a given culture as well as novel metaphors that speakers create to fill on-the-spot needs “capable of giving a new understanding of our experience” (p. 139). We can analyze metaphors in different ways, by identifying them when used in talks and texts, in linguistic or literary expositions, or by examining the mental processes that enable people to understand established metaphors and to create novel ones (Steen, 2011). It turns out that different mental processes are involved in the two cases (Gentner & Bowdle, 2008). When encountering a novel metaphor, people need to map the semantic attributes of one concept (the source) onto the attributes of what is depicted (the target). This comparison view treats metaphors as linguistic chunks which align two conceptual domains that share certain features.10 In similes, the most direct type of metaphor, the two domains are compared explicitly, using like or as. In ‘his face was as red as a beet,’ faces (the target) are compared to beetroots (the source). The metaphor selects one salient feature of the target domain, in this case, redness. The comparison can be worded less directly, as ‘his face is a beetroot,’ leaving the hearer to infer what feature of the source highlights the target. The terms in normally forward-referring metaphors (A is B) and also in reversed metaphors (B is A) are processed directionally, and salient features of the source are mapped onto the target in both cases. To access conventionalized metaphors, people mobilize an operation of classinclusion, attributing features of a superordinate category to the target: the source evokes potential metaphorical categories, and the target demonstrates whether and how they apply. For example, in My job is a jail, the target job is subordinate to a more general superordinate category (any situation that is unpleasant and confining) conveyed through the vehicle jail (Glucksberg et al., 1997). People are quite skilled at judging whether a comparison is literal or metaphorical, and they can even estimate degrees of metaphoricity. For example, John’s face was like a beet is judged more metaphorical than John’s face was red as a beet. That is, explicitly specifying the grounds for comparison reduces perceived metaphoricity.

5.2.4 Linguistic humor Humor helps to communicate ideas in an appealing and entertaining fashion, and is an aid in coping with stress or overcoming trauma. As advised by the great American writer and humorist Mark Twain (1835–1910) “Life is short, Break the Rules.

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Forgive quickly, Kiss slowly. Love truly. Laugh uncontrollably And never regret ANYTHING that makes you smile.”11 People share with other hominids basic features of humor, such as feelings of social security and playfulness, but mental play with words and situations involving perception and resolution of incongruity is specifically human (Moreall, 1987). People laugh at different things, and what some consider funny others may see as hurtful or silly. Age is a factor: what teenagers regard as amusing differs from what younger children find funny, and humor is affected by peer culture. As in any situation of language use, here, too, cultural background and world knowledge will affect what arouses a smile. The riddle in (2) highlights how much a person needs to know about movies and philosophical theories to catch the point of both the question and the response. (2) What do you get when you cross a mafioso with a postmodern theorist? Someone who makes you an offer you cannot understand. The question in (2) calls for a shift between two opposing scripts—of the mafioso known for making proposals that one can’t refuse versus postmodern theorists renowned for their opaque formulations of complex ideas. The two scripts may be opposed to each other, but overlap in the response: ‘Someone who will make you an offer you cannot …’ could apply to the mafioso, but—as the closing verb understand reveals—in (2) it describes postmodern theorists. Humor arises from the perception, as in (2), of an opposition between what is expected and what is perceived. To resolve incongruity, jokes switch between conceptual domains, so differing from metaphors which serve to link two conceptual domains (Nerlich et al., 1998). The idea of humor as incongruity (like so much else) goes back to Aristotle. In this sense, humor fits Grice’s view of figurative language as violating conventions of literal truthfulness and cooperativeness (Attardo & Raskin, 1991). Jokes tend to depend largely on verbal content, whereas in other brands of humor, as in most uses of language, nonverbal pragmatic background is as important as linguistic formulation. To ‘get the joke,’ one needs to understand its linguistic components, while its pragmatic context determines whether it is appropriate. A dirty joke may be acceptable among intimates, but not in a job interview. Knowing when, where, and what kind of jokes to tell is an essential component of social pragmatics across the life span. Prototypical jokes are short narratives with a set-up describing a fictitious situation followed by the core of the joke, sometimes as a dialogue. This leads up to a concluding punchline which lends meaning to the information that came before. At first, the account may have more than one compatible interpretation, but the punchline will take listeners by surprise, making them backtrack from their initial response to check for other possible, more relevant interpretations (Attardo et al., 1994). Jokes thus violate the requirement that texts introduce less informative material first and provide increasingly more informative material as they proceed.

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Jokes often take the form of riddles, defined as “a question or statement so framed as to exercise one’s ingenuity in answering it or discovering the answer” (Dictionary.com, n.d)—as in (2). The line between riddle and joke is not always clear. Hundreds of ‘jokes for kids’ in books listed on the web take the form of riddles (e.g., What has ears but cannot hear? A cornfield). This suggests that in some sense, riddles are the most basic type of linguistic humor, appearing early in children’s language. Riddles and jokes are often based on puns—a form of word-play in which a linguistic item combines two unrelated senses (Simpson, 2003). Punning (paronomasia) exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, and has a long history in literature (the Roman playwright Plautus was known for his puns, and Shakespeare used them widely). Because they are so linguisticallybased, puns are usually specific to a particular language or culture, and they may depend on individual words, or other linguistic domains—phonetic (3), lexical (4), or syntactic (5) (Giorgadze, 2014). (3) Woman: What is the brightest idea in the world? Man: Your eye, dear. (4) How do you know the drill so well? I go to the dentist regularly. (5) How do you stop a fish from smelling? Cut off its nose. In (3), the similar sounds of idea and eye, dear are the clue to the pun; in (4) the word drill may stand for practice or for an instrument for drilling holes; in (5) the verb smell is first taken as intransitive, without an object noun, the fish exudes a smell, but is treated as transitive, meaning the fish can smell something else. The key to getting the point of a pun is to grasp what makes it ambiguous (sound, meaning, grammar), and to shift from one to another possible meaning. Thus, accessibility to puns depends on vocabulary. (6) Where do fish learn to swim? They learn from a school. Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865, p.73) Understanding (6) requires knowing that school refers both to the place children go to learn and to a group of fish swimming together. The incongruity effect of a joke may also lie in the relation between how it is worded and the situation it refers to.12 Verbal jokes use a play on language for humorous effect, they are often based on linguistic ambiguity, and are largely impossible to translate. In contrast, referential jokes are a deceptive behavior, a trick played on someone. Paraphrase can help check whether a joke is verbal or referential: if a joke can be put into other words and still be amusing, its humor lies in the situation and not its words.

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As pointed out by Virginia Woolf (1925), “humor is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue” (p. 34). Yet infelicitous translations in hotels and resorts are commonly cited in texts on humorology (Simpson, 2003). The Spanish example in (7) illustrates lexical ambiguity as a source for joking. (7) Que le dijo el socorrista al ahogado? Nada, nada ‘What did the lifeguard say to the drowning guy? ‘Swim, swim’ ~ ‘Nothing, nothing’ The humor of (7) is lost in translation: it lies in the double meaning’ of nada—as both the imperative of the verb ‘swim’ and the negative pronoun ‘nothing.’ In contrast to verbal jokes, referential jokes as in (8) can be translated literally or paraphrased, since the incongruity or absurdity is marked overtly between the extra-linguistic situation and how it is encoded verbally. (8) There are two Draculas who can’t find blood and one of them has his whole face full of blood and says—where did you find so much blood—you see that wall—yes—Well I didn’t see it. (Translated from a 10-year old’s text in the CesCa Corpus.)13 Genuinely humorous use of language requires wit, an aptitude for using words creatively, to entertain and amuse. But a humorous effect may be unintentional. For example, the person who translated the instructions for using a coffee-maker from the original Italian as set on fire and abide the ejaculation did not intend to be funny. There is a difference between producing original humorous output of one’s own, repeating familiar jokes, or evoking laughter unintentionally. Using linguistic humor is, again, culture-bound. Lecturers in the Anglo-Saxon world consider it helpful to start a public presentation with a joke, a practice that is less acceptable in other rhetorical traditions.

5.2.5 Irony Termed tsxok ha-goral in Hebrew ‘the laughter of fate’ and sukhriat ʔalqadar ‘the mockery of fate’ in Arabic, the English word irony comes from the Greek eironeia’ ‘concealing, dissimulation.’ Perhaps the most sophisticated figurative use of language, irony, as the Semitic metaphors suggest, can apply not only to language but to situations that are perceived as odd or funny because they go against what one expects (Giora, 2018). As defined by Fowler (1926): Irony is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear & shall not understand, & another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more & of the outsiders’ incomprehension. (p. 434)

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Studies of television comedies and of conversations between college students and adults in different communicative settings (Gibbs, 2000; Hancock, 2004) found that irony was used on average in 6% of conversational turns. And in analyzing written materials, Kreuz and associates (1996) found that readers of contemporary American literature come across use of irony around every four pages. Irony is commonly used in literature to convey the opposite of a statement’s literal sense, as in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Marc Antony repeatedly refers to Brutus, the adopted son and murderer of Caesar, as “an honorable man” (III, ii); or in the British playwright George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion (Act II), when Professor Higgins replies indignantly to his housekeeper asking him not to swear “I never swear! I detest the habit. What the devil do you mean?” Different types of irony—dramatic, situational, and verbal irony—are commonly defined as devices where what appears to be the case differs radically from what is actually the case. Verbal irony, however, has an additional feature. The speaker is not just saying the opposite of what s/he means, but is also echoing a thought—a belief, intention, or norm-based expectation—attributed to an individual or group. This typically expresses a dismissive (mocking or scornful) attitude. So when a person says politicians never lie, s/he is not asserting either that politicians never lie or that politicians sometimes or always lie; rather, the speaker is deriding the norm-based expectation that politicians do not lie—and hence, indirectly, being scornful of politicians themselves and of anyone who might believe that politicians do not lie (Wilson & Sperber, 2012). Verbal irony may include sarcasm, also termed negative irony, which is often not only negative but even aggressive in intent—for example, a teacher saying to a student who has just failed several subjects You have really surpassed yourself this semester. In all cases of irony, the speaker needs to take into account what the interlocutor thinks, over and above what is overtly stated. This is a sophisticated ability that requires a second-order reading of the mind, one that echoes the thoughts or beliefs of an (actual or potential) interlocutor. We illustrate second-order belief by the following scenario. A little boy keeps his ball in a box. His mother says she’s going to put his ball in a basket so she can clean the box. When the boy sees his ball has been moved from the box to the basket, he entertains the thought in (9). (9) The ball is in the basket. His sisters Sally and Anne then invite their brother to play with the ball. In this situation, the boy may attribute any of the four thoughts in (10) to his sisters. (10) a. Sally thinks the ball is in the basket. (Attributes only a belief compatible with the boy’s own) b. Sally thinks the ball is in the box. (Attributes first-order false beliefs)

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L ANGUAGE FOR IMAGERY c. Anne thinks Sally thinks the ball is in the basket. (Attributes only a belief compatible with his own) d. Anne thinks Sally thinks the ball is in the box. (Attributes second-order false beliefs)

In (9) the straightforward representation of a state of affairs (that the ball is in the basket) represents a first-order belief —what the boy is thinking directly, what he believes to be the case (Wilson, 2009). The statements in (10 a–d) are ‘secondorder beliefs,’ meta-representations of thoughts that the boy attributes to another person. People who believe (9) but lack the ability to attribute to others beliefs that do not suit their own ideas would be limited to the meta-representations in (10a) and (10c); those entertaining first-order (false) beliefs would be able to form meta-representations like (10b), while (10d) depends on being able to attribute second-order (false) beliefs. This might explain why subtle uses of non-literal language like irony, which may not be at all ‘funny,’ may perhaps even be upsetting, as in sarcasm, take until the teen years to be interpreted in their intended sense.

5.2.6 Lies Unlike other figurative language, where people need to go beyond what is said to discover the intended meaning, tellers of lies want what they say to be taken at face value. Deception consciously intends to mislead (Levine, 2014). This facet of lying combines with irony in the title line from a 2010 song by the rapper and songwriter Eminem (Marshall Bruce Mathers III, b.1972), called “(I) Love the Way You Lie.” Lies thus deviate from Grice’s (1975) assumption of truthfulness and cooperative behavior between interlocutors in conversation. “The option of lying should be acknowledged as a crucial facet of its uniqueness, of what makes it so different from all the other forms of communication in the biological world” (Dor, 2017, p. 2). Humans evolved for and because of lying, just as much as for and due to honest communication. People deceive for various reasons and in different ways, from everyday white lies to major untruths that have changed the course of history, such as the Trojan Horse. Lying requires cognitive and emotional capacities beyond truthful communication (Walczyk et al., 2014). When talking honestly, speakers relay their experiences more or less automatically. But when lying, people have to monitor what to say and what to omit so as not to give themselves away by contradicting themselves or by suspicious body language. Freudian slips show that this is not always easy. And indeed, lying requires high levels of activation of top-down, executive processes in the brain over and above the strategic decision of whether to tell the truth or to deceive (Walczyk et al., 2014).

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Here again, mentalizing plays an important role. Hearers need to conceptualize the speaker’s state of mind in order to distinguish unintended from intentional falsehoods. Different types of falsehood (lies versus irony, say) involve conceptualizing complex mental states at varying levels of complexity. These include: what the speaker knows that the listener knows [=second-order knowledge], what the speaker intends the listener to believe [=second-order intention], what the speaker believes the listener believes [=second-order belief ]. In an ironic joke, the speaker knows that the listener knows the truth, so does not intend to deceive, but a liar believes the listener does not know the truth, and thus intends to deceive.

5.3 Neural underpinnings of figurative language skills The various phenomena covered by the term figurative language all involve a discrepancy between what is said and what is meant. To overcome this inconsistency, a person needs to attend to the contexts in which the usages occur and to infer (or even echo) what the addressee is thinking. It turns out that a common network supports the various types of figurative language and also the conditions enabling them to be applied successfully. The few studies of how children’s brains respond to verbal humor, irony, or lying all indicate that adults and children activate similar structures, but these appear more lateralized and less dependent on frontal control in adults than in children. Age-related shifts observed in lateralization and cognitive control point to significant changes in different domains of figurative language use across development. A meta-analysis of thirty-eight works by Rapp et al. (2012) compared the structures examined in different studies of patterns of brain-activation when people attempt to interpret idioms, metaphors, and ironic expressions. What can we learn from these comparisons? First, it turned out that some structures were activated recurrently and concurrently for all varieties of figurative usage, others for only one or some.14 Eleven different structures were implicated across the diverse varieties, leading the researchers to conclude that these overlapping structures form a figurative core network that embraces varied functions distributed among cortical and subcortical structures.15 That is, different but converging skills were found to be involved in figurative language processing, giving neurophysiological support to the common features we have attributed to using different types of ‘language for imagery.’ Second, most of the common structures serve integrative functions, such as combining words into sentences and meaningful wholes: the left and right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the left middle (MTG), and superior temporal gyrus (STG) activate contextual associations; the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the parahippocampal region are involved in perspective taking; and the insula

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links emotional and cognitive motivation. This sheds fresh light on the need to go beyond local, piece-by-piece processing of discourse in order to integrate elements into meaningful wholes (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995) and provide emotional connotations to generate expectations, resolve ambiguities, and suppress alternative interpretations. However, the fact that most of the structures in the core network are involved in all and any language tasks suggests that both non-literal and literal language are supported by similar processes—like depending on context, drawing inferences, and reading intentions. Third, while the common network was predominantly left lateralized, the right hemisphere (RH) also plays a role (though one that is less dominant) in the shared core. Around one-third of the activation foci detected in the different studies were in the RH, in three neural function-structure mappings: organizing individual components in sequences (rIFG); semantic control (rMTG); and modulating language processes and cognitive functions in literal language comprehension (right cerebellum) (Meltzer et al., 2010; Murdoch, 2010). This finding contrasts with the longheld view that the RH controls relations in metaphor and, by extension, in any figurative language use (Jung-Beeman, 2005). Several neuroimaging studies indicate that the RH is recruited whenever contextual and semantic information needs to be integrated for interpreting ambiguity, showing that its role is not confined to figurative language. Idiom comprehension has been shown to activate a bilateral neural network (involving both the left hemisphere (LH) and the RH). Papagno and RomeroLauro (2010) applied transcranial magnetic stimulation (see Glossary II) to see how participants matched pictures to idiomatic and literal sentences. A similar network involving the language areas of the LH was activated in both conditions, but with higher levels of activation for idiomatic sentences. Lauro et al. (2008) suggest that component parts of an idiom are approached in the same way as ordinary linguistic items, mobilizing the LH. However, an alternative, figurative meaning for the idiom as a whole is activated at the point where a key element in the expression signals it as idiomatic. Three RH structures are activated here: the rSTG and rMTG, which are involved in semantic memory, and the rIFG, which works to organize individual components hierarchically into a sequence. At the same time, the activation of the lIFG makes it clear that executive functions are marshaled to decide between alternative interpretations, literal or idiomatic. And the anterior-medial part of the superior frontal gyrus, in turn, serves to integrate the outcomes of alternative interpretations and to inhibit what is inappropriate. These findings suggest that idiomatic language follows similar processing procedures as literal, supplemented by an additional selecting between alternative meanings. This selection process may well be supported by the IFG, together with an additional high-level cognitive process (managed by the anterior prefrontal cortex) that serves to monitor and integrate the results of the ongoing linguistic analysis and select between competing meanings. At all events, the claim for RH

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predominance in processing of non-literal language such as idioms (based largely on early studies of metaphor) is once again called into question. Moving to metaphor, to judge the relative involvement of LH and RH, we need to look at the tasks researchers have used to probe this domain, how familiar the metaphor is, and/or how it is expressed linguistically. Winner (1988), for example, detected a picture effect that might explain why patients with RH lesions had more difficulty in matching metaphors to pictures than participants with LH lesions or without any damage—although RH-damaged participants were able to explain the metaphors adequately. Their difficulty thus could be due to mode of presentation, visual versus verbal, rather than figurativeness as such. A metaphor’s familiarity is another factor in hemispheric processing. Interpreting novel, unfamiliar metaphors involves the cooperation of both the RH— posterior superior temporal gyrus (PSTS) and IFG—as well as the LH (IFG and middle frontal gyrus) (Mashal et al., 2005). Stronger activation in the right PSTS for novel metaphors than for literal utterances points to the special role of this region in constructing novel semantic connections. Following Giora, it is novelty (non-salience, in her terms) rather than metaphoricality that increases RH participation. In Chapter 1, we mentioned that embodiment implies that the same neural circuitry that mobilizes our bodies physically also structures our reasoning about metaphor. Neurobiologists (e.g., Desai et al., 2011) found that metaphorical expressions involving physical motion (The public grasped the idea) activated sensorimotor areas similarly to those describing literal movements (The girl grasped the stick), with this correspondence greater for novel than for well-established metaphors. Metaphors, unlike idioms, can be deliberately invented, raising the question of the neural specificity of novel metaphor generation as against metaphor understanding (Mashal et al., 2005). Generating novel metaphors yielded increased activation in predominantly left-hemispheric brain regions, in the left angular gyrus, which forms part of the canonical language network and so serves in producing literal language as well. But the left dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (DMPFC) and the posterior cingulate cortex were specific to metaphor creation. And brain activation in these regions (left DMPFC and the rMTG) increased as a function of how creative the responses were. The specific involvement of the DMPFC in generating novel metaphors suggests that this structure is particularly relevant for goal-directed retrieval of semantic information and for creating nonconventional responses (Binder et al., 2009). Activation of the DMPFC during metaphor generation could thus reflect cognitive mechanisms required for inhibiting dominant responses or meanings (for example, to favor non-literal over literal interpretations and to sustain a semantic search in seeking an original figurative response) (Rapp et al., 2012).

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Metaphors are not a linguistically homogeneous phenomenon. Differential effects in brain activation may be due not so much to their figurativeness, but to features of the category (noun, verb, or adjective) and the imageability or frequency of the words they contain. Besides, they are often semantically quite transparent (e.g., turning point, down at heel, vanish into thin air), so that when we make judgments about specific examples the distinctions become graded, rather than discrete. People’s ability to reliably judge degrees of metaphoricity also indicates a continuum from the literal to the non-literal (Ortony, 1979). In describing the core figurative network, we note that certain structures play a role in linking emotional and cognitive motivations. Appreciating and producing humor epitomizes this link. Humor functions as an antidote to stress, so potentially enhancing the cardiovascular, immune, and endocrine systems, and helping to build resilience (Russo et al., 2012). The emotional component activates the ventral anterior cingulate cortex and the supplementary motor areas, being associated mainly with increased activity in the mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic pathways including the nucleus accumbens (NACC) and the amygdala.16 These pathways are involved in many executive functions—learning, reward-related mechanisms, motivation—as well as, curiously, problems of addiction. The amygdala, as noted, functions in reward-related mechanisms, selecting from the constant influx of information those inputs most relevant to the goals or intentions of the organism at a given time. Humor appreciation is thus likely to activate the amygdala because it functions as a positive signal of interaction, with high social significance. Humor is not only amusing, it is puzzling and, apparently, can be addictive. In addition to emotional components of delight or reward, humor also involves an ability to detect and resolve incongruity. This cognitive component recruits different structures within the cortical regions between the left temporal, occipital, and parietal lobes (the inferior temporal gyrus, the left fusiform gyrus (lFFG), and the temporal-occipital-parietal junction (TOPJ). This region is important since it is also activated for evaluating environmental signals with personal relevance for decision-making and mentalizing processes. The neurological basis of humor development is illuminated by the work of Vrticka and associates (2013) with children aged 6 to 12 years. Participants viewed video clips ranging from ‘funny’ (people stumbling while skiing or running) via ‘rewarding’ (gymnastics or snowboarding) to ‘neutral.’17 Responses to funny videos produced a greater activation in the TOPJ—a region we have seen is important for resolving incongruity—than to neutral videos, suggesting that an adultlike humor-processing network is present in middle childhood. However, unlike the left-lateralized activation in the TOPJ shown by adults, the children exhibited robust TOPJ bilateral activation. Yet, as we noted earlier for metaphor, there may be a picture effect in reacting to humor: children were shown video clips showing physical and spatial scenes, whereas the adults saw cartoons that might elicit more linguistic processing—and this might explain the greater bilateral activation

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among the children (Mobbs et al., 2003). Further analyses revealed that stimuli rated as amusing showed greater activation of the superior TOPJ regions compared with positive (or generally rewarding) inputs among adults but not children, indicating that these areas are specific to humor processing rather than part of a more generalized response to reward. Moreover, younger children showed higher dopaminergetic activation to stimuli that involved rewards than did older children. This finding might relate to personal preferences that evolve with age since, for humor to be appreciated, it must present a cognitive challenge, so that jokes outside the zone of cognitive comfort are preferred across age groups. In sum, humor processing relies on a network that includes the TOPJ and NACC and is active by middle childhood. A similarly distributed participation of brain activation emerged from studies of irony. Shibata and associates (2010) had participants read a short scenario of five sentences: the first four explained the situation of the protagonists, the fifth denoted either an ironic, literal, or unconnected meaning. Numerous structures were shared in processing the ironic and literal sentences. However, three regions strongly related to mentalizing processes, and higher-order cognitive operations showed greater activation (the right mPFC, the right precentral, and the left superior temporal sulcus) when only the ironic condition was measured. In other words, there is a shared neural basis for processing other non-literal varieties of language, but a differential involvement of mentalizing. Grasping irony is more dependent on mentalizing than understanding idioms or metaphors. Wang (2006) and associates compared the reactions of young adults and children (aged 9 to 14 years), using tasks similar to those of Shibata et al., (2010). The children viewed cartoon scenarios with a shared neutral introduction followed by a sincere or an ironic version, accompanied by a speaker’s commentary. In addition to information about event outcomes (positive versus negative), all scenarios included clear cues for facial expression (happy versus sad or upset), and prosody (sincere or ironic tone of voice) as an aid to interpretation. For example, a girl and boy were shown going to the beach, with the comment “John and Linda want to go swimming at the beach,” followed by the sincere version “When they get there, the sky is blue and sunny. John says, ‘What a perfect day!’” versus the ironic version “When they get there, the sky turns dark and rainy. John says, ‘What a perfect day!’” Children had to say whether the character making the final remark meant what s/he said (p. 934). Across all conditions of irony (as compared with the neutral baseline), children and adults engaged similar overall networks, including bilateral use of frontal, temporal, and occipital cortices. However, children recruited left inferior frontal regions (mPFC and lIFG) more strongly than adults, and showed consistent activity in the mPFC, a region mainly involved in processing social and affective information, whereas adults did not. In contrast, adults activated posterior

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occipitotemporal regions more strongly than children in regions traditionally associated with processing faces and emotional expressions (the fusiform gyrus, extrastriate area, and the amygdala). And adults tended to direct more attention to the speaker’s facial expression. In the no irony condition, both adults and children again showed significant activity in frontotemporal and occipital regions relative to rest-state. But adults exhibited the left-lateralized activation pattern typical of language processing, whereas children still recruited a more bilateral network similar to that activated in the irony conditions. And although they were given direct, unambiguous requests, the region in charge of managing social and affective information (the mPFC) remained activated in children. This accords with the idea that children typically recruit this mentalizing region whenever they attempt to infer a speaker’s communicative intent. The irony condition yielded RH-lateralized activity in temporal regions in adults, confirming the important role of the RH in interpreting non-literal language. We earlier noted neuroimaging studies that highlight the role of RH when differences between what is said and what is meant need integration of contextual cues in order to achieve coherence, particularly at the sentence and discourse level (Wang et al., 2006). Children did not show the same right-lateralized activation pattern for ironic over and above non-ironic scenarios. However, as the researchers note, this indicates a bilateral activity under the no irony condition rather than lack of involvement of RH temporal regions in the irony conditions. They suggest that greater involvement of prefrontal regions may help children integrate multiple cues so as to reconcile the discrepancy between the literal and intended meaning of an ironic remark.18 And indeed, in a different study of the neural circuitry active when children were asked to distinguish between sincere and ironic comments, (Wang et al., 2006) found an enhanced activity for ironic remarks, which the authors attribute to the increased cognitive load in processing multiple meanings (e.g., the literal, positive meaning of the utterance and the ironic, negative sense intended by the speaker).19 Children may also have been aided by the multiple contextual, facial, and prosodic cues provided them in the experiment. These studies reveal two developmental shifts in appreciating irony: a transition from reliance on frontal regions to posterior occipitotemporal regions and from bilateral to more lateralized activation. Both reflect the key fact that changes in functional specialization continue to occur during development as a function of expertise within a domain (Johnson, 2001). What about lying? Neuroimaging studies indicate that dishonest behaviors result in far broader brain activations than honest ones, occurring mainly in the prefrontal cortex and reflecting an array of executive functions, including inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility. One theory (Walczyk et al., 2014) identifies four sequential cognitive processes in generating deception: activation

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of truthful information in memory; intentional decision to lie; construction, generating and expressing a plausible alternative to the truth; action, delivery of a lie. These four components engage all aspects of the executive function system (attention, working memory, inhibition, cognitive switching, planning), whereas truth-telling typically involves only the first. That is, dishonesty utilizes more cognitive-neural resources than truth. Research reveals a variety of frontal areas implicated in this complexity: the amygdala, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (Neal & Cavanna, 2013). Unlike joking, lying is more stressful than telling the truth, and deceiving spontaneously is more conflictive than deceiving on request. Our brain mobilizes different neural processes for each behavior. One fMRI study (Yin et al., 2016) observed people playing a gambling game with genuine payoffs: in the spontaneous sessions, participants decided whether or not to lie, while in others they were explicitly instructed whether or not to deceive. When participants lied spontaneously, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, which manages cognitive conflict and negative emotions, showed higher activity—but not when they were telling the truth, nor when instructed to lie. When choosing to tell the truth, people seemed to be concealing the egocentered motivation involved in winning—an effort of suppression reflected in higher activity in the fronto-parietal network, including the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, entrolateral prefrontal cortex, and IPL. Truthful responding may constitute a baseline or default case for human cognition and communication. Telling lies appears to engage higher centers of the brain, with increased activity in executive brain regions (Spence, 2004) consistent with the intentional act of deceiving. Besides, honest and dishonest behaviors have a differential effect on the interaction between regions of the brain. A study comparing the neural underpinning of these two types of verbal acts had some sixty (right-handed) children, aged 7 to 12 years, participate in a situation where they could decide to spontaneously lie or tell the truth (Ding et al., 2017). Results showed that dishonesty negatively affected children’s neural functional connectivity. After they told the first lie, children’s global and local efficiencies decreased significantly, indicating that dishonesty disrupts children’s brain functional organization, so supporting the network disruption hypothesis related to lying. The overall efficiency of the neural network was more susceptible to disruption due to dishonesty in younger than in older children, but regardless of age, local efficiency decreased significantly after compared with before participants told their first lie. Such research indicates that global efficiency reflects the cognitive processing capacity of particular task-related neural networks. The complex neural underpinnings of using language for deception go a long way to explain, as we found for metaphor and irony, how both shared and distinctive brain structures underlie different facets of figurative language. They shed fresh light on issues previously accepted across the research community, such as

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the roles of the two hemispheres in literal versus figurative language use and the differentiation between global and specialized brain mechanisms in processing non-literal language use. They also help explain the lengthy and complicated route in the development of using language for imagery. The neural underpinnings of adults’ figurative language processing highlight the range of skills involved in this ubiquitous and kaleidoscopic realm of language use. Comprehension of figurative language involves a dynamic interplay between top-down, memory-based, semantic activation of word meaning and bottomup pragmatic constraints of the context—one reflected in the different networks recruited for this purpose. On the one hand, a common neural core underlies the different types of figurative usages we have surveyed: all alike relate to linguistic skills, particularly to integrating elements into meaningful wholes; to social cognition, for detecting intentions and mindreading to grasp what is meant; and to identifying and monitoring errors. Yet critically, each type and subtype of figurative usage, from proverbs to jokes, from metaphor to irony, from riddles to lies, relies on its own neural center. The few neurophysiological studies with children show two important developmental shifts. One is from reliance on frontal regions to posterior occipitotemporal regions (e.g., lFFG), which may reflect the automatization of basic reasoning about mental states in the domain of irony. The other is from bilateral to left activation, confirming that functional specialization continues across development (Johnson, 2001). What about development? Do literal interpretations take precedence over figurative in child language? And what about production of different types of figurative usages? Gaining command of the various uses of language for imagery confronts children with formidable cognitive challenges and demands extensive experience with rich and varied contexts of language use.

5.4 Developmental trajectories Young children have little sensitivity to non-literal language usage. Lev Vygotsky (1986) illustrated this with a game where children were told a dog would be called ‘cow.’ “Does a cow have horns?” “Yes” “But don’t you remember that the cow is really a dog? Come now, does a dog have horns?” “Sure, if it’s a cow, if it’s called cow, it has horns. That kind of dog has got to have little horns.” (p. 223)

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Children believe that the name of an object has a necessary connection to what it stands for. This is seen, too, in their liking for onomatopoeia, where the sounds made by animals or objects are treated as their properties (e.g., bow-wow, meow, moo, cockadoodledoo, choo-choo, and equivalents in other languages). Psychologists suggest that this nominal realism, young children’s conviction that the name of an object is not just a symbol but an intrinsic part of it, might explain their tendency to take words for what they say. It takes a long time from when a child looks at the floor when hearing an adult announce my face fell when I heard the price to the period when they can fully appreciate verbal irony. The developmental routes in command of varieties of nonliteral language are modulated by numerous factors: how culture-bound they are, how relatively concrete or abstract, the role of supporting context, and so on. It is hard to say which type of figurative usage is most ‘basic.’ Nearly every study we consulted starts by noting how common a particular variety is in everyday use. Yet perhaps the major finding of our inquiry is that children’s ability to understand and produce different figurative devices—metaphors, idioms, proverbs, jokes—does not emerge all at once, but follows an uneven developmental course. Take, for example, the staggered trajectory of different types of figures of speech. First, similes are understood before metaphors, since a simile like Peter is as brave as a lion contains clear linguistic cues to the relation between the two entities— the target Peter and the feature, braveness, attributed to him. But a metaphor like Peter is a lion requires that this feature be inferred, making it harder for children to understand the comparison. Besides, there are many types of idioms, each with its own developmental route. For example, metaphor-type idioms (e.g., ‘the new cop was thrown into the lion’s den by being given a tough assignment on his first day’) are usually understood earlier than proverb-type idioms (e.g., from Hebrew Better be at the tail of lions than at the head of foxes) because proverbs require more exposure and acculturation before they become part of a speaker’s repertoire. Ironical uses of language are grasped latest. They involve a high level of mentalizing where speakers must access their hearers’ thoughts on a situation before stating their own opinion (e.g., saying of a classmate who ran away from a fight “he’s a real lion when it comes to conflict”). Any type of figurative usage involves different factors which carry more or less weight in each case. Mentalizing, familiarity, salience, context, speaker expectations, and scriptal knowledge all play a role in using language for imagery, over and above linguistic features of intonation, vocabulary, or syntax. But all figurative usages develop as part of children’s growing knowledge and use of language in general, on the basis of their ordinary lexical and semantic development. This view is defended by developmentalists like Levorato and Cacciari (1995) and supported by brain studies. We saw earlier that the tasks used to test different varieties of non-literal expressions all recruit brain regions that are part of the canonical

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language network, supplemented by related regions which control being able to infer intentions and integrate context(s) and emotional connotations. We agree with the point made by Romero Lauro and associates (2008) that our brain reacts to any manifestation of language, literal or non-literal, as linguistic input. But non-literal language faces us with peculiar demands. To recognize what is implied by a linguistic image, people need to go beyond the literal sense of a word or expression, make pragmatic inferences, attending both to the situational context in which an utterance is produced and their own world knowledge (for example, to understand that a lion’s den is a dangerous place).20 To do so, children must seek a coherent global meaning to discourse, beyond piece-by-piece processing (Levorato & Cacciari, 1995), and they need to integrate different sources of information that offer alternative interpretations. The demands for understanding figurative language and being able to produce it creatively are part of later development. Below we track these developmental moves in processing non-literal language, going from the most conventionalized to more flexible and less predictable varieties that require a high level of metalinguistic awareness (as discussed in Chapter 6).

5.4.1 Understanding and applying idioms Recall that idioms are fixed strings of words that together convey a meaning with no obvious connection to the individual words that compose them. A prototypical example of conventionalized expressions, idioms can be used in multiple contexts. The common view is that idioms demand familiarity, based on rote learning (by heart) and frequent exposure. As against this claim, Levorato & Cacciari (1992) and associates demonstrated that to get the idea of an idiom people need to first recognize that the expression is being used idiomatically rather than in its referential sense (does the well-wisher really want the actor to break a leg?). Using both familiar and unfamiliar idioms as well as literal statements, Italian schoolchildren aged 6;9 to 11;9 years answered a question about what the character did when s/he … [IDIOM] after listening to a story. They had to choose between three types of responses: idiomatic, literal (paraphrasing the idiom), and associated (neither idiomatic nor literal). Older children chose more idiomatic answers for contexts that evoked idiomatic interpretations, irrespective of familiarity, whereas younger children made more literal choices when the idiom was not familiar. The ‘idiomatic bias’ of older children shows they can integrate different sources of information—both from the meaning of the words in the idiom and the events in the story that provided a context. Levorato et al., (1992) also had participants complete an idiom from a fragment—by a literal or a figurative completion that either did or did not yield the conventional idiom. They concluded that the older children (closer to 12 than to

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9 years of age) produced mostly idiomatic answers, not because of their familiarity with more idioms, but because they were adopting a more sophisticated strategy of language processing, based on their greater overall competence in manipulating figurative language. To succeed at such tasks, children must first realize that the same words can be applied to different situations, that the same label can denote different entities, and that they then need to integrate contextual information from the input with their general knowledge (of words and the world). This development paves the way to distinguishing what is said from what is meant. But this is not enough. Children must also have a repertoire of conventionalized expressions to help them suspend a literal in favor of an idiomatic interpretation. Studies agree that being able to use a conventional repertoire of figurative expressions in speech-writing takes until adolescence. The gap between understanding and producing figurative language lessens over time, particularly with idioms. By around age 15, youngsters can deal with the semantics of an idiom, and reflect on possible motivations underlying the relationships between the words it contains. We will see that this combination of linguistic knowledge (familiarity) and processing capacities (mentalizing) in processing idioms is true for other types of figurative language as well.

5.4.2 Proverbs The two facets of processing proverbs—knowledge of idioms as culturally conventional sayings and the ability to apply generalized propositions to specific situations—emerge at different stages in development. The Hebrew-based study of Berman and Ravid (2010) showed that grade-schoolers in middle childhood were able to interpret pseudo-proverbs in the form of novel sayings, but even 8th graders aged 13 to 14 largely lacked knowledge of traditional proverbs, when required to complete them by adding missing words (e.g., strikes for the English Lightning never—the same place twice). This applied, for example, to the Mishnaic proverb mi-she—be-erev shabat yoxal be-shabat ‘he who—on Sabbath eve will-eat on the Sabbath.’ Most of the younger children and many of the 13- to 14-year-olds failed to select the high-register verb toreax ‘exert oneself, take pains,’ but instead chose semantically similar omel ‘toils,’ pragmatically feasible mevashel ‘cooks,’ or phonologically close boreach ‘flee.’ Schoolchildren’s difficulty with established proverbs is due to a lexical deficiency, they lack familiarity with elevated vocabulary and archaic expressions. Context is particularly helpful to younger children for interpreting figurative language. The Berman and Ravid study showed that being given proverbs in the context of short, simple narratives rather than in isolation helped younger (4thgrade) Hebrew-speaking students much more than older 8th-graders.

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Does this helpful effect of associated verbal context apply to other types of figurative language, too? If so, it might provide a useful pedagogic strategy for enlarging children’s repertoire of figurative language in general.

5.4.3 Understanding and creating metaphors Winner (1988) analyzed the spontaneous speech of Adam (aged 2;3 to 4;0 years) in the corpus compiled by Brown (1973). To explain the fact that the child used many words differently than in their established sense, Winner used the idea of renaming to single out metaphors from other nonconventional usages (overextensions and anomalies). She characterized metaphor as labeling objects by an appropriate nonmetaphorical term, as when Adam used a horn as an eggbeater, calling it mixer— fitting Winner’s focus on novel, more deliberate metaphors. However, as noted, not all metaphors meet the criterion of unconventionality; many are already part of the established lexicon (night falls, day breaks, she broke his heart). Besides, unlike overextensions, metaphors do not necessarily fill a gap in the established lexicon. Adam misnamed an object even though he knew the accepted name for it, probably in order to point out a resemblance that struck him as noteworthy. This example, like many in the literature, suggests that before age 4, children can find a way to express similarities between two entities from different domains. Jacqueline, Piaget’s daughter (aged between 3 and 4 years) said of a stormy river “It is like a snake,” establishing a similarity between the domains of animate and inanimate objects (cited in Gibbs, 1994). Such instances led Vosniadou (1987) to claim that producing and understanding metaphors begins as soon as children learn to talk. And indeed, diary studies abound in cute examples of metaphorical language among toddlers. Winner and other researchers take them as deliberate transgressions of category boundaries. Others interpret them as indicating mistakes of categorization (Matter & Davis, 1975). Yet if metaphors imply crossing categories, mapping side-by-side distinct conceptual domains, couldn’t it be that children are deliberately violating category boundaries or switching across conceptual domains—even before consolidating their knowledge of distinct categories? Are these metaphorical uses a mark of ignorance, or do they imply an implicit level of category consolidation? Keil (1986) explored how children between 5 to 9 years of age understand metaphors by mapping domains such as weather, tastes, animals, and eating to domains of personality traits, ideas, cars, books, and professional occupations. Even the youngest participants were able to understand metaphors based on pairs within the same domain; but only older children were able to understand metaphors that juxtaposed different domains. Keil concluded that metaphor comprehension develops on a domain-by-domain basis, as a function of how much knowledge children have of the two domains juxtaposed in metaphor.

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We see no clear developmental gap between incipient (emergent) and genuine metaphorical capacities of toddlers as against older children. Rather, as in many other abilities (indeed, as a general feature of development), we identify a developmental continuum between young children’s sense of similarities across domains (‘baseball bat’/ ‘ear of corn’; ‘ship at sea’/ ‘toycar in bath’) and the sophisticated metaphors that adults may invent (‘a grating voice’, ‘a magical smile’). Both alike highlight salient features of the entities involved. But there is a continuum in how younger versus older speakers perceive both the communicative intention of others (what they want to convey) and their own communicative powers (what change they wish to produce in the mental state of the listener). But while mentalizing is a necessary condition for understanding and producing metaphors, it is not enough. Speakers also need to have sufficient knowledge of the words and concepts that create the metaphorical links between domains. Children are not likely to understand a metaphor that compares notions that are unknown to them (Vosniadou, 1987). Our take on the matter is that young children’s use of metaphor, where they need to compare salient features of entities and domains, does indeed signal an incipient capacity for category formation. But this capacity has a long developmental path, in the history of individuals as of societies. So, since metaphors involve crossing categories by juxtaposing distinct conceptual domains, young children can violate category boundaries only once the relevant domains are already established in their minds. As with other figurative usages, metaphor also means going beyond bit-by-bit processing of linguistic expressions to get at a coherent global meaning. Children need to orchestrate both conceptual and verbal skills in order to shift from oneto-one mappings that posit a direct link between words and things, to realize that the same object can have different labels and verbal descriptions. Gentner (1988) showed that 5- to 6-year-old children are quite adept at interpreting attributional metaphors like ‘Pancakes are nickels’ (both are round and flat) that map one perceptually salient attribute of a (usually concrete) object onto some other concrete entity. But it takes until around age 9 to 10 before they can interpret relational metaphors that need them to infer the link (usually functional rather than physical or perceptually salient) between the two domains, as in ‘A cloud is like a sponge’ (both absorb water). By that time, children, like adults, prefer relational over attributional interpretations, they can rely on greater worldand domain-based knowledge to recover a meaning that differs from the literal sense. Levorato and Cacciari (2002) had 9- and 11-year-old Italian-speaking children, adolescents, and adults create new expressions for denoting common actions and emotions—where metaphorical usage does not require specialized knowledge. Participants were asked to create a novel expression that your friends will understand better than other people (for example, for an activity, ‘Dire una bugia … ’

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‘Telling a lie is … ’; for an emotion, ‘Vergognarsi … ’ ‘Being ashamed is … ’). Children’s responses were then analyzed as paraphrases or figurative.21 For example, for telling a lie, a paraphrase would be ‘saying something that’s not true’ and a figurative response ‘being like Pinocchio.’ Over half the responses were figurative, even among the younger children, and this rate increased for adolescents but less so among adults. This confirms our suggestion that older speakers rely less on surrounding context for processing figurative language than do younger children. It also highlights the developmental trajectory in coining novel figurative usages as continuing through to and largely completed by adolescence. Adolescents performed very much like adults although, unexpectedly, the adults’ innovations made more use of the contextual cue of ‘X is like Y.’ The main outcome was that adolescents were much better at producing novel metaphors than younger schoolchildren, in both amount and quality. Seroussi (2004) had grade-school, middle-school, and high-school Hebrewspeaking students compared with adults complete sentences with two competing abstract nouns from the same consonantal root (e.g., shetef ‘fluency’/shitafon ‘flood’). Older students performed much better in dealing with less familiar nouns, while adults also made more use of extended or metaphorical senses. For example, they applied the term for ‘vaccination’ (Hebrew xisun) to the disease of racism, and used the word for ‘inundation’ for a flood of nonsense. These differences between younger, college-age adults and those aged 30 and over suggest that a more fine-grained division into age-groups is important, especially in research on later language development. Different levels of knowledge can explain these age-related differences in innovating figurative usages: conceptually, younger schoolchildren have more restricted world knowledge than teenagers or adults; linguistically, they have a more limited repertoire of means of expression; and pragmatically, they find it harder to take into account common grounds with potential addressees. Recruiting and monitoring these three levels concurrently is beyond the capacity of pre-adolescents.

5.4.4 Humor Children participate early on in humorous interactions. Anecdotal observations and parental reports provide numerous examples of humorous non-verbal games and forms of teasing. These act to disrupt the expectations of an interlocutor, a key feature of humor in general, with irony and sarcasm probably deriving from this protypical core of humor. As they grow older, children tend increasingly to include jokes and riddles as part of their communicative interactions. Jokes are a well-known genre of oral literature, taking the shape of ‘canned texts’ that are partially or completely recycled, lying between spoken and written forms of communication, so serving to bridge the two.

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Even before children can grasp the sense of a riddle or fully understand the incongruity and ambiguity behind a joke, they may laugh along with the rest of the family, enjoying the sense of belonging to a shared ritual in joke-telling. When children begin to understand jokes, they move into a new area of cognitive development, since they must have some (even rudimentary) knowledge of the concepts it involves. Recall that verbal jokes are often based on linguistic ambiguities that must be resolved, and this in turn requires different levels of metalinguistic awareness.22 We noted that neuroimaging studies detected two main components in humor appreciation: cognitive and affective. In development of humor, affective appreciation precedes the cognitive, pleasure comes before understanding. Researchers stress that distinguishing different types of humor by age is far from straightforward, that both simple and complex forms of humor may coincide at any age (Airenti, 2016). But this is only partly true: forms of physical teasing and mocking may coexist with more sophisticated irony among adolescence and adults, but not among preschoolers and young schoolchildren. McGhee’s (1979) four-stage model defines humor development in a Piagetian framework, in terms of the child’s developing cognitive ability to recognize and deploy incongruity. The first stage is pretend play with objects, and emerges at around age 2. Second, children begin to replace actions with words, manipulating the relationship between words, by engaging in word play. By the third stage, around age 4 to 5, when children can categorize objects and events, humor emerges as the child notices when things are not ‘as they should be,’ for example, someone taking a bath fully clothed. Finally, around age 7 years, children are able to restructure events and objects, and can play with words in the form of riddles and puns. Schoolchildren can find humor in verbal incongruity, they discover that words can have more than one meaning and, later on, that syntactic constructions can also be ambiguous (e.g., flying planes). Studies confirm a transition at early school age, between 6 and 8 years, to understanding incongruity, playing with words, and beginning to produce pre-made jokes. A type of humor typical of 5- to 8-year-olds is ‘toilet humor,’ a component of ‘defiance humor.’ As evidence of their gradual integration into peer culture, schoolchildren’s humorous interactions quite often include words that they conceive as taboo (Nwokah & Graves, 2009; Opie, 1994). In the CesCa corpus of written Catalan, we included joke-telling as one type of text. Taking into account the distinction between verbal and referential jokes, we found that before age 7, most jokes were referential, while afterward, the two were evenly balanced. Interestingly, although 6- to 7-year-olds reproduce verbal jokes, they are not always aware of the source of their humorous effect. Most popular jokes in their surroundings are Spanish, and while many Catalan-Spanish bilinguals had no problem in translating them into Catalan, their humorous effect was lost in the process. Only around 10 to 11 years of age will children attend

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to linguistic elements in verbal jokes and riddles with cognitive incongruity, a development that seems related to their increasing capacity to reflect on language (see Chapter 6). Our review of neurophysiological studies on humor indicates that a humorprocessing network analogous to that of adults is already present in middle childhood, but is less left-lateralized in children (showing a robust bilateral activation). The process of left lateralization may support the increasing ability to react to linguistic aspects of humor, while the early bilateral activation in the humor-processing network supports younger children’s preference for bodilyrelated referential humor. Along similarly speculative lines, while adults’ reward mechanisms were activated specifically by the (funny) jokes, no such distinction between general reward mechanisms and those specific to humor processing was found in children (Mobbs et al., 2003). This might explain why, if children perceive the setting as one of joke-telling, they will laugh, but not necessarily because they perceive the joke as funny. They may not yet be aware of verbal ambiguity and other linguistic resources employed in riddles, puns, or jokes. Ashkenazi and Ravid (1998) examined understanding of linguistic humor of Hebrew-speaking students from 1st to 10th grades compared with adults. They used puns, riddles, and jokes to probe the phonological, morphological, and orthographic metalinguistic awareness of their participants. After hearing the joke, participants were asked Why is it funny? Their explanations showed a clear developmental pattern. Before 4th grade (6 to 9 years), some explanations (14% in 1st grade, 24% in 3rd grade) show an emergent metalinguistic awareness, referring to language but without using metalanguage. For example in order to explain ‘Why do people eat a lot of soup (marak) in Morocco (maroko),’ they said that marak and maroko rhyme. By 5th grade, children’s metalinguistic comments were more explicit, but still awkward (e.g., “because they said marak and maroko, and this sort of connects between the words”). With some help the child could explain that the connection related to the presence of the same letters (Hebrew m-r-q). Well-articulated explanations that make explicit reference to linguistic categories (in this case, the shared consonants) increased markedly after 7th grade (age 10 to 13) and were commonest among high-school students and adults. The authors interpret these developmental changes by Karmiloff-Smith’s (1992) levels of metalinguistic development, as follows. Among the youngest children, any understanding of the joke was implicit; by around age 9 years, they showed a more explicitly metalinguistic approach, but still without a verbal formulation; only later were they able to verbalize reasons for funniness. Yet laughter can be evoked for reasons other than being funny, and humor may serve different purposes, from overtly exposing sensitive issues—as in political humor—to establishing identity and social status. Sanford-Eder’s (1984) study of peer groups in a middle-school setting found that students used humor in different ways depending on the size of the group and the degree of closeness among

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its members. Telling memorized jokes is common in newly-formed, mixed-sex, or mixed-age groups, where humor can be a tool to establish a shared identity. Practical jokes, funny stories, and humorous behavior, on the other hand, are mainly shared by small groups of intimates, to convey information about peer norms, often violating adult expectations. This underscores the value of humor as a means for exposing and exploring sensitive issues such as sexuality, which are normally not openly discussed. And it highlights the dual purpose social role of different forms of humor—for inclusiveness of small in-groups with shared values and life-experience (‘the gang’) and for exclusion of outsiders who are not in the know. Humor is also valued among teenagers as a means of handling stressful situations. Fu¨hr’s study (2002) with nearly a thousand participants aged 11–14 years provides evidence for humor as a coping tool in early adolescence. Responses to a self-report questionnaire revealed a triple pattern of response to humor: coping with uncertainty and stress, making fun of others, and getting cheered up. Significant gender and age differences emerged: boys tended to use more aggressive and sexually related strategies in coping-type humor, girls preferred being cheered up, and this tendency increased with age for girls but not boys. Moreover, using humor as a coping tool in uncertain and stressful situations increases significantly for both sexes by around 12 years of age.

5.4.5 Telling lies The motivations for lying, the ability to lie persuasively, and what is perceived as a lie, all differ with age. Most of the developmental literature is concerned with the moral and social implications of children’s telling lies. In fact, however, lying reflects an important milestone in cognitive development. When children lie, it means they understand that other people have different beliefs than they do, and that people’s beliefs do not directly reflect reality, but vary based on experience. ‘From junior to senior Pinocchio’ (Debey et al., 2015) is a comprehensive study of lying across the lifespan, which revealed an inverted U-shape (see Chapter 1) in both proficiency and frequency. Proficient lying improved during childhood, excelled in young adulthood, and then deteriorated with age. This applied, too, to frequency of telling lies, which increased in childhood, peaked in adolescence, and decreased among adults. Interestingly, this developmental pattern for deception coincides with age-related changes observed in cognitive control, particularly in inhibitory control. But what does it mean to be a proficient teller of lies? In Chapter 1 we noted that lying is evaluated as a negative social (and moral) behavior, yet it indicates growing abilities in mindreading, it may confer cognitive benefits when pursuing a goal or solving personal problems, and is a distinguishing feature of human

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behavior (Dor, 2017). Young children usually resort to lying to escape punishment; as young as 3 years of age, they may lie to conceal their transgressions, while by age 4 they are skilled at doing so. But preschoolers do not plan their lies strategically; rather they react on the spot to adults’ discovery of their wrongdoing. As we noted earlier, successfully deceiving someone requires regulating behavior to avoid inconsistencies (Talwar & Lee, 2002). A lie-teller must, first, ensure that the content of other statements made along with the lie does not contradict the lie, using the monitoring strategy of ‘semantic leakage control.’ Second, lie-tellers need to simulate non-verbal behaviors that are consistent with their untruthful statements, and suppress spontaneous, incongruent non-verbal responses by exerting ‘non-verbal leakage control’ (Ekman & Friesen, 1969). Children under 8 years of age have generally not developed these skills sufficiently to succeed in deceiving adults. With age, children’s abilities at feigning improve. By middle childhood, they possess increasing control over the consistency between their verbal statements and their non-verbal behaviors (Loeber & Loeber-Stouhame, 1986). Adolescents are better liars because they have stronger cognitive control; their executive abilities help them to suppress both the negative emotion provoked by lying and self-interest issues that may run counter to telling the truth. Besides, teenagers have more motives to lie, not just to conceal wrongdoings or to defend their own interests, but also as a signal of autonomy and a means of evading adult control. Jensen and associates (2004) had nearly 300 high-school and college students evaluate the acceptability of lying to parents about diverse issues such as friends, dates, and money. Respondents put the right to lie to parents to preserve one’s autonomy at the top of the list in justifying lying behavior. Changes in neural connectivity reflect the age-related increase in ability at lying and its associated lower cognitive load (Wang et al., 2006). Dishonesty disrupts the brain functional organization of children more than of adults, with a concomitant increase in cognitive workload. With age, this reduction in global efficiency lessens, and lying has a lower cognitive cost. In other words, both the motives and the ability to lie increase with age, while cognitive disruption decreases. Although some research points to a decrease in deceptive speech after adolescence, other studies show that, in adulthood, lying is subject to marked individual differences (Hauch et al., 2016). Besides, the difficulty people have in detecting deceptive speech on the part of expert liars leaves the question open as to a decrease in lying among adults.

5.4.6 Irony Researchers have been trying to establish when children begin to understand irony for over twenty years. We still don’t have a clear answer. Some argue that irony comprehension emerges in early adolescence (Demorest et al., 1984), others point

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to middle childhood (Capelli et al., 1990; Winner, 1988) or even earlier (Angeleri & Airenti, 2014). Understanding irony recruits brain regions able to support both the increased cognitive load of processing multiple meanings as well as the various cues—contextual, prosodic, and facial—needed to make relevant decisions. As noted, contrast is necessary but not sufficient for the task. Speakers of an ironical utterance are not simply saying the opposite of what they mean. Rather, they are echoing an idea or intention attributed to the other(s). As such, irony involves thought about a thought (Happé, 1993), so demands a higher order of mind-reading ability than metaphor. It is thus not surprising that understanding irony takes a long time to develop. At around 5 or 6 years, children begin to detect that someone speaking ironically means something different (often the opposite) to what they said (Harris & Pexman, 2003). There is some evidence that even younger children can comprehend an ironic remark, especially if it conflicts with something they can perceive directly in their surroundings (Angeleri & Airenti, 2014). Yet understanding of ironic intent seems to emerge only around age 7 or 8, and continues to develop across middle childhood and into adolescence. What are the skills that underlie irony comprehension and production? Happé (1993) tested understanding of metaphor and irony in typicallydeveloping children compared with young adults with autism. She had participants solve tasks of first- and second-order false belief, success in which is usually regarded as indicating levels of mind-reading ability. Children who did not pass false belief tests understood neither metaphorical nor ironical utterances; those who passed only first-order false belief tests understood some metaphorical but no ironical utterances; and those who passed both first-order and second-order false belief tests understood both metaphorical and ironical utterances. Happé took these results as evidence that irony requires a higher order of mindreading than metaphor. Her conclusion is consistent with the general consensus in the developmental literature that irony develops later than metaphor comprehension. However, as suggested earlier, mentalizing skills, while important, are not sufficient for understanding irony. Both knowledge of language and mentalizing ability are strongly related in development of irony, making it hard to discern which accounts for figurative language comprehension in general and irony in particular (Kalandadze et al., 2018). Angeleri and Airenti (2014) go so far as to argue that understanding verbal irony does not require second-order mind-reading, but that children rely on a shared common ground, including knowledge of the situation and of the speaker. They found that once the child’s language skills and age-level are taken into account, children’s understanding of false beliefs was not related to their comprehension of irony. The authors propose, rather, that children’s appreciation of irony is aided by their greater ability, between age 4 to 8 years, to make use of contextually relevant information in interpreting speech. Social learning also seems to play a role in irony development, due to increased experience with language uses in different communicative contexts. Learners need

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to have some experience with the social norms that may be involved in ironic statements, as well as the particular lexical or syntactic choices associated with irony in a given language and culture (Kim, 2014). It remains an open question whether such sociopragmatic knowledge is based on implicit learning or requires metapragmatic awareness of the kind detailed in the next chapter. However, some children have more frequent opportunities to engage with ironic speech, underlining the finding of Pexman and associates (2009) that children whose parents tended to use this strategy also tended to do so. To what extent are children aware of the negative implication of irony in the case of sarcasm? Dews et al (1996) addressed this question with children aged 5 to 6 and 8 to 9 years compared with adults. Participants were shown cartoon clips displaying different scenarios ending with different types of remarks—literal criticisms, literal compliments, or ironic criticisms—and were asked to rate ‘how mean’ (or nasty) was a given speaker. For example, a scenario of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was displayed as follows: The turtles try to get a computer expert to show them how he did something on a computer. The computer expert just walks away. One turtle remarks, “Helpful, isn’t he?” (pp. 3073–3074)

Participants in all three age-groups rated ironic criticisms as meaner than literal compliments and less mean than literal criticisms, but the differences between the first two increased with age. The youngest group showed some understanding of the difference between the non-literal meanings of sarcastic as against ironic speech, but not between the intentions of ironic versus sarcastic commentary. The 9- to 10-year-olds were more accurate at understanding both types of speech and rated sarcastic criticisms as more ‘mean’ than ironic criticisms. These results show that children can identify the non-literal meanings of sarcasm and irony by as young as age 6, but it takes until middle childhood for them to grasp the pragmatic purposes of these speech acts. In an interesting study on irony production, Aguert and associates (2017) had pre-adolescents and adolescents (12- and 16-year-olds) participate in free discussions in the same class versus specially constructed digital forums on different topics—music, TV, sport, and love. The researchers compared occurrences of ironic language and found little verbal irony, less than 5% out of the total speech output (Gibbs, 2000). Participants tended to be more ironic with friends (in free discussions) than with strangers (on the digital forums), where the first situation involved more shared knowledge than the second. They also found that topic of discussion had an effect on amount of ironical commentary: unsurprisingly, love elicited the most ironic utterances and music the fewest. In sum, irony requires sophisticated social and cognitive insights on the part of both speakers and hearers. Effective use of irony demands, perhaps more than any

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other type of figurative language, reliance on shared knowledge, and appreciation of both what the interlocutors know and what they can be expected to interpret as meant. These demands are reflected in the widespread brain networks activated by the diverse types of irony, wider than for any other variety of figurative language, and also in the protractedness of its development.

5.5 Using figurative language in the right way, at the right time and place It turns out that becoming a pleasurable, poetic, elusive and, at the right time and place, a witty user of figures of speech is no mean feat. In varied domains, from riddles and jokes to idioms, proverbs, and metaphors, interpreting non-literal language requires substantial abilities, both cognitive and linguistic. The cognitive demands involved include, first, linguistic flexibility—going beyond the surface forms of words and accepted form-meaning mappings (Kaplan & Berman, 2015), transcending the principles of semantic transparency, the one-to-one mappings of form and meaning dominant in early lexical acquisition (E. V. Clark, 1993). Second, understanding figurative usages means going beyond syntactically compositional processing to integrating the different parts of linguistic constructions into unanalyzable wholes, recognizing that, conceptually, the whole means more than and is different than the sum of its parts. Third, speaker-hearers have to bear in mind concurrently two distinct contexts and to recognize the common ground they share. For example, to understand a saying like the early bird catches the worm, one needs to grasp that the words combine to convey a special sense (it is worthwhile doing things in good time) which applies to objects and situations that have nothing to with the either birds or worms, although taken together they do have some common ground (in this case, that birds eat worms). And the same goes for a saying like birds of a feather flock together, in the sense that people with similar (typically negative) characters tend to collude with one another.23 It takes remarkable mental flexibility to realize that the same word (‘bird’) may be used to allude to quite distinct entities in different figurative contexts. Taken together, these attainments involve a developmental shift from adherence to the principles of clarity and ease of processing, which play a key role in early child language, to mature communicative competence. Doing so meets not only the charges that language use should be ‘quick and easy’ to process in real time, but that they also be “rhetorically expressive” (Kaplan & Berman, 2015, p. 205). These abilities have important consequences for achieving higher levels of literacy and academic success in general (see Chapter 7). Being able to interpret and produce figurative language appropriately in varied communicative settings is an important facet of ‘later language development’ from middle childhood to adolescence.

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Language for imagery shares certain basic processes with literal or ordinary language use: context dependency, inference making, resolving ambiguity, and recognizing incongruity. But figurative language across the board implies a dissonance between what is said and what is meant, and so is unsuited to maximally efficient conveying of information about the world or for broadcasting experiential facts. For efficient and precise communication, we need utterances that are relatively stable across contexts, require minimal inference to be understood, are unambiguous and consistent, and, whenever possible, reveal a close correspondence between what is said and what is meant. Yet, as we have seen, the diverse types of non-literal devices pervade both everyday and literate language use. There is no way to become a competent speaker and a well-functioning member of your speech community without understanding and producing idioms, recognizing proverbs, sharing metaphors, and reacting to irony and sarcasm (Huang et al., 2015). And, although telling jokes is risky because it is so highly contextdependent (with a fine line between sounding stupid and being funny), it is a tool not only to gain friends but also to achieve status (Bitterly et al., 2017). Lies are told to avoid conflicts in social interaction, but also for self-protection by hiding our fears and insecurities. When entering the realm of non-literal language, we move from the world of unambiguous, straightforward, plain communication to the world of double meanings, allusions, hinting, imagery, getting to the complex via the simple and vice versa, and introducing pleasure and poetry into daily life. As we have tried to show, all these uses are language-dependent and culturebound, requiring high levels of mentalizing and sensitivity to context. It is not surprising, then, that they follow intricate (sometime convoluted) and protracted developmental pathways.

Notes 1. Attributed to the boxer, born Cassius Clay, after he had won a fight; downloaded from the web Wikipedia entry ‘The Greatest Speech—1974,’ (September 17, 1974, Waldorf Astoria, New York, USA) https://speakola.com/sports/muhammad-ali-the-greatest1974. Speakola was created by Melbourne author and speaker Tony Wilson in August, 2016. 2. Google searches for ‘literally’ have more than quadrupled since 2005, including when it is used to mean ‘figuratively.’ Yet as late as 1926, H. W. Fowler’s comprehensive Dictionary of the English Language mentioned the word literally some two dozen times as contrasting directly with metaphorically. 3. The idea is that listeners assume speakers to be cooperative, so that whenever a conversational maxim (such as ‘Do not say what you believe to be false’) appears violated, it will function as a conversational implicature—a signal that the speaker intends something other than the literal meaning of what s/he has said (Wilson, 2009). 4. According to Nippold (1991), 6.7% of the sentences of the reading programs for grade school in the U.S. contained an idiomatic expression.

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5. The noun tap occurs as a verb meaning ‘exploit or draw a supply (from a resource).’ But while the noun is listed as entry 2906 of the 5000 most frequent words in American English (Davies & Gardner, 2010), its use as a verb is not listed, nor is the noun with the same meaning ‘faucet’—showing that everyday words are more likely to acquire figurative senses than less common terms. 6. The word stable is lexically ambiguous between the noun ‘place for horses’ and the adjective ‘fixed, constant.’ The clause where they serve truck-drivers is syntactically ambiguous because people can serve food to truck-drivers or they (theoretically) can serve truck-drivers as food. 7. The ‘mental lexicon’ refers to words and expressions that speakers have stored in memory and which they can retrieve for producing and interpreting speech and writing. It is largely shared across a speech community, though individual repertoires vary somewhat due to age, schooling, cultural background, etc. The mental lexicon differs from conventional dictionaries, which are organized by orthographic criteria, based on surveys of large corpora (Aitchison, 2003; Anshen & Aronoff, 1999) although scholars differ about what they view as its entries—morphemes, words, and/or MLEs. 8. McElree & Nordic (1999) had people judge the truth value of sentences that were literally false but metaphorically true, as evidence that metaphorical and literal interpretations are generated in parallel. 9. Words often have two kinds of meaning: denotation = the entity or situation they refer to in the real world; connotation = properties or secondary senses associated with them. 10. The comparison approach combines insights from Gentner and Wolff ’s structure mapping theory (Genter, 1988; Genter & Bowdle, 2008) with Ortony’s (1979) salience imbalance theory. Metaphorical comparison, or analogy, highlights similarities between target and source by aligning two domains, guided by salience imbalance and systematicity, implying that only properties that are significantly more salient for the source than for the target concept are relevant in making or interpreting metaphorical comparisons. 11. Mark Twain (1835–1910). https://www.azquotes.com/quote/390497. Accessed June 4, 2022. 12. In recent years, scholars like Attardo (1994) and associates have rediscovered the distinction made by the 1st century B.C. Roman scholar Cicero between humor that is de re (referential, about things) and de dicto (verbal, about words). In his De Oratore, Cicero suggested paraphrase as a way to distinguish between them. 13. The CesCa corpus consists of texts written by Catalan students across the school years, containing two kinds of data: vocabularies of five semantic fields comprising 242,404 lexical forms and textual data of four different discourse genres consisting of 207,028 tokens. All materials were morphologically analyzed and lemmatized and are freely available (Llaurado et al., 2012). 14. These fMRI studies (Rapp et al., 2012) included twenty-four studies of metaphor, fourteen of non-salient stimuli, seven of idioms, eight of irony, and one on metonymy. The main meta-analysis was based on twenty-eight studies that directly compared non-literal and literal stimuli.

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15. Four structures which manage integration of words into meaningful wholes are involved in any language task, as part of the language network: the left and right IFG, the left MTG, and STG. In addition, the insula integrates visceral information into emotional and cognitive motivation, and the left precentral gyrus integrates the left (pre)motor areas for speech planning with the motor sources of some figurative uses. Two other structures, the mPFC and the parahippocampal region, control contextual associations, important for generating expectations, solving ambiguity, and suppressing alternative interpretations (Frith & Frith, 2012). Both the mPFC and the parahippocampal region are also involved in perspective-taking and mind-reading. The two remaining structures serve for inferring intentions and thoughts—the inferior parietal and the middle frontal cortex, for performance-monitoring and error-detection. 16. The mesocortical pathway transmits dopamine from the ventral tegmental area in the midbrain to the PFC. 17. Participants rated a total of 455 videos by how funny and how enjoyable they were on scales of 1 to 8. 18. Both children and adults showed selective activity in the mPFC (extending well into the ventral mPFC), demonstrating the role of the PFC in response to vignettes involving ironic remarks, in contrast to most prior studies that reported selective dorsal mPFC activity during tasks requiring mental-state inferences. The authors propose that the mPFC may be functionally organized so that its dorsal regions are engaged in cognitive monitoring of mental states, while its ventral regions are associated with the affective meaning of stimuli. In Wang et al.’s more recent (2006) study, both children and adults activated the ventral mPFC more strongly during irony relative to no irony conditions, perhaps reflecting integration of the emotion conveyed through facial expression and tone of voice with a cognitive appreciation of the speaker’s intent. 19. The goal of these studies was to use fMRI to compare the neural activation in typically developing children compared with children suffering from disorders in the autism spectrum, but they also shed light on the activation patterns in typically developing youngsters aged 13 to 15 years. 20. More erudite speakers will have an additional association here, with the Biblical story of Daniel in the lion’s den. 21. Two different instructions were used: nominal, where the task was to form a new expression with no constraint on its syntactic form (‘Target is … ’) or comparative, using ‘is like’ (e.g., ‘Target is like … ’) to see whether explicit ‘is like’ would have an effect. 22. Each type of linguistic ambiguity requires a different metalinguistic centering (Chapter 6). Jokes may be based on phonological ambiguity, on metaphonological awareness, lexical double meanings, and so on. 23. Compare the even more opaque version of the same idea in Hebrew: halax ha-zarzir etsel ha-orev ‘went the starling with the crow,’ associating two birds with (different) unpleasant characteristics as being in cahoots (a word meaning ‘collusion’ used only in this context, with a vague origin, possibly from French cohorte). Birds figure in numerous English-language idioms and proverbs, from the transparent ‘she sings like a bird’ to the more opaque and conventionalized ‘a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.’

6 Language for reflection (on language) Richard Lederer, who authored Crazy English: The Ultimate Joy Ride through our Language (1989) as well as other books about the English language, including the titles, Anguished English, Get Thee to a Punnery, called English the most “loopy and wiggly of all languages,” querying “in what other language do people drive in a parkway and park in a driveway? In what other language do people play at a recital and recite at a play? Why does night fall but never break and day breaks but never fall? (Alternatively: and your nose run, and your feet can smell.)” (pp. 108–109). He uses language to write about language and, in so doing, he has recourse to metalingual usage.1 Any grammar book or style manual will contain metalinguistic commentary, but few are as amusing or enjoyable as Lederer’s. Not surprisingly he has been dubbed ‘the wizard of idiom’ and ‘Attila the pun.’ In ordinary communication, people are concerned with what they say or write more than with how they do it; we typically skim over the exact wording to get or give a message. But in metalinguistic uses, people pause to dwell on the form and not only the content of what they say or write. This type of language use may not always be clear to others, it may even be confusing. Take, for example, the (imagined) dialogue between a boy and his friend in (1). (1) “I’ve just had the most awful time,” said a boy to his friend. “First I got angina pectoris, then arteriosclerosis. Just as I was recovering, I got psoriasis. They gave me hypodermics, and to top it all, tonsillitis was followed by an appendectomy.” “Wow! How did you pull through?” sympathized his friend. “I don't know,” replied the boy. “Toughest spelling test I ever had.” What happened in (1)? Both boys were speaking English, but each attended to a different facet of the speaker’s “awful time.” One was talking about how terrible he felt having to spell the words he mentioned; his friend related to the diseases they denote. The first boy was performing a metalinguistic operation: he used language to refer to the orthographic form of words rather than their meaning. Attending to the form of words as distinct from what they stand for demands attentional control, since to do so, you have to process linguistic features of a message, while inhibiting its content.

Growing into Language. Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman, Oxford University Press. © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.003.0006

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It is not easy to make this shift. Consider the sentence in (2), coined by Douglas R. Hofstadter (1981). (2) Their is four errors in this sentance. Can you find them? Three errors are immediately evident: misspellings of there and sentence and ungrammatical use of is instead of are. (To detect them, you as reader needed to focus on linguistic form, how the words were spelled, is the sentence grammatical?) The fourth error requires moving to the meaning of the sentence (what is called its truth value): it is factually false, since there are only three errors of linguistic form in the sentence. A ‘self-referencing’ utterance like (2)—which relates to itself rather than to some outside entity—needs you to attend to a message in two ways at the same time: as a statement about something and as a linguistic artifact. When language is ‘turned on itself ’ it challenges some established theories of language—for example, that sentences in a language are constructed from a finite vocabulary of symbols (Cappelen & Lepore, 2007).2 Quotations (citing from somebody or somewhere else) challenge this principle, because they allow us to compose novel English sentences out of a large stock of quotable items that are not themselves part of the English lexicon.3 For example, we need to process what is said in (3) to understand it, since one of the words it contains is not from English. (3) ‘Snøman’ isn’t a word in English; it’s from Norwegian’ This and similar puzzles show that metalinguistic discourse may require that we diverge from our usual linguistic resources in order to use language competently. This chapter addresses two main questions: what are the skills involved in understanding and producing metalinguistic discourse, what level of awareness does it demand?; and how do these abilities develop from childhood to adolescence? After reading this chapter you will be acquainted with: • features of metalinguistic compared to referential-communicative uses of language; • metalinguistic awareness, as increasingly conscious access to linguistic form, culminating in the ability to provide explicit verbal explanations of what one knows of language; • the neural underpinnings of such tricky notions as consciousness, and neural correlates of metalinguistic access to different systems of language structure; • the developmental route from early sensitivity to verbal input to maturely reflective metalinguistic operations, and the specialized metalanguage of experts.

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6.1 Using language for (metalinguistic) reflection When using a language that we know for referential-communicative purposes like telling stories, having a conversation, contemplating future possibilities, or interpreting figurative language, our linguistic knowledge is activated automatically; we do not need to consciously analyze the structures and forms that we employ. In any such activity, people are in a state of wakefulness—what philosophers call phenomenal consciousness—and they are aware that they are using words and combinations of words in order to communicate.4 This kind of awareness controls our verbal behavior, yet the content of this awareness—the form of the words, how they are linked—is not necessarily accessible to mental introspection. On the other hand, when chatting with others or telling a story, people often selfcorrect what they have said (e.g., that’s pref … er perfectly true, no, I mean you’re wro … sorry, right), or they may ask their interlocutor to repeat or clarify something they have said. Such operations (which even young children can perform) show that our attentional system has been triggered bottom-up, after noticing an error in what we just said (by auditory feedback); or it may have been set in motion even before we noticed the error by unconscious feedback from our organs of speech— the nose, teeth, tongue, roof of the mouth, and lips (Levelt, 2004). Attentional systems thus also regulate language processing top-down, by relating to features of utterances that fulfill a particular goal. This high-level form of attention underlies, for example, linguistic abilities discussed in the preceding chapters: to plan stories, controlling for referential, temporal, and syntactic connectivity; to converse with others, sticking to a topic and attending to one’s interlocutors; and to distinguish between actual and hypothetical uses of language or between literal and figurative meanings. In ordinary language use, attentional control is at the service of accomplishing these and other communicative purposes. This chapter deals with how people move beyond such goals to think, talk, and write about different domains of language structure and use: phonology, lexicon, syntax, and pragmatics. In contrast to the verbal activities discussed earlier in the book, in metalinguistic activity people turn to the linguistic means in themselves as objects of reflection. They consciously access awareness of different levels of language, by means of internal reflection. As such, metalinguistics goes beyond control of behavioral output to self-conscious introspection (Manuello et al., 2019). Various tasks have been applied to assess metalinguistic skills. For example, people are asked to make a complete sentence out of the word Driver and the incomplete sentence Children are too young to … To succeed, participants obviously need to understand the sentence, but they must focus on the relation between linguistic forms (driver < drive). In other tasks of metalinguistic skills, participants are asked to divide words into sounds or syllables, judge sentence acceptability,

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identify and correct errors like those in (2), or detect incoherencies in stories. All such tasks require that participants operate on linguistic forms in and of themselves without recourse to external, pragmatic and contextual cues. With age, children perform them more successfully. They attend increasingly to structural features of phonology, morphology, and syntax as such; can use forms appropriate to different settings; and are more adept at applying these skills to structuring their own discourse in speech and writing.

6.2 Metalinguistic awareness In her 1974 book, Courtney Cazden coined the term metalinguistic awareness for the ability to think about and discuss different features of a language that we know or are in the process of learning.5 As indicated by the Greek prefix meta ‘beyond,’ metalinguistic awareness (MA) means that speakers are able to think about things that they know about their language and that they can articulate these thoughts explicitly, even if not expertly. For example, if a 6-year-old says that the words bat and cat ‘end the same’ or ‘phone is a short way we say telephone,’ s/he is showing that they are aware of how words are built up out of their component parts; they are accessing linguistic awareness to report on units of language as objects of reflection. Acquisition of linguistic awareness has been of interest to developmental psycholinguistics since its inception (Gleitman et al., 1972), with a recent explosion of studies in the area. Yet the question of what role metalinguistic abilities play in acquisition of basic linguistic skills is still up for debate. The first signs of children’s ability to reflect upon language appear early on (E. V. Clark, 1978). Young preschoolers pay attention to adults’ reformulations of an incorrect utterance and may sometimes even reformulate the reformulation. The dissonance they sense in the interlocutor’s utterance may activate their attention bottom-up. Small children are also responsive to adults’ requests for clarification (such as What did you say you wanted?) and they may also repair their own speech output, as in the course of a 6-year-old’s oral narrative in (4) (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986c). (4) … et puis la fi … une fille lui donne un os. ‘… and then the gir … a girl gives him a bone.’ In (4), the child is focusing on use of the article, which in French alternates between definite ‘the’ (Masculine le, Feminine la) and indefinite ‘a’ (un, une). In Hebrew, noun plurals take one of three endings: -im on Masculine nouns, -ot on Feminine nouns, -ey in compound nouns. In (5), a first-grade Hebrew-speaking child first pluralizes the masculine Hebrew noun kova by the inappropriate feminine ending –ot, then changes it to the correct but contextually inappropriate

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masculine plural kova-im, and finally comes up with the correct form ending in –ey in a noun compound kova-ey purim = ‘Purim hats’ (hats used for dressing up on the festival of Purim). (5) ima, yesh lach od kova’ot, kova’im, kova’ey Purim? ‘Mommy, do you have any more hatettes, hats, hats-of Purim? = Purim hats’ These behaviors reveal sensitivity to alternations in the grammatical systems of gender and number in the ambient language. But they are far from conscious control or top-down attention to linguistic form. Self-repairs increase in quantity and quality between age 5 to 7 years, evidence of greater monitoring of schoolochildren’s speech output, as in (6)—from an English-speaking 2nd-grader telling about an accident her brother had experienced (Evans, 1985). (6) We went to—uh me and Don went to Aunt Judy's. And … and uh my brother came down on Fri—Friday night, uh there was a ac—came on the train, And there was an accident. And they thought uh … that uh … the—there was a accident with a—a van, And they thought—there was pig's blood in it, And they thought there was somebody hurt. But it was the pig. (p. 367) This child shows numerous hesitations and pauses, signs of difficulty she has in online planning. True, her attention system is being triggered bottom-up, bit-bybit, not as yet top-down. Yet she also self-repairs in a more motivated fashion than the younger children in (4) and (5), by adding information to what she is saying. By high-school age, self-repairs are used more to clarify the content of a message than correcting local mispronunciations or miswordings. Mature self-corrections manifest increased memory-spans and pre-planning, as shown in (7) from accounts of personal experiences told by two university students. (7) a. One day I was having a really bad day, and this coworker of mine she was just being unreasonable, I mean just being totally unreasonable. b. And uh we are sort of getting on with our lives and you know something that I didn’t add in there was that the way I got most of the anger out which it was just mostly anger … More mature speakers signal self-repairs by discourse-markers like I mean, sort of (acting as ‘place-holders’ (H. H. Clark, 1996)), and also overtly refer to the actual process of their online speech production (what I didn’t add in there). Yet across the board, such online amendments are transient, they leave little or no trace in consciousness.6 They result from online monitoring processes inherent to speech processing and production.7 These ‘disfluencies’ function as mechanisms for organizing speech online (Schegloff et al., 1977). They are not necessarily a sign of inadequate knowledge of the language, but may stem from a realization that there is another, preferable way of expressing the same idea: in (7a) more forcefully, and in (7b) by reiterating and

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adding further details to what has already been said. Repairs are typically motivated by speakers’ wish to make themselves clearer, to get their message across more effectively, reflecting a basic type of MA. As we will see, different approaches are taken to the development of this type of awareness. In the course of conversation, we may also make remarks like I don’t follow you or anticipate the hearer’s reaction by something like D’ya know what I mean? Here, speakers are not so much concerned with being understood. Rather, they automatically mobilize formulaic sayings to check on the communication process itself, to ensure that what they are getting across is what they meant to say. Yet even if speakers can behave metalinguistically by self-repairs or by check-ups like these, they can rarely explain why the language they know works the way it does. Spontaneous self-repairs and metalinguistic judgments form part of a developmental continuum, progressing from early metalinguistic sensitivity to conscious access. At one end of this continuum are questions about the right use of words or comments on the speech of others, reactions to a foreign accent, and also quoting (Tom called me dumb)—showing a focus on how people talk and the words they use. At the other extreme are deliberate manipulations of verbal forms (you say tomahto and I say tomaito) and judgments of linguistic structure and function (You can’t say on the cat sat the mat. It doesn’t make sense, a mat can’t sit), evaluation of rhetorical alternatives, and controlled structuring of one’s own discourse. The shift from implicit knowledge to reflecting on and expressing in words how we use language represents a critical advance in how language develops and why it matters (Karmiloff-Smith et al., 1993). The developmental route of this complex ability starts with self-repairs among young children and proceeds to people behaving metalinguistically without consciously accessing the specific linguistic features they are correcting. At the other end of the scale, metalinguistic knowledge allows people to verbalize and explicate features of the object language (the language reflected on), aided by specialized knowledge of linguists, language teachers, editors, or translators that are major providers of metalanguage. Much of the job of such professionals is the outcome of learned and conscious reflections in the form of explicit rules or generalizations. To explain, for example, why you “can’t say” ‘on the cat, the mat sat’ in English, because syntactically, the Object and Subject Noun Phrases are interchanged and it is semantically infelicitous because mats can’t sit. In order to formulate such generalizations, experts resort to a specialized metalanguage, using such terms such as word order, subject, proposition to explain the features they are targeting. They may even invent an, often arcane, metalanguage which only the initiated can understand.

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We cite two such examples in (8), from the Danish grammarian Otto Jespersen and from Noam Chomsky, founder of the generative school of linguistics.8 (8) a. The case used to express the subject is generally the nominative, in dependent nexuses it may be the accusative. (Jespersen, 1937, p. 126) b. It follows, then, that LF-movement of the wh-phrase is not constrained by the principle of binding theory … (Chomsky, 1986, p. 77) This terminology is not part of the repertoire of ordinary speakers, however welleducated they are and however many lessons in ‘grammar’ they have endured at school. The specialized metalanguage used for describing the elements and relations in the object language is like a foreign language for most speakers. For Mertz and Yovel (2009), metalinguistic activities do more than merely discuss the communicative code; they shape it, because they are embedded in discourse, so that, on the surface, they use the same means of expression as ordinary language use (e.g., “the subject is” or “the principle of ” in (8)). Because metalinguistic behavior is reflective, using language for dealing with language, it is in essence a metapragmatic activity. These ideas echo those of socio- and anthropological linguists inspired by Lev Vygotsky, who argue that MA plays a role in the process of children’s socialization into a given speech community. As we note further in discussing developmental trajectories (Section 6.4), some scholars (Silverstein, 1993; Taylor, 2016) argue that MA enables children and adolescents not only to reflect on their own implicit knowledge of language, but also to gain more conscious access to the discourse practices of their speech community.9 We adopt principles that emerge from this perspective on metalanguage. We propose that (1) metalinguistic usage, like ordinary language use, has both referential and performative functions, which define the content of a message and its communicative goal respectively; and (2) even at the referential level, metalinguistic talk in itself performs an act in relation to language and to a given speech event. How can or should one talk about something? What is the right approach when performing different types of speech acts, from inviting friends for dinner to instructing them how to reach your home? These multiple facets of MA underlie Daniel Dennet’s (1986) characterization of consciousness and awareness as “an unhappy conglomerate of a number of separate concepts” (p. 114), to describe the multiple uses of these terms both in ordinary language and in the cognitive sciences. From both behavioral and neurobiological perspectives, consciousness and awareness are multidimensional constructs that apply to different levels of thought and states of mind. In the next section, we review studies relating to the neural underpinnings (Dennet’s ‘sub-personal level of explanation’) of this conglomerate.

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6.3 Neural underpinnings of awareness and consciousness People recognize differing intensities as well as different levels of conscious access to their experiences, how available they are to mental introspection, and how this applies to different types of content (visual, kinetic, verbal). We can ask, for example, how alert someone is after suffering an accident, or whether s/he can identify the syllables in the word adolescents. These three dimensions—intensity of consciousness, accessibility to the content of awareness, and type of content—can all be combined, under the control of the attention “that incessantly patrols the vast landscape of mental contents” (Manuello et al., 2019, p. 12). We noted earlier, in discussing using metalanguage for reflection, that bottom-up attentional processes mobilize self-repairs, while top-down attention contributes to higherlevel processes like planning a story. Consciousness, availability of content, and attention are distinct and separate brain processes that are subservient to distinct networks, each feeding into the others. Consciousness does not depend on our will. No control of attention seems necessary for the subjective sense of being conscious about something or for constructing its content. Rather, consciousness is supported by a complex interplay of different networks.10 The thalamus, extensively connected with the cortex from which it receives feedback, plays a pivotal role in supporting consciousness. It is part of the default network that, as we know, is more active during rest than during attentive engagement with the environment. Also involved are the posteromedial parietal areas together with the medial frontal, anterior cingulate, and lateral parietal cortices, which are active when the brain is engaged in internal monitoring and in processing information related to self (Cavanna et al., 2013). In a state of phenomenal consciousness—the subjective quality of experiencing wakefulness that occurs without attention—bottom-up attention can be automatically triggered by external stimuli (visual, spatial, kinetic, or auditory) that are registered by modality-specific brain areas. Yet awareness of content requires control of attention, in which case fronto-parietal regions are recruited. These regions are necessary for both attention and focal awareness, involving distributed interactions between modality-specific and fronto-parietal regions. The initial steps of both conscious and unconscious perception of a stimulus occur in the same areas; but brain activity is more intense in the unconscious state of intake, as an active phase of anticipating and preparing for conscious intake (rather like being unconscious under anesthesia). Researchers have identified brain nodes whose activity is assumed crucial for progressively constructing conscious perceptions of the world. And this is also true of contents that can be reflectively accessed. But it is not yet clear where exactly the brain processes the advanced level of consciousness required for, say, adequately defining the meaning of a word or explaining why an expression is ambiguous. Do these reflective abilities reside in the self-same neural structures as those that analyze the attributes of the objects of attention (in

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the primary or secondary visual cortices, say) or are they, rather, achieved by the associative activity of the fronto-parietal system or global workspace? Whatever the case, whether the highest level of consciousness is attained in the central system of the brain or in its mode-specific cortices, the content of consciousness is constructed and refined progressively, being successively elaborated by different brain areas until completely processed. Three stages are said to account for this elaboration: subliminal, preconscious, and conscious (Dehaene et al., 2006). These were originally defined for visual stimuli, but we assume they apply to other domains as well. The first, subliminal stage is not strong enough to produce the emergence of conscious experience. The second, preconscious stage is strong enough to do so, but requires attention to produce a content that enters the brain’s central system. In other words, the preconscious stage seems confined to sensorimotor processors within occipito-temporal loops, so that the contents of this stage—although capable of arousing multiple levels of priming—cannot be reported. The third, conscious stage is able to do so and, at the same time, produce a reportable content that enters the global workspace when it is processed in the light of attention. Attentional resources provide different degrees of awareness to whatever content is involved, regulating their access and availability. Regardless of whether access to the highest levels of consciousness takes place in the neural structures that analyze the objects of attention or is finally attained in the brain’s central system, the different features of the stimuli are combined to enable a unified conceptualization. As we will see below (in Section 6.4), this gradualism characterizes the development of metalinguistic access in every area of language knowledge and use. Children do not move from implicit, unconscious processing of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon in referential-communicative uses of language to reflective access and explicit verbal reporting. Rather, in the early years, each type of content has its own behavioral indicators of what Karmiloff-Smith called implicit metaprocedures, attaining conscious control and reportability with age and maturation. Unfortunately, to date we can only infer the intermediate steps in this process from behavioral indicators. Neurobiological studies dealing with implicit processing as part of language acquisition, or with the activity of the brain while performing metalinguistic operations, have focused largely on metaphonological processing—perhaps because this has been assumed to be important for acquisition of reading, and so necessary for understanding how children become literate (Frost, 2012). Other domains of MA that we consider below in behavioral terms have attracted less attention in research on the brain. Recall the tasks in which participants are asked to remove (or add) a morpheme from a given word, say Driver, to construct a sentence, like Children are too young to … (‘drive’). Arredondo and associates (Arredondo et al., 2015) had 6- to 12-yearold children perform similar tasks orally during fMRI scanning.11 They found

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that such tasks yielded a stronger activation in the bilateral superior frontal gyri (SFG), and left middle and inferior frontal gyri (MFG, IFG), as well as anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), compared with whole-brain activation; in contrast, among adults performing the same tasks, stronger activation was found in the MFG and IFG. That is, children showed a more distributed activation, with more brain areas involved than adults performing a similar task. Other studies showed that two areas activated during metamorphological tasks in children (the left IFG and aSTG) also supported word structure and meaning (Friederici, 2002). And morphological competence and the activation of brain areas involved in phonological awareness were found to be significantly correlated in both English (Hoeft et al., 2007) and Chinese (Siok et al., 2004). These findings can be interpreted in two ways. One possibility is that morphological competence builds on phonological competence, so that the two are similarly supported by brain regions that drive phonological awareness. Another is that similar cognitive processes underlie children’s improvement in a broad range of metalinguistic abilities necessary for learning to read (Carlisle & Goodwin, 2013), all of which are supported by the functioning of similar temporal and parietal brain regions. Phonology and morphology were each shown to play a significant, and distinct, role in reading abilities of children aged 6 to 9 years (Arrendondo and associates, 2015), as compared with older children (aged 9 to 12), where only morphological competence explained differences in reading ability. These results are in line with earlier studies on different orthographies like English (Hoeft et al., 2007), Spanish, and Chinese (Siok et al., 2004). We conclude, on the basis of regretfully sparse neurological evidence, that how children develop, and how people employ MA in accessing various linguistic domains (phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax, semantics-pragmatics) eventually become integrated into a unified experience of language knowledge and use.

6.4 Developmental trajectories Metalinguistic abilities progress with age, supported by the protracted maturation of executive functions and the impact of literacy, which together yield top-down attentionally controlled and selective focus on different aspects of utterances. Only experts, however, attain the highest level of metalinguistic knowledge, and are able to explain in specialized terms the precise properties of different linguistic systems, even comparing them across languages. The developmental trajectory we trace here reflects a path that Karmiloff-Smith (1992, p. 17) views as true of learning in every domain of knowledge, including, obviously, language. For her, “Development and learning, seem to take two complementary directions”: they involve a gradual process of proceduralization, by which behavior becomes more automatic and less accessible to consciousness, and

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also a process of explicitation and increasing accessibility, by which information that was previously implicit becomes explicitly represented. Karmiloff-Smith characterizes the bottom-up shift from implicit to explicitly verbalized knowledge as a progressive process of ‘Representational Redescription’ (RR), “by which implicit information in the mind subsequently becomes explicit knowledge to the mind” (p. 18). This process occurs iteratively across three phases in each subdomain (in language, for example, pronouns and lexical expressions for reference, verb forms indicating tense and aspect for temporality, conjunctions marking connectivity). In the procedural Phase 1, learning is data-driven, aimed at successful performance. Each new representation is stored along with but not integrated into existing representations. For example, a 5-year-old boy described a picture series about a boy and a balloon vendor as follows: There’s a little boy in red. He’s walking along and he sees a balloon man and he gives him a green one, and he walks off home and it flies away into the sky, so he cries. Karmiloff-Smith argues that at Level 1, children cannot as yet make anaphoric reference to other entities in the discourse (for example, he does not refer to the balloon man) but adhere to mainly deictic reference (as explained in Chapter 2). They connect their utterances by reference to external data (the content of the picture) rather than by internal cohesion or a top-down global schema. The metaprocedural Phase 2 is system-internal. Children may disregard external data in the interests of internal, global level cohesion, with a decline in performance—regression in one aspect of a task at the expense of another (for example in narrative development, as discussed in Chapter 2). In the conceptual Phase 3, internal and external representations are reconciled, leading to improved performance based on integration of different levels of access—performing a task online, taking a top-down perspective, verbalizing this knowledge (KarmiloffSmith, 1985). Different levels of access yield age-related disparities in performance on apparently similar metalinguistic tasks. For example, five-year-olds can successfully repeat the last word they heard before a beep in a recorded story, no matter whether the word is an article, a noun, or a verb. But only in middle childhood or later can they define what is a word, or recognize that articles and prepositions, and not only nouns and verbs, are words. Importantly, changes in representation occur not only at the macro-developmental level, say from one year to another, but also at the micro-developmental level, in short-term repeated problem-solving. Unlike a Piagetian-type stage model, where a child can only be at one stage in a given period, the RR model allows a child to be simultaneously in a procedural phase in one subdomain and metaprocedural in another. If so many referential-communicative functions of language are realized without conscious reflection, what advantage is there to MA? We suggest that it is not simply an added layer superimposed on our knowledge of language, but an

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indispensable part of becoming a proficient language user. For one thing, it facilitates understanding and production of metalinguistic discourse, where people talk or write about language as an object (from How do you spell ‘magnificent’? to Can you suggest a better word than ‘magnificent’ in this context?). For another, it is necessary for processing certain types of figurative language, such as the novel metaphors, humor, lying, and irony discussed in Chapter 5, which often need some metalevel of linguistic analysis to be understood. Besides, as we detail in the next chapter, metalinguistics interacts powerfully with reading comprehension, text production, and L2 language learning. The neurobiological studies just reviewed showed how, for different kinds of stimuli, the content of consciousness is progressively constructed until conscious access is attained. Unfortunately, to date this research fails to track the path from the early (unconscious) processing of linguistic stimuli to the point where they become conscious and amenable to verbal report. As we noted, such studies mostly concern the neural correlates of phonological and morphological awareness with little or no attention to other aspects of language. Developmental research based on behavioral indicators does, however, support the gradual construction of consciousness in different domains of language structure and use, much in line with the three phases toward consciousness discussed above. That is why KarmiloffSmith (1986c) refused to restrict the notion of meta to conscious accessibility, arguing rather for an array of metaprocesses due to successive processes of RR from early acquisition up to the specialized abilities for conscious reflection on language use. The path of increasingly higher levels of conscious access to linguistic form begins with self-repairs and requests for clarification, as in examples (4) to (6). What researchers usually call MA emerges around age 5 or 6, coinciding with the time most children in Western societies learn to read and write. It is not surprising, then, that an extensive literature has been devoted to the contribution of MA to literacy learning and reading comprehension. Yet it turns out that the relation between literacy and metalinguistic knowledge is, at the very least, reciprocal (Tolchinsky et al., 2012). Numerous studies point to phonological awareness—the ability to consciously access the sound structure of words—as playing an important role in learning to read and write. Yet the very processes of learning to read and write (and particularly learning to spell) in themselves help children become aware of how words are structured out of sounds. This explains why illiterate adults who were unable to separate words into their subsyllabic elements (c-a-n-d-y) could do so six months after learning to read (Morais et al.,1979). Bilingualism and L2 learning are also favored sites for the study of developing MA. Researchers assume that constant confrontation with alternative ways of saying the same thing (e.g., closet/armoire, I can/je peux, it’s worthwhile/ça vaut le coup) heightens speakers’ attention to linguistic forms while enabling them to inhibit one of the alternatives depending on the context of use. This dual

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effect—increased attention to linguistic forms and constant need for executive control—explains why studies have found greater MA in bilinguals compared to their monolingual counterparts (Vorstman et al., 2009). Moving to metalinguistic development in different areas of language use, the French psycholinguist Jean Emil Gombert (1997) analyzed MA as based on linguistic information involving different linguistic domains: metaphonological, metasemantic, and metasyntactic knowledge—to which we add metapragmatics. Clearly, when people use language, they apply their linguistic knowledge at one and the same time in all these areas. Here we consider development of MA separately for these different systems as an analytical strategy for dealing with the topic typical in the research literature (Gillis & Ravid, 2003). But, importantly, these different facets of metalinguistic knowledge are eventually integrated into a unified, overarching construct.12 Phonological awareness precedes and feeds into awareness of morphological structure, metalinguistic analysis of the form and meaning of words develops rather later, while this emerges and consolidates before metaknowledge of syntactic structure, on the one hand, and of pragmatic communicative appropriateness, on the other.

6.4.1 Phonological awareness Children’s phonological awareness has sparked great interest among psycholinguists and educationists since the early 1970s (Mattingly, 1972) until today (Branum-Martin & Garnaat, 2015) (the Wikipedia entry for phonological awareness (n.d)) lists nearly seventy references). This could be because phonology evolves earlier than other linguistic domains and has the most concrete form, physically encoded through the organs of speech.13 Yet recognizing and manipulating the sound structure of words as objects draws on multifaceted abilities. It involves being able to isolate, delete, or manipulate the individual elements out of which words are constructed, at different structural levels: syllables (ac– tor in actor), onset-rime (/k/–/æt/in cat), body-coda (/kæ/–/t/), and phonemes (/k/–/æ/–/t/).14 Studies reveal a developmental progression in the size of individual elements as well as the level that children can explicitly access, going from single-syllable words like ‘cat,’ ‘dog,’ to longer ‘Siamese,’ ‘Labrador,’ and compound expressions like ‘cat-food,’ ‘dog-house’ (Goikoetxea, 2005; Share & Blum, 2005). Across languages, children are aware of syllables before phonemes. This makes sense, since syllables, but not phonemes, can be pronounced in isolation. When people talk, they combine phonemes to form syllables and words, so that a sound like t occurs at the beginning of today, in the middle of getting, and at the end of thought (the sound t is articulated/pronounced differently in these three words, but if you ask speakers what sound appears in all three words, they will say t). Studies of children’s phonological awareness at late preschool and early school

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age consistently reveal that conscious access to phonemes is a gradual development affected by the phonological properties and the writing system of the ambient language. The responses of 4- to 7-year-old Hebrew speakers when asked to identify similarities between words and to detect rhymes (Saiegh-Haddad, 2007) illustrate this development. Younger children were able to recognize a consonant phoneme in initial and final position in words they heard, but they could not isolate them out when asked what the word begins or ends with. Only first-graders who had started reading instruction had varying degrees of success with this type of metalinguistic segmentation. Recognizing phonemes involves implicit metaprocedural access whereas isolating and pronouncing them requires a higher level of awareness. Studies comparing phonological awareness in different languages (Nagy & Anderson, 1999; Tolchinsky et al., 2013) confirm that phonological awareness is affected both by the morpho-lexical structure of a language as well as by its writing system (a topic we expand on in Chapter 7). The first author of this book compared how 5-year-olds isolate syllables and phonemes in Cantonese, Hebrew, and Spanish (Tolchinsky et al., 2013), three languages that use different writing systems. Cantonese, a language with mainly monosyllabic words, is written in Chinese characters that represent morphemes rather than phonemes and, in most cases, a written character corresponds to a single morpheme and a single syllable (Mair, 1996). That is, units of meaning (morphemes) overlap with units of sound (syllables). Hebrew and Spanish are languages that share similarly simple syllable structure, most typically in the form of CV and CVC segments (e.g., gato ~ xatul ‘cat’) (Goikoetxea, 2005; Share & Blum, 2005). But they have different writing systems. The twenty-two letters in the Hebrew alphabet stand for consonants (e.g., the same letter ‫ ק‬stands for the syllables ka, ku, ki, ke).15 In contrast, Spanish has a canonical alphabetic writing system, where letters stand for consonants or vowels. In our study, children had to delete the first syllable from words containing three CV syllables (e.g., banana > nana), and to isolate the initial and final phoneme from CVC monosyllabic words (e.g., Hebrew kad ‘jug,’ Spanish mas ‘more’). We then examined how performance on these tasks related to the same children’s writing and reading of words in their language. The results showed that Cantonese and Spanish preschoolers were better at syllable deletion than at phoneme isolation, both for the initial or the final phoneme of a word, but Cantonese children outperformed Spanish and Hebrew preschoolers in syllable deletion. In contrast, Hebrew preschoolers performed the same on the two tasks (syllable deletion and phoneme isolation). They did better than Spanish and Cantonese preschoolers in final phoneme isolation, and could also delete initial syllables, but less proficiently than their Cantonese- and Spanish-speaking peers.

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Hebrew-speaking children showed a strong preference for CV strings as a unit of segmentation, a feature that may facilitate both initial syllable deletion and final phoneme isolation, which explains why they performed similarly on the two tasks. That is, although across different languages, syllables are accessed more easily than phonemes, the characteristics of a particular target language modify this tendency, here, by increasing the explicit access to syllables in Cantonese and to phonemes in Hebrew. These comparisons (where syllable deletion correlated with better performance in writing and reading in Cantonese and Spanish, as against phoneme isolation in Hebrew) show that children’s phonological awareness differed precisely in those linguistic features that contribute uniquely to successful writing and reading of words in their respective languages. These findings agree with the results of several studies (Carreiras & Perea, 2002; Goikoetxea, 2005; Tolchinsky & Teberosky, 1998), demonstrating that awareness of the syllable rather than the phoneme is important for writing and reading words in Spanish. Again, this is because a feature of Spanish (its predictable syllabic structure) is reinforced by its orthography. Additional evidence of the role played by writing in phonological awareness comes from the study of Vernon and Ferreiro (1999). They asked 5- to 6-year-olds Spanish speakers to segment words into ‘small pieces.’ Some children simply reiterated the entire word verbatim with only a change in intonation, others cut the word up into syllables and still others divided them into phonemes. They found that strategies of segmentation correlated more strongly with writing level than with age: how children segmented the target words had more to do with the way they wrote words than to how old they were. Together, these findings show that phonological awareness does not simply depend on age or stage of development but is mediated by the language and the characteristics of the orthography that children are learning. Phonological awareness is frequently taken to predict successful reading and writing acquisition, sometimes as a prerequisite for learning to read in alphabetic systems. Such studies highlight the correlation between phonemic awareness and learning to read (Goswami & Bryant, 1990), including in languages that do not use alphabetic writing systems (Nagy & Anderson, 1999). We agree that sensitivity to phonological features of the ambient language may be bolstered by early uses of oral language like onomatopoeia (compare Hebrew ~ English havhav ~ bowwow, kukuriku ~ cockadoodledoo), physical actions accompanied by formulaic expressions, like clap handies, giddy-up, and nursery rhymes (Jack and Jill went up the hill … ). Yet current research indicates that, rather than an ability that develops with age, phonemic awareness “requires learning to read with an alphabetic system,” and so is “a consequence of literacy and not a prerequisite for it” (Tolchinsky, 2003, pp. 188–191). This fact is confirmed by studies on illiterate adults that we discuss in Chapter 7.

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6.4.2 Morphological awareness What about MA in morphology, how words are built up out of their grammatical and semantic component parts (like roots, stems, and affixes)? Children’s spontaneous speech output shows that, from an early age, they attend to parts of words by applying metaprocedural processes. They are often even able to verbalize the content of this internal introspection, as in (9), utterances produced by 4-year-old girls thinking and talking about how to treat marking of plural and gender in their languages (Berman, 1979). (9a) If there is one, you have to say Schuh; if there are two, you have to say Schuhe (9b) But table is a boy, so why do you say shulxanot and not shulxanim? (9c) Why do they say persons rather than people?16 These little girls are working on the endings used to change words from singular to plural and from feminine to masculine in German, Hebrew, and English respectively. Such precocious comments on grammatical forms of plural nouns in different languages are far from expert formulation of rules and exceptions (e.g., ‘Most masculine gender nouns in Hebrew take the plural suffix -im, but some take the feminine ending -ot and need to be learned by rote as lexical exceptions’). But these children (bilingual daughters of (psycho)linguists, perhaps mere chance) show a precocious metalinguistic practice on the forms of language: they refer to words as objects to talk about, rather than using them to refer to actual shoes, tables, or people in the real world. In (10), a 6-year-old Spanish-speaking boy attempts to explain why verbs ending with the same suffix indicating imperfective aspect (-aba) must always be written with the same consonant (b), even though it may be pronounced differently in different phonetic environments. (10) Tiene que ir siempre con be porque es cantaba, bailaba, saltaba es como que lo hacen siempre. ‘(It) must go always with b [the name of the letter] because (it) is singing, dancing, jumping, it is like they are doing (this) always.’ The example in (11) is a more monitored instance of metamorphological awareness, from a high-school student explaining about exceptions in Hebrew pluralformation, translated into English. (11) It’s not so strange that the plural of the word for tables ends in feminine -ot, lots of words that end with the letter nun take a feminine plural like aronot ‘closets,’ melonot ‘hotels,’ shigonot ‘crazinesses.’ And in (12), an Israeli teenager manifests linguistically sophisticated analysis of written language when responding to a question based on the pun

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(discussed in Chapter 5) about why people eat a lot of soup in Morocco (Ashkenazi & Ravid, 1998). (12) The words marak [‘soup’] and maroko [‘Morocco’] share the same letters, the same root m-r-q. (p. 379) With age and literacy, children are increasingly able to access the structure of words and to report verbally on their analyses (Nagy et al., 2014). At first, this may take the shape of identifying grammatical components, by implicitly using different forms to change words from singular to plural, from present to past tense, from nouns to adjectives. Or children can talk about how this is done, for example, saying how grammatical elements are added to word stems, as in their comments on plural marking in (9). Young children also reveal awareness of morpho-lexical patterning in their language by novel coinages, innovating words that do not exist in the established vocabulary but could be words in their language. For example, preschoolers say things like ‘He’s not a repairman, he’s a fixer’; ‘That’s a violinist and that’s a hornist,’ or talk about ‘unrasing’ drawing errors. When Tom Roeper said of himself “I’m a slowpoke,” his daughter responded, “Well, I’m a fastpoke.”17 Along similar lines, in Hebrew, a preschool girl coined the word kadima-nit ‘forward-ly’ by analogy with the existing axora-nit ‘backwards’; a boy, aged 3;6, coined maglexa for ‘razor’ from the verb le-hitgaleax ‘to shave’ (from the root gl-h); other preschoolers coined words for ‘repairment’ from the verb le-taken ‘to fix’ as takan (cf. sapar ‘barber’) or taknay (cf. xaklay ‘farmer’); while a 4-year-old used novel mashketa for ‘sprinkler’ from the verb le-hashkot ‘to-water’ (instead of conventional mamtera). Such innovations show a remarkable sensitivity to word-structure and even to accepted form-meaning mappings of, say, agent and instrument nouns, well before children are instructed in reading and writing (Clark & Berman, 1984). They also show that children innovate in a way suited to the morphological structure of their language: by adding suffixes in English and by manipulating root consonants in switching verbs to nouns in Hebrew (Berman, 2000). Later, across grade school and beyond, this knowledge expands to cover a more sophisticated literate lexicon. For example, English-speaking high-schoolers can turn nouns into adjectives, not only by adding the ending -y as can toddlers (saying buttery, jammy analogously to dirty, soapy). Older students show that they recognize the relation between less common, more abstract nouns like industry, element, and their associated adjectives industrial, elementary (Carlisle, 2000; Mahony et al., 2000). By later high-school age, students can combine morphological segmentation with grammatical categorization and semantic interpretation. When presented with a group of words like consideration, considerate, considerable, they will say that all three come from the verb consider, that the first is a noun

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and the other two are adjectives, and they may even be able to explain the differences in meaning between them. These capacities are evidence of a more mature integration of metaprocessing at different levels of linguistic structure. Even more sophisticated MA appears in recognizing and explaining the grammatical and semantic difference between ambiguous terms. For example, the word considered is both past tense of the verb consider and an adjective meaning ‘thoughtful’ or ‘deliberate.’ Hebrew-speaking grade-school and high-school students and adults showed increasing sophistication in differentiating between words constructed from the same consonantal root, like xisun ‘vaccination’/xason ‘robust’; shetef ‘fluency’/shitafon ‘flood’ (Seroussi, 2004). This highlights the importance of recognizing word families as lexical items that share features of form and meaning (e.g., English view, viewer, review) and the grammatical knowledge that view can be both a verb and a noun, but viewer can only be a noun. An even more sophisticated level of MA is recognizing that a noun (but not an adjective) ending in -er in English will be only the name of a human agent or an inanimate instrument (compare the noun driver with the word drier which can be the name of a machine or an adjective meaning ‘more dry’). Only by high school can students alternate a compound made up of two nouns (English winter weather) with the corresponding adjective plus noun (wintry weather); and only experts can explain the difference in meaning between the two (Ravid, 2004; Ravid & Zilberbuch, 2003). Kuo and Anderson (2006) found that awareness of morphological structure emerges earlier in grammatical inflections (like marking of plural number or past tense), and only later for derivationally related, lexically based forms (like adjectives from the verb consider). This is supported by Diamanti and associates’ study (2018) of Greek-speaking 4- to 7-years-olds. The judgment tasks they used (e.g., Do both words start the same? Which of the words is longer?) showed that children found it harder to produce appropriate derivational morphemes than grammatical inflections. They also detected a staggered rather than all-or-nothing kind of metamorphological ability, with unconscious epilinguistic judgments appearing earlier than strictly metalinguistic comments.18 The precedence of metamorphological awareness in grammatical rather than lexical structure mirrors a general developmental trend in developing morphology: children gain command of across-the-board grammatical inflections earlier than less rule-bound processes for derivation of new words (Clark & Berman, 2004). This in turn is due to a perhaps self-evident fact: children need to have at least partial command of a given linguistic domain before they can reflect on it metalinguistically. A second conclusion of Kuo and Anderson (2006) points at a reciprocal relationship between morphological awareness and reading development analogous to what we suggested for phonological awareness. The view that reading enhances morphological development explains why younger readers, like less literate people

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in general, will not be sensitive to the subparts shared by words (they give the example of ante- in words like antecedent). For example, young schoolchildren find it hard to recognize the semantic and morphological difference between the prefix re- in words like review, retreat compared with reword, rebuild; or between the suffix -y in words like naughty, pretty with its function in dirty, sunny. Segmenting out a prefix like re- or a suffix like -y from its stem in English is a straightforward morphological strategy. But it is quite a challenge when faced with more complex form-meaning relations (as in the English adjectives based on consider or families of words built up out of consonantal roots in Hebrew or Arabic): these require a metalinguistic capacity that depends a lot on size and sophistication of vocabulary development. Another way of testing MA is by how children recognize cognates, words that have similar form and meaning in different languages (for example the Spanish/English nouns instrument/instrument or adjectives brilliante/brilliant). Studies found that Spanish-speaking children with high phonological awareness in their first language did better at learning to read words in English, and that morphological awareness helped them take advantage of cognate words in both L1 and L2. These abilities increased from 4th to 8th grade, as MA consolidated in early adolescence, underlining the close connection between vocabulary knowledge and morphological sensitivity. Morphological awareness is particularly impacted by the nature of the target language.19 For example, consonants are more salient than vowels in all languages (they are acoustically more strident, and most languages have more consonants than vowels). Yet in Semitic ‘root-based’ languages like Hebrew and Arabic, which have consonantal writing systems, children from early school age pay particular attention to consonants as playing an important role in morphology. For example, they recognize quite early on ‘families’ of words that share the same root consonants (e.g., the radicals G-D-L all relate to the idea of ‘large size’ in the words gadol ‘big,’ gadal ‘grew bigger,’ gidel ‘raised (crops, a family),’ gidul ‘growth,’ me-gudal ‘over-grown,’ migdal ‘tower,’ gadlut ‘grandeur’) (Ravid, 2012). Other considerations affect morphological awareness of English-speaking children. They first attend to endings for grammatical forms, like plural -s (pronounced s, z, or iz) and past tense -ed (t, d, id). A little later, they become aware of endings that change the lexical class of words (noun dirt to adjective dirty, verb teach to noun teacher). But it takes until late school age before they are aware of form-meaning relations between structurally complex word-pairs like recognize/recognition, compare/comparative. Morphological awareness also shows similar developmental trends across different languages: (i) early MA shows up in judgment tasks, identifying correct versus incorrect usages; at later school age, children can perceive and also produce shared morphological patterns (e.g., the endings -ness or -able in English) and form-meaning relations (abstract nouns and adjectives of potentiality in these two

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examples); (ii) sensitivity to grammatical patterning emerges before awareness of word-family relations; and (iii) awareness of word-structure facilitates learning to read, while being able to read and write heightens this sensitivity. As noted, pedagogical research highlights phonological awareness, and morphological awareness may initially depend heavily on phonological cues. But, with age, attending to the structure of words interacts increasingly with lexical and syntactic growth, and becomes more important for interpreting new words encountered in reading or conversation. Psychologists compare active vocabulary—words children use in their spoken and written production—and potential vocabulary—words they can coin and understand based on their morphological knowledge (Nagy et al., 2014). Our analysis of MA both confirms and underlines a related, more general property of language development across languages, children, and linguistic domains: perceptive knowledge precedes and exceeds productive abilities in all facets of language learning and use.

6.4.3 Lexical awareness Morphological awareness of the relations between word-form and word-meaning is both fed by and feeds into vocabulary growth. The richer a person’s lexicon— first as a list of separate words and later as a network of interrelated items—the more developed her or his lexical awareness. But what is a word? Few notions have such an intuitive, everyday sense and yet evoke so much debate. Many linguists even dismiss the possibility of finding a definition that can apply to all languages. People’s idea of a word is typically pre-theoretical (Blanche-Benveniste, 1994). If you ask a person to give you an example, you will most probably get a noun in response, rarely a verb, and never a pronoun or preposition. Nouns are considered more word-like than other lexical categories, probably because they have more readily detectable referents. The Swiss psycholinguistic Ioanna Berthoud-Papandropoulou (1978) found that at age 5 years, children recognized that nouns denoting real-world referents were words, but it took until age 10 to 11 before they consistently recognized as words items in closed class categories (so-called ‘function words’) like articles, pronouns, or conjunctions.20 Following earlier observations of Piaget (1926) and Vygotsky (1986), she interpreted this as showing that children find it hard to separate a word as a sign from its meaning (see Chapter 5). It took until late middle childhood before children could appreciate the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the linguistic sign and the entity that it represents. For example, Berthoud-Papandropoulou (1978) found that when they were asked how many words there are in the sentence ‘six boys are playing,’ many young children respond ‘six words.’ Others confused word with phrase boundaries and answered

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‘two words,’ standing for ‘[six boys] [are playing],’ a response also found in other languages such as Russian (Karpova, 1966). As we noted in Chapter 1, even infants can segment the continuous stream of speech into words. Well before school age, children string together several lexical items in their ordinary use of language, while by age 10 or so they can effectively combine both open-class words (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and closed-class grammatical items (pronouns, articles, conjunctions). In doing so, children show that, quite early, they internally represent such items, at some level, as words. Even young children recognize the boundaries of both open and closed class words (with some early exceptions, such as formulaic combinations like wazzat? for ‘what’s that?’ wanna for ‘want to,’ leggo for ‘let go’).21 But outside of their ordinary use of language, it takes quite a few years for children to access all the different lexical classes in their language as words. Karmiloff Smith and her associates (1996) proposed that even preschoolers have an internal representation of word. She found that they could recognize as words both closed- as well as open-class items in the context of ordinary language use, rather than in a metalinguistic task where they had to provide examples or count words. To test this, she had 4- and 5-year-olds listen to a story where the narrator every now and then paused to ask What was the last word I said? causing an interruption in the online stream of speech. Being able to extract and then repeat a single unit from online speech output turns this into an offline, metalinguistic task that depends on their representation of a word in the input they received. Nearly all 5-year-olds but less than half the 4-year-olds detected both open- and closedclass categories in their responses. That is, by late preschool age, but not before, children are sensitive to closed- as well as open-class items as having the status of words. Karmiloff-Smith then had them repeat, say, the last thing the narrator said, to see whether they distinguished between a word and its referent. As against the Piagetian view (Piaget, 1926), they found that 5-year-olds did distinguish between thing and word, between the referent and its sign, both for open- and closed-class items. Like phonological and morphological awareness, lexical awareness is a matter of degree, it develops across childhood, rather than emerging abruptly at 6 or 7 years of age. Here, too, there is an intricate interplay between MA and literacy. This was demonstrated by a study that compared late preschool children with illiterate and semi-literate adults (with up to six years of elementary schooling) from different language backgrounds (Tarifit, Somali, Turkish) in a Dutch-speaking environment (Kurvers et al., 2006). Different tasks assessed various domains of MA: phonological (e.g., judging and producing rhymes), morphological (segmenting words into parts), lexical/semantic (is X a word? does X stand for Y?), syntactic (dividing sentences into parts), and textual (does this make sense?). The study found significantly greater differences between illiterate and literate adults than between children and adults. For example, phonologically, most illiterate adults did not

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divide words into sublexical units (sounds or syllables), whereas young children segmented words into syllables and literate adults segmented them into phonemes. Lexico-semantic tasks also revealed similar between-group differences: about half the children and all the literate adults but very few of the illiterate adults could perform a game where they were asked to mention qualities of animals whose names are changed (recall the example from Vygotsky of cow ~ dog in Chapter 5). Illiterates considered that names cannot be changed, because they are given by God or because it would not make sense to do so (‘Why would you do that? Even if we agreed to change the names, the dog would not listen to you’). In line with Karpova (1966), Berthoud-Papandropolou (1978), and Gombert (1997), but in contradiction to Karmiloff-Smith et al. (1996), the Dutch researchers (Kurvers et al., 2006) concluded that content words—nouns, verbs, or adjectives—have a much higher ‘word status’ than function words—articles, prepositions, conjunctions—and that “For most illiterate adults, language is a referential system and a medium of communication, but not an object accessible to reflection, or a string of elements that can be parsed into structural units” (p. 84). Being able to segment strings of verbal material into their component parts— words into syllables, syllables into sounds, utterances into words—is closely connected to the general cognitive domain of pattern recognition, which many researchers see as the most basic facet of language acquisition (Behrens, 2009; Seidenberg, 1997). For example, English-speaking schoolchildren will recognize that the words sunny, dirty, sandy are built up of the same parts, in ways that are both similar to and different from a group of words like slowly, strangely, stupidly. Awareness of form-meaning relations between words requires sensitivity to lexical ambiguity, where the same word has more than one meaning (e.g., He gave the waitress a big tip; The tip of the knife was broken; She gave a cooking tip to her friend; and Be careful not to tip the glass).22 A study of Dutch grade-school children (Corthals, 2010) showed they had a hard time defining the different meanings of words that were spelled or sounded the same (e.g., ‘bear’ = an animal, to carry, bear ~ bare). MA in the lexicon also means being able to distinguish what is or is not a word in one’s language. Interestingly, children can early on differentiate real and pseudo-words (for example, let, lot, lut or sitter, bitter, mitter in English), showing that they have a large enough vocabulary and are also sensitive to phonological factors of syllable structure in their language (e.g., bwana is a common word in Bantu languages, but clearly not native to English; raison ending in a nasalized vowel is clearly French compared with the cognate English reason or semantically unrelated raisin). Children raised as bilinguals have an advantage on explicit metalexical access, since from early on they can alternate freely between, say, kitchen/cuisine,

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shoes/chaussures. When a 2-year-old answers her monolingual grandmother: ‘No, nana, not maison, house,’ she shows that she intuitively knows how to set off ‘a word’ in the two (or more) languages she knows (Berman, 1979). Psychologists interested in measuring vocabulary at different developmental periods appeal not only to the breadth of children’s vocabulary—how many words they recognize—but also to the depth of their lexical knowledge, how well they grasp the relations between words. This is more than the morphological ability of recognizing or constructing words that are structurally related in word families (Ouellette & Shaw, 2014). Vocabulary depth also means being able to recognize semantic relations between words—by providing synonyms and antonyms for a word (nice means pleasant, not nasty) and being able to give definitions for words (an apple is a kind of fruit). The ability to define words is at the top end of performance on the spectrum of lexical skills; it is the strongest indicator of vocabulary depth, and requires the highest level of MA. Definition is a prototypical expression of MA, since it calls for explicit reflection on what a word means (whatever that means) and how it is used in different contexts and for different purposes. Giving a fully adequate and explicit definition that refers to the distinguishing features of the target term is a formidable task for grade-school children, continuing to adolescence and even adulthood (Nagy, 2007). It depends on the complex cognitive ability to center on criterial properties at the expense of other, attributive features of an entity (for example, a pencil is criterially an instrument for writing and contains lead, while it may but need not have the attributes of being yellow or black, sharp or blunt). Consider the different levels of definition in the constructed examples in (13), in response to the question ‘What is a pen?,’ ranked in order of increasing specificity and unambiguousness. (13) 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

You write with it. A thing you write with. An instrument that you write with. An instrument for writing. An instrument for writing in ink. An instrument for writing in ink. It can be in the form of a ballpoint or fountain pen with a nib. 7. It can be either an instrument for writing in ink or a place with a fence where animals like pigs or sheep are kept.

All seven definitions mention the function of the item in question, but only (13-2) to (13-7) define the term: (13-2) and (13-3) use the syntactic form of a relative clause (that) you write with as a canonical way for restricting the scope of reference of a term; (13-3) also adds a higher-order category label ‘instrument,’ so reducing the range of possible referents to inanimate objects; (13-4) uses a more

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semantically specific form of definition by the preposition for to indicate the function or purpose of the object; (13-5) distinguishes the object from other similar instruments like a pencil or stylus; (13-6) goes beyond a definition of its function to provide different subtypes of the object. The examples in (13-4) to (13-6) illustrate pure Aristotelian definitions, in the set form of ‘an X is (a kind of ) class name that specifies a defining attribute or property.’ Only (13-7) takes into account that the word may be ambiguous, that there is a less common use of the term with a different, semantically unrelated sense of a place rather than an object. Even preschool children can give definitions that show they are familiar with both the word and its referent, and which are correct as far as they stand, like (13-1) and (13-2). Yet these are typically general, vague and inadequate. Litowitz (1977) analyzed definitions given by preschoolers and young schoolchildren (ages 4;5 to 7;5) at five levels of adequacy: (i) a semantically empty statement, like ‘It’s something like this’ (deictic pointing); (ii) word associations, like ‘pencil’ or ‘paper’ for ‘pen’; (iii) a concrete example of a relevant activity, like ‘when you write’; and (iv) some sense of ‘a definitional form’ with a set predicate and an initial abstract from individual experience to general social circumstances—as in examples (13-1) and (13-2). Litowitz’s study failed to elicit fully adequate (level v) definitions, no doubt due to the young age of her participants, so underlining the relatively late development of the MA and formulations involved in linguistic definition. A complementary study by McGhee-Bidlack (1991) elicited definitions from older students (aged 10, 14, and 18 years). Even the youngest group in middle childhood could give what the author terms ‘characteristic responses’: they defined concrete nouns largely by referring to relevant superordinate categories (like instrument for pen). Only the oldest group of adolescents provided adequate definitions for abstract nouns like beauty, courage, freedom. McGhee-Bidlack concludes, first, that the ability to define depends on both knowledge of what a word means and familiarity with the ‘definitional form’; and, second, that the ability to define abstract nouns is a late developing metalinguistic skill. These observations are in line with a study of Hebrew-speaking students aged 11 to 12 and 15 to 16 years, compared with adults (Seroussi, 2016), which also found a significant developmental difference in both semantic specificity and structural appropriateness of definitions. Older participants were far more successful defining abstract compared with concrete nouns (like the Hebrew words for thought, contempt compared with table, scissors). Only the adults regularly provided (near) synonyms or antonyms in defining abstract terms (e.g., idea or concept for thought, lack of respect for contempt). This study, again, highlights familiarity with an advanced lexicon combined with metalinguistic sophistication in providing verbal explanations for word-meanings: the crowning achievement of using ‘language for reflection’ and a domain that continues well beyond the school years.

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6.4.4 Syntactic awareness As in other domains of linguistic structure, syntactic metalinguistic awareness involves different abilities that develop gradually. Even before age 3 to 4, children construct grammatical sentences, react similarly to alternative wordings of the same request (‘Can you give me that?’ ‘Please give me that?’), and produce different formulations for similar messages. But how far do they have conscious access to the procedures involved in using language to structure their utterances as statements, requests, or questions? To probe development of syntactic MA, researchers often ask children to repeat sentences, both well-formed and anomalous, on the assumption that the task reveals awareness of syntactic structure. Bohannon & Nel (1975) had children in preschool, 2nd, and 4th grade both repeat and judge sentences of varying grammaticality. The two tasks require different degrees of explicit access: repetition is closer to ordinary processing, while judgment requires more explicit reflection, a difference that was reflected in the study. The older children produced more accurate judgments, but there were no age differences in the repetition task. Even 3- to 4-year-olds could choose between, say, All the boys came/comed to school, showing that young children’s sense of what is grammatical—whether an utterance is well-formed in their language—emerges in tasks that require a relatively low level of explicit access. Bohannon also found a connection between kindergarten children’s scores on scales of ‘reading readiness’ and how they judged sentence correctness, which she took as evidence for a relationship between the two types of metalinguistic skills. More recent studies (Polišenska´ et al., 2015) demonstrate, however, that although children aged 4 to 5 years are able to repeat sentences accurately, they tend to omit or make changes in grammatical items (like pronouns, auxiliaries, determiners) more than in content words (verbs, nouns, adjectives). They appear to focus on propositional content rather than syntactic form: as long as meaning is preserved (in keeping with the content words), grammatical items are not retained in working memory and so not repeated. Children are able to repeat sentences they hear from a young age, on condition they are grammatically well-formed, contain only familiar words, and are up to four words long (due to short-term memory constraints). Children’s early concern with propositional content also emerged in a study by Henry and Lila Gleitman (1979), where children aged 5 to 8 years were asked whether a deviant sentence sounded good or silly. Clear age-related differences emerged: younger children responded in terms of subjective significance. For example, they might reject the sentence I am eating dinner because they don’t like to eat dinner, showing they have difficulty separating out sentence structure and propositional intent. Similarly, Carr (1979) found that younger preschool children (age 2 to 5 years), tended to judge anomalous sentences, deviating from

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their ordinary or expected meaning, on the basis of what was asserted rather than on how they were constructed. By early school age, children show a higher level of MA in judging whether an utterance is well-formed, evaluating that it both makes semantic sense and is syntactically constructed by the accepted rules of grammar. In a study of Italian 7- to 9-year-olds, Pontecorvo and associates (1989) queried how conscious children are of the relative weight of grammatical form compared with semantic meaning in judging a sentence as (un)acceptable. After reading a sentence, participants were asked to use one or two other words that they were given, instead of those in the original sentence, or else they had to say where the new word(s) would go best. For example, given the (Italian) sentence ‘Jean’s grandfather always uses spectacles when he reads the newspaper,’ they were asked to substitute robin (in place of grandfather) and embroiders (in place of reads) (p. 41). After making the replacements, children were asked whether the ‘new’ sentence was acceptable, and to explain why, giving reasons for their judgment. In some cases, inserting the new words yielded sentences that were grammatically correct but not semantically meaningful, in others they were grammatically flawed but made sense semantically, and so on. Children thus had to overcome the conflict between syntactic structure and semantic content, focusing attention on one or the other. For example, when asked to insert the word papa´ ‘daddy’ in the sentence Il giardino di mia nonna é pieno di fragole rosse ‘My grandmother’s garden is full of red strawberries,’ children more often produced a sentence with a morphological error (e.g., Il giardino di mia papa´ pieno di fragole rosse where mia is feminine for ‘my’ but papa´ is a masculine noun), rather than the semantically anomalous Il papa´ di mia nonna é pieno di fragole rosse ‘The daddy of my grandmother is full of red strawberries’ (p. 46). Children in all three age groups (7, 8, and 9 years) preferred to create grammatically incorrect but semantically acceptable sentences rather than the other way round, indicating that, up to middle childhood, children have difficulty in controlling for focus of attention (concentrating on grammatical structure at the expense of semantics). Yet the study also showed that the 9-year-olds did better than the two younger groups, both in judging the grammatically incorrect but meaningful sentences as anomalous and in correcting the grammatically incorrect sentences when reading them aloud. On the other hand, even 9-year-olds gave fewer morphosyntactic explanations (e.g., ‘because it is masculine, like the word that went before’) than other types of explanation. They revealed explicit access to morphosyntactic features of their language, but were unable to put into words why this was the case. The authors of the study took this to mean that “for 9-year-old-children, the semantic aspects of the language system are objects of metalinguistic awareness, whereas the morpho-syntactic aspects are still mainly objects of a metaprocedural activity” (Pontecorvo et al., 1989, p. 50), following Karmiloff-Smith’s (1986c)

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proposal of metaprocedural processes as a developmental phase where linguistic representations are accessed implicitly at a level between ordinary and MA. Children’s more abstract representations of syntactic structure from late preschool through middle childhood are attested by various methodologies. Studies include priming methods and response-time tests (Savage et al., 2003) in processing reversible versus irreversible syntactic strings—for example, Japanesespeaking children found it easier to process strings that were semantically not interchangeable (‘the dog ate a strawberry’ versus ‘the dog chased the pig’) (Suzuki, 2013)—and being able to reorganize scrambled strings of words, for example reordering a string like ‘of the cat out the box jumped’ to form a grammatical sentence (Kaplan, 2007). Reordering strings of jumbled words into grammatical sentences is common in L2 teaching and is recommended in pedagogical manuals for grade- and middle-school English-language classes, as evidence of students’ command of the elusive notion of ‘sentence sense.’ Syntactic awareness of syntactic ambiguities is a late-developing ability in constructions like The chicken is ready to eat (who will do the eating?) or The man is poking the monkey with a banana (who has the banana?). Asking children to identify pictures out of two that showed such scenarios, Zimmer (2016) found that few 4- to 7-year-olds showed access to syntactic ambiguity in the sentences they heard, while most appeared not to realize that both scenes could be described by the same sentence. She relates this to early reading success in 1st and 2nd grades, noting that even older children who showed some awareness of this ambiguity (by selecting both pictures, say) were unable to give adequate explanations for their insight. Again, metalinguistic access depends on knowledge of the relevant structures, but does not guarantee conscious understanding of what causes the ambiguity, let alone ability to word this knowledge explicitly. A type of syntactic ambiguity that has attracted attention among psycholinguists is the case of relative clauses that describe a noun phrase that serves as grammatical subject of a sentence and so is embedded inside it (compare the boy the girl saw fell versus the more transparent the boy that the girl saw fell or the ungrammatical the boy the girl fell) (Arnon, 2010; Friedmann & Novogrodsky, 2004). It takes until late school age for students to understand what is going on in such opaque constructions, let alone to explain why they are or are not anomalous. This could be done, for example, by pointing out that in the string the boy the girl saw fell, it was the boy that fell and the girl that saw him, while the string the boy the girl fell only says that the girl fell and there is nothing to tell us what the boy did. (Confused? So are we, but these conundrums are beloved of formal linguists.) So how do children cope with such puzzles? They do better when (i) an overt morphological marker serves to indicate who did what to whom (e.g., the girl saw the boy who fell) or when (ii) only one interpretation makes semantic sense (e.g., the girl saw the cat licking milk). Such late-developing abilities have been assessed mainly by studies of comprehension through picture-selection. Metalinguistic access to

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such complex constructions might better be tested by presenting them to younger children in more transparent contexts (like cats licking milk rather than boys and girls seeing or falling), so that children can process them in relation to real-world alternatives. These examples show that resolving syntactic ambiguities requires top-down conscious access to analyzing sentence structure at an abstract level of representation. It involves both advanced knowledge of linguistic structure and cognitive flexibility to recognize that the same string of words in the same verbal context can be interpreted in more than one way, to perceive the difference between constructions that appear on the surface to have the same structure. The task of paraphrasing, changing the form of a sentence without changing its content words or its meaning, is beyond the capacity of younger children. One task is to have students combine clauses in different syntactic constructions (e.g., to reword the sentence It was raining, so they cancelled the picnic using the word because to yield They cancelled the picnic because of the rain ~ because it was raining). These are cognitively as well as linguistically challenging tasks for processing syntactic structures, and they develop only at late school age. As in other linguistic domains—phonology, morphology, lexicon—awareness of syntactic structure is a staggered ability in both command of structure and level of awareness. Children’s initial focus on propositional content rather than syntactic form interacts with level of access. In tasks that are closer to ordinary language use, like repetition, children can focus on some aspects of syntactic structure by late preschool age. Yet accessing how these constructions are built up out of their component parts, let alone giving a verbal explanation for this understanding, come later. In this, as in other verbal and cognitive domains, judging whether an utterance is anomalous is easier than identifying the source of the anomaly, and this in turn is easier than rewording it correctly—as meta-activities that emerge before being able to explain why they are the case. The highest level of syntactic MA is manifested when speakers are able to explicitly put into words why an utterance has more than one interpretation, why it is not acceptable, or why two different constructions do or do not mean the same. In Karmiloff-Smith’s model of RR, this means having gone beyond procedural and even metaprocedural access to the conceptual level, where objects of knowledge (in this case, of sentence structure) are abstractly represented as entities that are amenable to conscious explanation in words. While not necessarily requiring the expert level of the specialist linguist, this does involve high levels of linguistic experience, sophistication, and literacy.

6.4.5 Pragmatic awareness The lexical and morpho-syntactic forms employed in referential-communicative uses of language also serve to convey speaker-writer attitudes and social norms

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(in expressions like ‘black is beautiful,’ or the outdated ‘gentlemen prefer blondes’) (Kim, 2014; Shively & Cohen, 2008). We have seen that, developmentally, the content and structure of such expressions becomes increasingly amenable to awareness. It makes sense that the socio-pragmatic aspects of a language will also, with time, become subject to internal introspection and, later on, eventually amenable to verbal reportability. Social learning plays a role in developing MA, as young people use language in more varied communicative contexts. Arguing against the focus on syntax and semantics of twentiethcentury linguistics, the anthropological linguist Michael Silverstein (1993) takes a pragmatically motivated metalanguage stance, using cross-linguistic and crosscultural evidence to promote a socially-anchored view of how people convey verbal content. The anthropologist John Gumperz (1978) likewise notes that, in order to communicate, speakers must make inferences about the structure of conversation, for example, whether a particular linguistic interaction is an idle exchange of greetings, a quarrel, or imparts important information. Mertz and Yovel (2009) conclude their study of different approaches to MA as follows: Across multiple arenas … we see a convergent interest in the role of metalinguistic structure, awareness, and use … fueled by growing evidence that metalinguistic function and ideology exert a great deal of influence on language, at the same time as they form a crucial nexus with social processes. Thus both linguists interested in the structure and use of language, and scholars interested in studying social change and power, can find an exciting meeting-ground in the study of metalinguistic awareness. (p. 20)

We agree that a sophisticated level of MA requires going beyond linguistic structure and semantics to include a metapragmatic recognition of the social norms and accepted beliefs implied by what people say or write, well beyond the surface form of the words they use (Szu¨cs & Babarczy, 2017). One facet of language use of socio-linguistic, culturally bound meaning is register. As discussed in Chapter 3, people use language to suit different communicative circumstances, from elevated, carefully monitored writing and academic lecturing via an everyday more neutral level of language use to unbuttoned, colloquial speech between intimates. Studies demonstrate increased awareness of register as a function of age and literacy development in English. For example, Corson (1984) showed that British adolescents’ (aged 12 to 15 years) use of a more sophisticated lexicon in academic settings was strongly impacted by social factors of class and ethnicity. Similar observations emerged for native speaker-writers of Californian English aged 9, 12, and 16 years old compared with adults (Bar-Ilan & Berman, 2007): more advanced, high-register words of Graeco-Latin origin compared with their more everyday Germanic counterparts (e.g., conversation/chat,

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construct/build, elevated/high) were favored in written more than in spoken discourse, in narrative compared with expository texts, and by older compared with younger participants. A comparable database in Hebrew, based on languagespecific features of register (Ravid & Berman, 2009), showed that (i) lexical usage was a better criterion of register than morpho-syntax; and (ii) across measures, high-school adolescents were more sensitive than younger students to level of language use in written versus spoken texts and in narrative versus expository genres of discourse. Register variation as a sign of metapragmatic sensitivity to different communicative circumstances differs by language, so that awareness of sociolinguistically appropriate options is a special burden for foreign language learners. In French, for example (Jisa, 2004), educated speakers use a distinct lexicon in more formal compared with colloquial situations. They deploy different morpho-syntax in speaking versus writing (e.g., forms of past tense verbs, lexical versus pronominal subject phrases, and passive voice instead of impersonal on). In contrast, Swedish reflects a democratic tendency to flattening distinctions between high-level formal language use and everyday colloquial style, while Hebrew and English lie somewhere between these two extremes. Less educated people are also sensitive to differences between colloquial and formal registers. Blanche Benveniste (1982) organized theater sessions in which a group of French-speaking adolescents with little formal schooling had to perform roles representing characters of different social status— a school principal, an army officer, a janitor. Even these relatively untutored teenagers introduced some formal vocabulary and high-register grammatical forms like the passé simple verb tense when depicting characters with higher social status. In contrast, non-native speakers, even ones proficient in a second or third language and of well-educated backgrounds, have a hard time commanding such socially-sensitive awareness. They may use slang in formal circumstances, and bookish types of expressions in everyday communication. The examples in (14) and (15) from teenage blogs (Bogetic, 2016) demonstrate the complexity of linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities involved in MA, flourishing in adolescence. (14) Laurie, aged 15 (2013) A rant about anything and everything Ok here we go, point 1) I hate it when people message me all “Hey I like you” or “Whad upppp gurl” (First off, use english but that’s a later point) … Point number 2) Does anyone around here use proper english or grammar? I’m sick of people who say like every other word, and I’m sick of people who don’t understand common spelling and don’t know how to punctuate or capitalize. It’s one small little button so don’t give me that crap.

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(15) Tina, aged 17 (2012) List Of Things That Bug Me. Agree? Here comes a favorite rant of mine: those of you who talk like idiots. Oh my. I’m going to try and be quite calm on this, because it angers me so. I’m a lenient gal. I don’t mind if you aren’t the best speller. I don’t mind if grammar and punctuation confuses you. Well, that’s a lie. I do mind, but if you’re a cool person, I can look over that. But. BUT. ‘U’ is a letter, and should not be used as a whole word. To my knowledge, in the English language, the only letters that can also be used as words are ‘A’ and ‘I.’ Notice that ‘R’ is also not on that list … In these blog texts, teenagers express negative attitudes to the language of their peers, using an unbuttoned style of writing (rather, digital typing) favored by young people in contemporary communication. They also reflect students’ concern with literacy-related issues of language usage like correct grammar, spelling, and the impact of blogger keying. As we explore further in the next chapter, these concerns are closely connected to the development of literacy.

6.5 Metalinguistic awareness and figurative language What, if any, is the difference between metalinguistic and figurative uses of language (as discussed in Chapter 5)? On the one hand, understanding and producing figurative language and being aware of the forms employed for verbal expression (figurative as well as non-figurative) seem closely related skills. Both require going beyond implicit knowledge of the structural properties—phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic—which people recruit for ordinary language use. Both need people to differentiate between form and meaning, to focus on the intended meaning, to mind-read their interlocutors’ intentions, and to attend to contextual appropriateness. Yet different types of figurative use may require distinct degrees of conscious access while, as noted, different degrees of MA may be needed to access different types of verbal material. The relation between these two issues is therefore not simple. Conventional idioms and established metaphors are part of the mental lexicon of speaker-writers, and so may be mobilized automatically, by force of circumstances, with minimal attentional control and explicit reflection. Besides, metalinguistic commentaries that function as online commentary on use of words (as in example (3) above) seem to be produced rather automatically, although they may help to clarify the metaphorical status of an utterance (Leezenberg, 2008). In contrast, more conscious metalinguistic skills are needed to successfully solve some of the tasks that researchers use to examine metaphor understanding and production. In fact, when children are asked to paraphrase or to explain metaphorical sentences, it is not only their basic metaphorical understanding that

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is being measured but also their ability to put this understanding into words. Young children do very poorly on this kind of task; they seem unable to paraphrase metaphorical expressions correctly until early adolescence (Winner et al., 1976). Pouscoulous and associates (2007) showed that asking children to explain metaphors may conceal how much they have actually understood, so tapping into a lower level of awareness but not necessarily lower levels of understanding metaphor. Children’s appreciation of linguistic humor and identifying what causes the comic effect call on different degrees of MA. As noted in Chapter 5, Ashkenazi & Ravid’s (1998) study on Hebrew speakers from grade school to adulthood showed that, with age, participants’ explanations were increasingly more metalinguistically explicit, making use of well-defined linguistic categories (e.g., ‘The words marak and maroko share the same letters, the same root m-r-q’). Metalinguistic skills are also necessary for sustaining lying behavior, because liars must keep track of their earlier justifications. This may require (metalinguistic) control of the exact wording. As discussed in Chapter 5, lying requires conscious monitoring of expression that is far stricter and less automatic than ordinary use of language. Along similar lines, how can children appreciate the difference between humorous, sarcastic, or ironical remarks as against genuine compliments unless they have some awareness of the forms which express these nuances? To interpret the functioning of verbal irony, for example, people need to mobilize metapragmatic abilities, to consider the link between a linguistic expression per se and the social-communicative context in which it appears, as well as the intentions and knowledge of the interlocutors (Gombert, 1992). These abilities, too, observe a process of gradually increasing conscious access and reportability. Harris and Pexman (2003) used puppets to test the abilities of children aged 5 to 6 and 7 to 8 years to understand the humorous or aggressive intent of ironic comments compared with literal criticisms and compliments. One such script was of a 7-year-old girl who spent an entire Saturday with her father cleaning the house and cutting the lawn. When she came home, Martha’s mother commented to her husband: “You sure have been lazy today” (p. 147). The researchers found that early school age children were able to detect an ironic intent, but could not interpret such ironically humorous use of language in an adult-like way, let alone explain the incongruence between the ironic statements and the situation they depicted. Hess Zimmermann (2021) and associates focused more directly on metapragmatic reflections of adolescents aged 12 and 15, by asking them to comment on the function of two types of non- prototypical ironic statement: ironic gratitude (e.g., Gracias por llegar a tiempo ‘thank you for being on time’ to someone who arrives an hour late) and ironic suggestions (¡Vamos a un karaoke para que alegres a todos! ‘Let’s go to a karaoke to make everyone happy’ to someone who cannot sing) (p. 22). They wanted to discover whether adolescents would identify the

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social functions of irony—to attenuate criticism, to raise the status of the speaker vis-à-vis the addressee, to save face, as a mark of intimacy, etc.—which require being aware of people’s attitudes and the power relations between interlocutors (Filippova, 2005). Participants were given different written stories, controlling for the social status of protagonists and the occurrence of ironic statements, and then asked to say what function the ironic statement had in the story. Most 12-year-olds found it difficult to interpret, let alone verbalize, the function of the ironic statements; they could describe the situation, but were unable to extrapolate the role of the irony, or to explain on what they based their interpretation. Fifteen-year-olds were able to assign different functions to the ironic comments, and could even verbalize some explicit pragmatic rules, for example that ironic expressions may function to signal intimacy, or that Depende de con quien estés ‘It depends on who you are with’ (p. 26). In Chapter 5, we noted the different factors affecting the developmental trajectories of types of figurative language. The studies mentioned here confirm that different levels of MA play an important role in how these are processed at different phases of development. A metalinguistic approach to verbal material may also, as noted, rely on different degrees of reflection, and the content of reflection can be worded more or less precisely, from vague generalizations to expert definitions. Critically, MA is an aspect of a more general metacognition, which enables people to reflect on language, to use language for language by talking about talking, to appreciate rhetorical alternatives, and to regulate language for constructing ongoing discourse. Developmentally, metalinguistic practice precedes metacognition, since young children can manipulate language before they are able to reflect on the fact that they are doing so (for example, when asked to produce rhymes (Dowker et al., 1996). Besides, metacognitive regulation may also differ for various types of metalinguistic operations, from the relatively transparent phonological metaskill of separating out the syllables of a word, to structural analysis of word-internal morphological structure, and only later to the complex ability to recognize, let alone explain, syntactic ambiguities, which may even escape the notice of adult speakers as in ‘They painted the wall with wavy lines’ = ‘they used wavy lines when painting the wall,’ or ‘the wall that they painted had wavy lines’). As we will see in Chapter 7, metacognitive regulation of language is important for going beyond the level of sentences to constructing extended pieces of discourse. In sum, as in other domains, there is a lengthy route from young children’s early sensitivity to what people say and the reflective, conscious metalinguistic operations of older speaker-writers, on the one hand, and the specialized metalanguage of experts, on the other. The protracted developmental continuum we observe in MA evolves from toddlers’ ability to attend to adults’ reformulations of what they have said and proceeds to young children’s online, spontaneous self-repairs as part

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of error-detection mechanisms of their as yet immature neural networks—a mechanism that remains active throughout the lifespan as part of general processes of speech-monitoring. These skills reflect an early ability to attend to linguistic forms, whether correct or not, and, later on, to recognize how they should be changed. These implicit metalinguistic practices—metaprocedural in the terms of Karmiloff-Smith—evolve over time by RR, showing increasing ability to separate out the external form of verbal utterances (how it is said) from the intended meaning of their message (what is said). This requires one to focus selectively on external form, being able to segment the stream of speech in terms of its linguistic units—sounds, morphemes, words, phrases, sentences. It also requires being able to evaluate appropriateness of such descriptions in relation to contexts and to pragmatic factors like power relations between interlocutors. At a much later developmental phase, speakers are able to verbalize their metalinguistic insights explicitly to explain them to others. Eventually, some particularly gifted or professional language users will employ a specialized metalanguage to elucidate their ideas. This developmental path is supported by maturation of top-down attentional systems and cognitive control resulting from the development of associative neural networks. Other factors modulating development include: (i) the target features of attention (sound structure, word-internal morphological composition, lexical or structural ambiguity, etc.); (ii) speakers’ level of literacy; for example, illiterate adults are able to separate words into syllables (can-dy) but not into their sounds (c-a-n-d-y) or morphemes (candie-s), whereas 7-year-old children who have learned to read and write can perform all these tasks; (iii) the specific task at issue: for example, a 6-year-old who cannot segment a word into its subsyllabic parts or sounds will be able to pronounce each such segment when trying to spell the same word; and, relatedly, (iv) the speaker’s linguistic profile: for example, bilingual speakers display earlier and more advanced metalinguistic abilities than their monolingual peers. More advanced developments go beyond MA to include learned reflections on language forms and functions expressed in precise, well-motivated metalanguage.23

6.6 Playing a language game How many metalinguistic comments can you expect in answer to the oral query ‘What can you say about the word red?’ Possible responses are given below, in order of approximate level of sophistication, from early preschool to adult experts: • It’s a color. • You spell it like you hear it. • It’s the past tense of ‘to read.’

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• It sounds the same but is spelled differently than the past tense of the verb ‘read.’ • Red is the color of blood. • Red hair is more orange than red. • Red in English is rouge in French, the English name for make-up ‘blush.’ • Red is one of the three primary colors, with yellow and blue. • When something turns red, you say it reddens, if something is a little red, you can say it is reddish, and the quality of being red is called redness. • When a person is all flushed, you can use the simile/you say he is as red as a beet. • Waving a red flag indicates danger. • The communists were once called ‘reds,’ the red flag of the communist revolution in 1917. • The primary color at one extreme end of the visible spectrum. • An effect of light that has a wavelength between 610 and 780 nanometers. These examples demonstrate varying levels of awareness of words and the entities they stand for. They also demonstrate the rich network of associations evoked by a familiar word.24 Reflecting on these statements, one might conclude metalinguistically that ‘red,’ like many other seemingly basic or simple words, can be interpreted and/or defined in numerous ways. These alternative decodings depend on speakers’ knowledge of both words and the world as well as on their ability to elevate this knowledge to the level of conscious metacognition. The endeavor involves so much, and such varied, knowledge that we selected metalinguistic use of language for reflection to conclude the ‘worlds’ we have surveyed so far in writing about ‘language use and development beyond age five.’ We move, finally, in the next chapter, to literacy as a domain that, unlike the others dealt with so far, is not available in all cultures, nor to all members of literate societies.

Notes 1. We use the term metalinguistic, coined by Roman Jakobson (1960) and common in current Anglo-European usage, rather than metalingual (practices) and metalanguage. Leezenberg (2008) suggests that, for Jakobson, the metalinguistic function may even be prior to other functions since metalinguistic feedback from their caretakers is important for children’s language acquisition. 2. According to Chomsky (1959), “A language is a collection of sentences of finite length all constructed from a finite alphabet (or, where our concern is limited to syntax, a finite vocabulary) of symbols” (p. 137). 3. Quotations are a complex, multifaceted aspect of metalinguistics, involving various implications, two of which are illustrated below.

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L ANGUAGE FOR REFLECTION (ON L ANGUAGE) 1. If you don’t understand how quotations function, you cannot understand the meaning of sentences like: (i) ‘Snow is white’ is true in English if snow is white. (ii) ‘Aristotle’ refers to Aristotle. 2. Quotation creates canonically opaque contexts, where changing words, even by synonymous expressions, fails to preserve the truth-value of a statement. Compare: (iii) ‘Bachelor’ has eight letters. (iv) ‘Unmarried man’ has eight letters.

4. We distinguish between a state of phenomenal consciousness, the subjective quality of experiencing wakefulness that develops without attention, and different levels of psychological awareness. In the present context, conscious refers to phenomenal consciousness and aware of to an awareness that controls behavior without implying conscious access to the content of this awareness. 5. Metalinguistic awareness forms part of more general metacognitive development, noted early in the cognitive sciences by Flavell in the title of his article (1979) as “a new area of cognitive-developmental theory” and redefined in the title of a later work (Flavell, 1999) as reflecting “children’s knowledge about the mind.” As research in the domain advanced, metacognitive skills were redefined as “thinking about thinking,” (Olson & Astingon, 1993) and as “cognition that reflects on, monitors, or regulates first-order cognition” (Khun, 2000, p. 178). Not surprisingly, this development has attracted considerable interest among psycholinguists studying the complex relations between language and thought (Gombert, 1992). 6. Karmiloff-Smith (1986c) argues that self-repairs in online spoken discourse reflect an unconscious metaprocess rather than conscious access. In this, they differ from corrections in writing, since writing is reflective and so more metalinguistic by nature. 7. A critical issue is when monitoring takes place. Most theories assume that both an inner and an outer loop are involved. The inner loop can detect errors before the utterance is actually articulated, since it relies on inner representations. The outer (or auditory) loop goes through the auditory system since it depends on auditory feedback to detect errors (Postma & Oomen, 2005). Another common, usually implicit, assumption is that speech monitoring is an inherent part of the language processing system (Levelt, 2004). This suggests that a multimodal mechanism must be engaged (much of the monitoring system involved in speech is not specific to language) before overt responses are made, that is, before auditory feedback is available. 8. The term ‘generative’ refers to speakers’ ability to use the grammar of their language to produce (generate) innumerable novel sentences in their language that they have never heard before. 9. Silverstein (1993) distinguishes between metasemantics (language referring to its semantics; e.g., ‘A cow is a kind of animal,’ ) and metapragmatics (language referring to its pragmatic intentions; e.g., ‘I didn’t mean to insult you.’ ) Many linguists and philosophers view pragmatics as the ‘icing’ on the basic syntactico-semantic structure of language, but Silverstein argues that semantics is a subset of pragmatics and metasemantics a subset of metapragmatics. He interprets language as structured by how it is

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deployed in use, in particular situations, so that all speech depends on its pragmatic functioning. The neural correlates of consciousness have been defined as the minimal neural mechanisms that are together necessary and sufficient for experiencing any conscious percept (Crick & Koch, 1990). Arredondo (2015) used a modified version of Carlisle’s (2000) Test of Morphological Structure. In this, we take a ‘layer-cake’ approach to linguistic structure, espoused by preChomskian structuralist linguists who saw language as built up out of layer on layer of phones, phonemes, morphemes, phrases, and sentences. This was rejected by Chomsky’s focus on syntax as at the heart of Universal Grammar, but is indirectly supported by modularity theory (Fodor, 1983). Note the distinction between phonetics, concerned with the physical production of speech sounds by the organs of speech (lips, tongue, vocal chords, etc.) and its acoustic perception, and phonology as concerned with how sounds are organized into syllables, words, and strings of words in a given language. There is some confusion in use of associated terms. Phonemic awareness is one facet of phonological awareness concerned with recognizing and manipulating phonemes, as the smallest units of sound, typically represented between slashes /…/. Phonics is a system of early literacy instruction, requiring students to know and match letters or letter patterns with sounds, learn the rules of spelling, and use this information to decode (read) and encode (write) words. A distinctive feature of Hebrew as a Semitic language like Arabic or Amharic is that the basic meaning of most open-class words is expressed by a (usually tri-) consonantal root. For example, the Hebrew triconsonantal root K-T-B ‫ כתב‬serves the basis for the action noun ‘writing’ pronounced ketiva and spelled as KTWBH ‫כתיבה‬, while the product noun meaning ‘letter’ (in the sense of missive) is pronounced mixtav and is spelled MKTB ‫מכתב‬. All twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet (of the type called abjad) may serve as root letters, but only eleven serve as function letters denoting inflectional and derivational morphemes (Berman, 2012). The examples in (9) are from diary records of bilingual children of three psycholinguists, respectively: (9a) W. Leopold (1939–1974). Speech development of a bilingual child: A linguist’s record. Vols. I to IV. Northwestern University Press; (9b) personal communication of Ruth A. Berman, see also Berman (1979); and (9c) Dan I. Slobin, (1978). A case study of early language awareness. In R. A. Sinclair, J. Jarvella, & W. J. M. Levelt (Eds.), The child’s conception of language. Springer, p. 47. Thanks to contributors to InfoChildes, from where we lifted these examples, all of which have parallels in children’s coinages in other languages. (MacWhinney, 2000). In her earlier works, Karmiloff–Smith (1979) applied the term ‘epilinguistic’ (epiGreek for ‘on, above’ and also ‘near, at’) to the awareness that lies between the acquisition processes (which all normal children develop to produce and comprehend utterances) and the conscious awareness that children attain about some aspects of the linguistic system . Traditional typologies (taxonomies of language types) refer mainly to morphological structure, from largely analytical types of languages, where most words are

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L ANGUAGE FOR REFLECTION (ON L ANGUAGE) monomorphemic (having only one element of meaning) like Chinese, to weakly inflected language like English and German, via highly synthetic or inflecting languages like Spanish or Hebrew, and on to concatenating or agglutinative languages like Turkish which string long series of affixes to a single stem. Linguists distinguish between ‘open-class’ or ‘content word’ lexical items (nouns, verbs, adjectives) that have independent semantic content and can be added to without changing the reference of other words in the same class, and ‘closed-class’ or ‘function’ words (pronouns, articles, conjunctions), which depend on their grammatical environment to be interpreted and form a paradigm of interrelated elements. In Hebrew, children regularly combine the object marking preposition et with the definite article ha in the fused form ta, while early writers fuse the two words bet and sefer (literally ‘house’ and ‘book’) as becefer for ‘school,’ where the symbol c stands for the Hebrew phoneme written as ts in English (bats, Gatsby). Lexical ambiguity refers to polysemy for words with more than one meaning (homonymy for words that are spelled and pronounced the same, but mean something different, like the two meanings of bank in English). This is different from ambiguity in figurative language (see Chapter 5), where the same word can be interpreted with a non-literal sense, as a metaphor, say. Even seemingly simple linguistic statements and ‘rules’ about, say, phonology or morphology, may be beyond the grasp of untutored, non-specialist speakers. Interestingly, the polysemous (multiple-meaning) of words applies primarily to simple, everyday lexical items. Compare ‘red’ to less frequent, more semantically specific words that, in English, typically have more syllables: ‘scarlet’ (as in ‘a scarlet woman,’ ‘she went scarlet,’ or ‘the scarlet pimpernel,’ or ‘crimson’: ‘the Harvard Crimson,’ ‘crimson tide’), while an even rarer related color word ‘vermilion’ is never extended to metaphorical or other figurative uses.

7 Language for literacy and literacy for language The gardens outside ancient Athens where Plato lectured were called ‘the groves of Academe’ in honor of their owner, the venerable Akademos. In Plato’s Hekademeia, politics and philosophy were debated at dinnertime, and philosophers published their thoughts on papyrus scrolls. By the early eighth century B.C., the Greeks had adapted a western Semitic script to their language (often ‘mislabeled the Phoenician alphabet’ (Sickinger, 2012)).1 The small number of letters in this new alphabet and their regular correspondence to the spoken sounds of Greek made learning to read and write generally accessible, at least to wealthy noblemen. By the sixth century B.C., alphabetic literacy—knowledge of letters and numbers—spread among privileged males across the Greek world. It has been claimed that the Greek alphabet established the written text as primary to speech in Western civilization (Goody & Watt, 1968; Olson, 1977). Yet early written Greek lacked a great deal to transform a piece of writing into textual communication (Morrison, 1987). A papyrus scroll displaying an uninterrupted sequence of upper-case letters does not help much in getting information from the text as it stands. Plato’s Dialogues were written scriptio continua, without separating words or indicating a change in participants in the dialogue (Bernard, 2001). This was true, too, of the earlier Homeric epics, considered the first literary texts of western culture.2 It took until the Hellenistic period (beginning around the fourth century B.C.) for something like a canonical text to be constructed (Reynolds & Wilson, 1991). And even then, Greek texts were not yet instruments of knowledge, and classical Greek culture was one of ‘orality’ rather than ‘literacy’ (Ong, 1982) in the sense used here. Knowledge was transmitted by discussion and argument; writing had a relatively insignificant role (Harvey, 1966). By the time the Gospels were composed, nearly four centuries later, Greek texts were still written without graphic devices like spacing between words, punctuation marks, or division into paragraphs. These extra-alphabetic conventions are taken for granted today as explicit procedures for organizing a text into linguistic and conceptual units, and guidelines for reading and interpreting it. Such conventions seem intrinsic to written language, yet they developed only gradually. Beginning with the Scriptoria (rooms set aside for writing or copying manuscripts), Anglo-Saxon scribes learnt the practices of word-separation, punctuation, and text layout from their Irish colleagues, whose practices depended largely on personal Growing into Language. Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman, Oxford University Press. © Liliana Tolchinsky and Ruth A. Berman (2023). DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192849984.003.0007

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preferences (Parkes, 1992).3 They might use upper-case letters to mark word endings, or various heights for pieces of text they regarded as irrelevant. As late as the eleventh century, medieval manuscripts did not use spaces between words, and punctuation was occasional, and largely arbitrary (Petrucci, 1995). Introduction of the Latin codex around the fourth century helped spread use of graphic cues in written texts (Parkes, 1992). In place of papyri, this new technology used individual pages loosely attached to each other on one side and bound with boards or cloth. By the sixth century, scrolls had largely vanished from use.4 Another advance in text writing came from the spread of silent reading in medieval scriptoria. Scribes became more aware of ‘the meaningfulness of form,’ adding graphic devices to help readers understand the context of a text (Saenger, 1997; Sickinge, 2012). Importantly, texts began to be perceived as written entities in their own right, not necessarily supported by oral interpretation. Scholars agree that use of extra-alphabetic conventions signified changing conceptions of the relation between writers (scribes) and their potential readers—and that these were both the cause and result of changes in the social roles of reading and writing. But it is harder to document how people read in ancient times since, unlike writing, reading is an ephemeral activity that does not leave visible traces. People can read silently to themselves or out loud to an audience, simply glancing at a text or ‘with intent’ (like orthodox Jews lip-reading sacred texts). These activities not only generate different behaviors, they reflect distinct mental processes. Silent reading appears to have existed even before the Middle Ages.5 Medieval manuscripts were not only “intended to shorten the reading times, but rather to maintain an attentive, almost stammering reading” (Petrucci, 1995, pp. 134–135), reflecting the lack of any necessary connection between reading and writing. Copying texts in the monasteries was more about preserving them than facilitating how they would be read. Later, by the twelfth century, universities began to relate the two activities, as writing came to be used for reading (Chartier, 1995). Classical Greece made a revolutionary transition from pure orality to alphabetic literacy, but concern with the contents of a text emerged only later, when medieval universities began to teach writing for transmitting knowledge. In time, changes in text layout and organization suited to different genres and knowledge domains gave rise to a new ‘order of discourse,’ (Foucault, 1980) permeated by written language.6 This was the basis for what we term text-literacy, where writing serves for organizing knowledge to be transmitted to potential readers (Morrison, 1987) by creating autonomous written texts. For a text to stand alone, writers need to make unambiguous reference to entities and explicitly mark connections between utterances, linguistic features that are less necessary in oral communication with interlocutors. The changes in language introduced by this new order of discourse, the language of text-literacy in our terms, underlies the shift from an oral to a literate mentality.7 .

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This transition was accelerated by the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, regulating how written language was represented in typographic space. It also reinforced the connection between reading and writing since, as is well-known, the printing revolution led to a huge increase in reading materials, including wider use and regularization of vernaculars alongside of Latin, and revision of ancient texts (Cartwright, 2020). The scope of the reading public remained subject to strong social and geographic inequalities. Importantly, however, as Clanchy (2012) points out: The really significant point is not the proportion of the population that could read in whatever sense but the fact that the dynamic of literacy was religious. Until the introduction of compulsory elementary schooling in the nineteenth century individual prayer … remained the foundation of European literacy …. The motive for this action was to enable men (and often women) to read the Word of God. (pp. 13–14)

The introduction of compulsory schooling furthered the move from orality to literacy, with literacy reaching wider sections of the population. It also diversified the motives for the teaching of literacy, “the most powerful social instrument for good or for evil,” in the words of Clanchy (2012, p. 10). And, indeed, even in the era of globalization the impact of literacy depends on how it is pursued in a given society: for turning people into good citizens, productive workers, efficient bureaucrats, innovative scientists, or well-disciplined soldiers. The expansion of digital communication (noted in Chapter 3 and discussed further below) has motivated individuals to avail themselves of self-education, important to a ‘knowledge-based society.’8 To function as active members of such a society, people need to be able to produce and understand various types of discourse; lack of these abilities leads to social marginalization. Below we will argue that this is not just a question of what people can do with printed and digital texts, but of the epistemic consequences of these abilities, what we derive from interacting with written materials. After reading this chapter, you should be acquainted with: • • • • • • • •

differences and interrelations between script and text-literacy; characteristics of writing in academic settings; rhetorical traditions in the structure and style of written texts; the interrelations between text writing and reading; composing and processing of printed and digital texts; neurological underpinnings of text composing and reading; developmental trajectories in attaining text-literacy; the shift from native to proficient use of language.

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7.1 Script and text-literacy Writing systems, or scripts, are formed by a finite set of visible and enduring graphic symbols which represent utterances (i.e., pieces of spoken language) in such a way that they can be recovered more or less exactly without oral intervention (Daniels & Bright, 1996).9 As vividly expressed by the Mozambiquan writer Mia Cuoto (2018), these finite sets of symbols Parecen dibujos, ‘(they) look like drawings’ pero dentro de las letras esta´n las voces ‘but inside the letters are the voices.’ Cada pa´gina es una caja infinita de voces ‘each page is an infinite box of voices’ (p. 152). Alphabetic scripts (like those used here, or in Spanish or Turkish) are one type of writing system, where the smallest unit, a grapheme, represents categories of sounds—consonant and vowel phonemes, the “voices inside the letters.”10 To achieve script-literacy, novices need to gain command both of a writing system—as a finite set of characters accompanied by non-alphabetic conventional symbols like punctuation marks or capital letters—and its orthography—languageparticular spelling conventions—in order to access the infinite set of voices on each page. Literate speakers of alphabetic scripts know that words may sound different when spoken than when seen in writing. The same written word in English sounds different when read by an Irish speaker or a Texan—showing that writing does not transcribe speech in any simple sense. Other kinds of scripts include: (i) Semitic languages like Hebrew or Arabic, which use consonantal systems (called ‘abjads’), where graphemes represent consonants (the Hebrew letter ‫( ק‬qof ) can be read as ka, ki, ke, ko, ku); (ii) syllabaries, where the basic unit is the syllable (Japanese kana かstands for /ka/, き for /ki/); and (iii) logographic systems like Chinese, in which the graphemes stand for meaningful, often monosyllabic units. The term script-literacy covers all such writing systems, but here we focus on alphabetic literacy of the kind used in Europe (including Roman or Cyrillic). Beginning with the precocious insights of preschoolers (Tolchinsky, 2003), becoming alphabetically literate may take more or less time depending on the nature of the orthography—the normative spelling of words. Yet even for ‘crazy’ orthographies like French or English, in which one phoneme may be represented by various letters and the same letter pronounced differently in different words, attaining alphabetic literacy takes no more than three or four years (Seymour et al., 2003).11 Once children master the orthographic conventions of their language, they will reuse the same set of symbols repeatedly, in different situations, for different purposes. In contrast to alphabetic literacy, text-literacy is an open-ended process, since different communicative contexts and discourse functions (see Chapter 3) trigger distinct usages. For example, a shopping list written at home will have a different layout than a research report on antibodies. Shopping lists typically arrange

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items vertically, indicating all are equally necessary, perhaps grouped by type (vegetables, meat, dairy products) and underlined or capitalized to highlight their importance. Research reports reflect the hierarchical relations between text components by headed sections for each topic, and paragraphs mark off facets of a theoretical framework, distinguishing between assumptions, evidence, and conclusions. The striking differences in form, content, and layout of these two types of texts reflect distinct procedures in the organization of knowledge, yet both rely on similar scriptal conventions. Becoming text-literate is a protracted process. In addition to the demands of word-spelling and extra-alphabetical conventions, it involves commanding procedures for translating knowledge into text: conforming to particular rhetorical traditions (as noted in Section 7.4); and attending to the technology it employs. With digitalization, the computer screen has become a distinctive textual unit: the shift from scroll to page has moved on to scrolling down digital texts.12 Such innovations have transformed how people read and conceptualize knowledge. They have also multiplied the types of texts people need to control. Think of all the categories of digital texts we are supposed to command, it boggles the mind! In textwriting, graphic devices do not transcribe features of spoken language in any simple one-to-one mapping. For example, the blank spaces between strings of letters which, out of habit or convenience, we call words, do not correspond to pauses or other units of speech. Rather, blank spaces signify graphic entities (Correa & Dockrell, 2007), which differ across languages. A graphic word may represent a single morpheme, as in Spanish fin ‘end’; a clause (da´melo ‘give it to me’); a complex lexical item (agricultura ‘agriculture’); or a bound multilexemic unit of two or more ‘words’ (like a fuer de sano ‘out of ’). We take spacing between words as natural, but the convention was first adopted in Latin only around 600–800 A.D., later carried over into other languages using alphabetic systems. Today, languages with Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, use a blank space as word divider. Spaces are not strictly speaking punctuation marks (in the sense of Latin punctum ~ puncta ‘point ~ points’), but they are part of punctuation systems, aids to reading a text, whether silently or aloud. English punctuation includes capital (uppercase) letters, periods (full-stops), question marks, exclamation marks, commas, semicolons, colons, dashes, hyphens, parentheses, different kinds of brackets, apostrophes, quotation marks, and contractions—structural devices needed to clarify what a text means.13 The very notion of text has been transformed in digital space, as more fluid, more interactive, and increasingly multimodal compared with on the page (Barton & Lee, 2003). Online links between texts promotes intertextuality, as people draw concurrently on various sites entered on the web. But even off the web, an article in a newspaper may contain embedded tweets and links to outside articles or to

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primary sources, like press releases, making it hard to delimit what exactly is or is not part of a text. The first ‘short message service’ (SMS) in 1992 (“Merry Christmas”) blurred two distinguishing features of written texts—delimited boundaries and permanence.14 Being text-literate, as of the time of writing this chapter, means being able to understand both transitory and permanent written texts and coping with mobile intertextuality. True, autonomous text production is not a general practice; it is limited to certain professions and workplaces. Educated adults may read a lot and converse in writing through the internet, but never themselves write a story, a report, or an essay. Yet text writing remains a goal of every literacy program. Why persist in the endeavor? We believe that students need to gain command of autonomous text writing not just for what they can do with written texts, but for what text writing can do for them, for its epistemic consequences. The mental activities involved in text writing—planning, revising, rereading, editing, and so on—impact not only writers’ knowledge of the topic at issue, but also their reasoning, how they use and think about language. And it enhances their reading comprehension, too (Graham et al., 2015).

7.2 Levels of literacy knowledge Since writing began, societies and individuals have manifested varying levels of literacy. Socio-cultural and economic circumstances determine who teaches literacy, who has the right or obligation to be taught, and for what purposes. To illustrate: in ancient Greece, well-born Spartans looked down on literacy, which they viewed as undermining the martial spirit; wealthy Athenians attended private, non-compulsory institutions, and were taught by ‘grammaticists’ (teachers of literacy and numeracy) or a tutor, accompanied by a ‘pedagogue,’ usually an illiterate slave (Petraki, 2010). In sixteenth-century England, reading was ideally devoted to prayer, with instruction conducted at home, typically by mother to child. In 1870, Forster’s Education Act set the framework for compulsory schooling of all children between the ages of 5 and 12 (Gillard, 2013). In the mass education of today, ‘literacy level’ may be taken to indicate an individual’s integration into society, with some going so far as to consider those who cannot take advantage of schooling as a ‘potentially subversive minority.’15 A less loaded characterization of this minority is to say they are textually illiterate, defined in the U.K. as ‘poor literacy,’ by UNESCO as ‘functional illiteracy,’ in France called illettré.16 One in six (16.4%/7.1 million) adults in England have very poor literacy skills;17 and while basic education today reaches most Americans, a large-scale study showed that in 2019, one in five adults (21%) were unable to successfully detect the meaning of written sentences, locate a piece of information in short texts, or fill out simple forms.

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Most children, in the Western world at all events, are taught to read and write at school, yet as these figures show, many end up with but poor literacy skills. They can handle short digital messages and use social networks but are not active participants in the literate culture of the ‘textual community’ (Olson & Oatley, 2014). This apparent paradox is resolved if text-literacy is seen as going beyond the technology of writing, as a complex process of acculturation over and above techniques of writing skills, as an instrument of thought, a way of thinking on paper. Textliteracy requires access to varied communicative settings (described in Chapter 3); and also, as detailed later in this chapter, experience with text composing in writing different types of texts, and deep reading that involves linguistic and conceptual understanding of what is written) (Wolf, 2018). Unlike speech, writing can be examined offline, allowing people to plan, reconsider, revise, and eventually change their product. This work on language— enhancing lexical precision, unambiguous reference-making, and explicit linkage between utterances—is essential when there is no audience present: its meaning must be obtained from the text itself, without help from whoever produced it. Literate language relies on a process of editing through reflecting on what has been written; and it mobilizes scientific-like processes of reasoning, formulating hypotheses, gaining insights, reacting critically, approaching a topic from different perspectives (‘decentering’ in Piagetian terms, as discussed in Chapter 3). These dispositions may evolve early in family practices (Lareau, 2000) as part of what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu, 1984) defined as habitus: habits, skills, and states of mind that we possess as a result of our life experiences.18 If such dispositions are not cultivated by schooling, they may jeopardize the development of text-literacy. Like adapting to a particular system of writing for achieving script-literacy, text-literacy, too, is culture-bound. While written language is never a direct transcription of speech, some languages show a more marked difference between the two, in the form of what Ferguson (Ferguson, 1959) termed ‘diglossia.’ This happens when, alongside of the spoken vernaculars, the language has a highly codified (often grammatically more complex) variety found in formal settings but not used for mundane matters. Arabic is a marked instance of diglossia, where Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), as the official, written variety shared across the Arab world, contrasts with the spoken dialects in different Arabic-speaking communities (Egyptian, Iraqi, Palestinian, etc.). Children entering school need to learn MSA as a variety to which they have not been exposed at home or in the neighborhood. In a relatively homogeneous culture like Sweden, with strong egalitarian traditions, the two varieties differ relatively little. French, on the other hand, requires educated speakers to adopt distinct usages in the lexicon, syntax, and morphology when writing, largely dictated by the Language Academy, in contrast to the language they use when conversing with one another (Blanche-Benveniste, 1994).

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Hebrew, too, displays clear register differences in written versus spoken usage, with English somewhere in the middle (Ravid & Berman, 2009). In sum, writing and speech are relatively distinct varieties of language use, and the distance between them may be more or less of an obstacle to gaining literacy. Yet in any community, linguistic features of word-use, syntax, and style of writing interact with communicative contexts and discourse function. Mode of production, communicative contexts, and discourse function together to yield the stylistic features that characterize text-literacy as ‘a special mode of discourse.’

7.3 The language of text-literacy Being text-literate affects every aspect of how people write and read, from vocabulary and grammar to rhetorical conventions and content-area—medical discourse or philosophy, say. Literate language reigns in academic settings, where knowledge and credentials for future careers are obtained largely through written means. Acquiring it may begin early on with culture-building family activities preparing offspring for academic life (Lareau, 2000). Research shows that parental schooling is the major variable affecting children’s success at writing and reading in the early school years (Dubow et al., 2009; Tolchinsky et al., 2015). What do people in academic settings hope to accomplish when they write? Basically, to persuade their readers—teachers, colleagues, reviewers, or editors— that they qualify to become certified members of the target community. Texts geared to these goals—research reports, scientific articles, essays, project proposals, monographs—employ analytical prose with distinct rhetorical functions (to argue a point, explain a concept, define terms, provide information, analyze data) which may be differently weighted across a text. Some texts are mainly expository, focused on analyzing the topic rather than presenting the writer’s standpoint; others are mainly argumentative, presenting pros and cons on an issue so as to persuade the reader of the writer’s outlook.19 But a text is rarely all or nothing in rhetorical content. Prototypically informative encyclopedic entries may contain narrative-like biographical content about a person, while argumentative texts are often enhanced by informative description. Different genres in Bruner’s ‘logico-scientific mode of thought’ (as presented in Chapter 2) share this topic-centered stance. Imaginative or expressive prose (fiction or poetry, say) is prized for its individuality, but analytical discourse must be recognized by the community it addresses as conforming to established expectancies from this type of text. As readers, we react to the quality of a text—how good (or horrendous) we find it. Experienced readers tend to agree to such responses. Yet the motivations

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underlying inter-rater agreement by external judges differ, depending on their professional background and personal predilections (Berman & Nir, 2009b). Below we define four dimensions to account for the quality of academic writing: (i) genre appropriateness—properties conforming to reader expectations of types of analytical prose; (ii) text structure—overall organization of a well-formed piece of discourse; (iii) syntactic packaging—linking sentences into grammatically and thematically related chunks; and (iv) lexical content—the words and expressions selected by writers. We assume that these properties result from how individuals compose or read a text based on their internalized schemas and reading experiences. As Bereiter and Scardamalia put it, when “piling up sticks at random, we may accidentally produce a structure that stood, however this might happen with sticks, it is far less likely when piling up words on paper” (1987, p. 41). It is hard to define the relative weight of the processes involved in writing—generating ideas, planning, revising, previous readings—but each clearly affects the quality of the written product. Here we analyze the properties of analytical writing top-down, from dimensions that exert a central control over text production to ones open to alternative realizations. Writers, however, work on all these in parallel: they attend concurrently to content and genre constraints, to discourse organization, syntactic packaging, and lexical choices. Only expert writers can separate out these various facets of text. Like them, text analyzers (as we are at this moment) consider each in turn to understand how texts work.

7.3.1 Genre-appropriateness Each discourse genre creates a horizon of expectancies based on previous encounters with comparable texts, requiring writers to observe strategies consistent with other texts that have similar communicative goals. Among proficient writers, these previous encounters form writing schema stored in long term memory (LTM) that control the process as a whole. More local decisions (syntactic connectivity or word choice, say) depend on this schema, and deviations count as errors. An exception is intentional ‘genre-extraneous transgressions’: Deliberate deviance from genre-regularity marks maturely proficient writing, unlike the unconscious genre violations of immature writers.20 To illustrate, the 15-year-old high-schooler writing about freedom of movement between countries in (1) opened and closed his text with expressions suited to interactive spoken usage, so violating the genre (and register) constraints of an analytical essay.

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(1)

Good morning, I, a 4th year secondary school student and adolescent, will give my opinion on this subject, so delicate and at the same time so extravagant. … To conclude, I would like to emphasize my opinion, the Spanish pay everything, and immigrants pay nothing and receive payment. Thanks for your attention.

The excerpt in (2), from a journal editorial written in 2006 by Ian Winfield, an expert on ecosystems, also starts with a genre-transgression:21 the author inserts a quote (marked here in italics) from the Bruce Springsteen composition ‘With Every Wish,’ used as a metaphorical resource, not an error, as an intentional transgression to capture the reader’s attention. (2)

FISHES, WISHES AND CURSES Ol’ catfish in the lake, we called him Big Jim When I was a kid, my only wish was to get my line in him Skipped church one Sunday rowed out and throw’d in my line Jim took that hook pole and me right over the side Went driftin’ down past old tires and rusty cans of beer The angel of the lake whispered in my ear ‘Before you choose your wish son You better think first With every wish there comes a curse’

Winfield then goes on as follows: “Say ‘fish’ to many people and they appear to hear ‘fisheries’. To a considerable number of individuals, ‘fish’ means little more than a potential meal or (as in the above lyrics) a sporting quarry. Even when commenting on documents drafted by scientific colleagues, I have lost count of the number of times that I have crossed out ‘fisheries’ and inserted ‘fish’.” (p. 549)

Analytical prose aims to construct a representation of the discourse-topic in the mind of readers. And it needs to provide a clearly defined standpoint on the topic supported by relevant evidence, like data and examples. Compare, for example, the excerpts translated from Spanish in (3) and (4) on the same topic, by a 6thgrade boy and a university student respectively.

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(3)

‘Freedom of movement between countries’ Every day more people come and that means there is no work, they also give more help to those who come from abroad, I do not understand that, why to them yes and not to those from Spain? In my case an example has happened to me: a few years ago a foreign couple occupied a flat, however they did nothing to it and who knows if they would help them to pay the electricity or the water. In another case there is soccer: in almost all soccer teams there is always a foreigner, with the great Spanish soccer players there are.

(4)

‘Freedom of movement between countries’ Currently we choose different ways to travel from one country to another, but in some cases there are drawbacks. For this reason, we must ask ourselves, do we have freedom when moving between countries? When we travel to another country that is not ours, it can be for various reasons such as leisure, fun … but we also find cases of displacement for reasons of need, whether it be due to a war in our place of origin, political problems … These situations (they) occur in many parts of the world. Everyday hundreds of people go from one country to another as immigrants in search of a stable job and with the aim of improving their economy and way of life, hundreds of others arrive as disastrously and without resources as refugees from countries at war. These have help from NGOs or the country’s government, which try to help them in social reintegration and to enable them to meet basic needs such as housing, food, or clothing.

The text in (4) rates more adequate than (3) as analytic prose: the adult starts by presenting the current state of affairs, from which she generalizes to specific situations, expressing a clear standpoint backed up by facts and illustrations. In contrast, the schoolboy lists specific situations without integrating them by an overall viewpoint (although this can be inferred).

7.3.2 Text structure How information is organized across a piece of discourse reflects a plan-inexecution. Genre-specific writing schemas constrain overall structuring, which are open to alternative organizing principles. Again, compare the texts in (3) and (4). The adult text is hierarchically organized: it unfolds top-down from a general topic-related standpoint to successive supporting facts, examples, and personal comments. Text (3), in contrast, is linearly organized: it develops by presenting

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diverse situations at a similar level of generalization; the order of examples and facts could be changed without altering its overall organization. In contrast, reordering the thematic elements in (4) would affect the text as a whole. Well-formed text construction involves an interplay between top-down and bottom-up processing to attain an integrated “re-representation of knowledge” (Karmiloff-Smith, 1986b, p. 175), as explained in Chapter 6. We will later see (Section 7.8) that this view is supported by the span of neural networks recruited for producing written texts, which show an interplay between high-level cognitive control, particular communicative circumstances, and attention to lexical decisions. In producing a text, integrating top-down and bottom-up processing may begin with a generalization, in the form of an introduction followed by other, more specific components—observing a deductive rhetorical pattern, as in text (4). Or writers may proceed bottom-up from data-driven information (here, examples or facts) to an overall generalization that functions as a conclusion—in an inductive pattern of rhetorical organization, as in (3). Whatever path is chosen, a well-formed piece of analytic writing means being able to flesh out one’s generalizations by means of supporting data-driven information.22 This requires a categorial mental representation, analogous to but more complex than the narrative schema required for storytelling.23 In telling stories, narrators can relate events that actually happened to them or to others, but writing an analytic text means constructing and categorizing one’s own ideas from scratch.

7.3.3 Syntactic packaging Here we move to what is known as ‘complex syntax.’24 Although we do not have a clear picture of the precise units involved, texts are obviously not produced either word-by-word or in a single shot; writers need to combine the lexical and grammatical components of texts into larger units. Linking clauses and sentences into syntactically and thematically cohesive chunks of discourse depends both on writers’ proficiency and how well they cope with top-down text organization. Complex syntax combines clauses into longer, more integrated units. Each clause has its own weight and contributes in its own way to the chunk as a whole. Some clauses (often a ‘main clause’) may stand alone, while others are dependent on them. The unit as a whole is thus syntactically ‘complex,’ made up of different levels of structure and meaning. Texts whose main purpose is to reconstruct a topic in the reader’s mind typically employ complex syntax, and are more densely chunked than, say, texts conveying a set of instructions or a series of chronologically ordered events. Why use complex syntax? Why isn’t it enough to juxtapose simple clauses, one after another, without syntactic dependency between them? First, complex constructions condense information, allowing ideas to be processed in a more

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tightly integrated fashion than when presented separately—an idea implicit in the metaphor of ‘packaging’ (Berman & Slobin, 1994).25 Second, complex constructions provide cohesiveness (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Sanders & Pander Maat, 2006) by treating a situation from different perspectives in a single linguistic unit (Langacker, 2010). Use of complex grammar also obeys Slobin’s charge for effective communication to be maximally “rhetorical,” exploiting language “for expressing notions and for compacting semantic content” (Slobin, 1977, p. 187). To illustrate this point, consider the opening sentence of President Barack Obama’s 2008 victory speech: If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our fathers is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

This forty-five-word utterance features thirty-two different word-types, eight clauses, a forty-one-word if -clause, and a main clause—“tonight is your answer”— coming after the sentence is 95% complete. As such, it forms a combination that is unlikely to facilitate working memory for the audience. Yet, once it was uttered, the nearly quarter-million people present responded with elated approval. Complexity increases as a function of which and how many units of structure are combined into higher-level chunks (Langacker, 1997). Syntactic density includes: number of words per phrase (in noun phrases [NPs] like the dream of our fathers; prepositional phrases [PPs] like in our time); phrases per clause; and clauses per discourse unit.26 Ideational density also derives from the type and variety of elements at each level: for example, if the head noun of a noun phrase is abstract or concrete, and what kinds of modifiers it has—determiners, adjectives, relative clauses. It also matters how clauses are inter-connected: coordinate clauses linked linearly by and or but; subordinate clauses including adverbial clauses of time, cause, or condition, and different types of relative clauses qualifying nouns. To measure complexity of how texts are divided into chunks, we devised a discourse unit called ‘clause package’ (CP) combining syntactic, thematic, and discursive criteria (Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2009a; Katzenberger, 2004).27 Clauses linked in a package must (i) semantically and discursively refer to the same topic and (ii) contain a syntactically independent main clause, to which other clauses in the same package add more information or whose content they elaborate. CPs thus lie between global text organization and local linguistic expression, Studies of the two authors and their associates have shown that CPs are sensitive to distinctions of genre (expository essay-type texts include more complex chunks), modality (spoken texts contain longer but less densely packaged chunks than written), target language (Spanish texts contain more clauses per CP than English and these more than French or Hebrew), as well as age-schooling level

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(from grade-school to middle- and on to high-school adolescence). Division of a text into CPs is illustrated in (4), with clause boundaries marked by a bracket ]. (4)

‘Freedom of movement between countries’ Currently we choose different ways to travel from one country to another,] but in some cases there are drawbacks.] For this reason, we must ask ourselves,] do we have freedom] when moving between countries?] [CP1] When we travel to another country] that is not ours] it can be for various reasons such as leisure, fun …] but we also find cases of displacement for reasons of need,] whether it be due to a war in our place of origin, political problems …] [CP2] These situations (they) occur in many parts of the world.] [CP3] Everyday hundreds of people go from one country to another as immigrants in search of a stable job and with the aim] of improving their economy and way of life,] while hundreds of others arrive as disastrously and without resources as refugees from countries at war]. [CP4] These have help from NGOs or the country’s government,] which try to help them in social reintegration] and to enable them] to meet basic needs such as housing, food, or clothing.] [CP5]

The packaged chunks in (4), where only CP3 consists of a single clause, show how different aspects of situations can be combined in multiclausal constructions. Number of elements per clause or phrase also measures more local density of information packaging. For example, use of PPs, in the form Preposition + NP, is an accepted hallmark of textual richness (Loban, 1976). This elaborating on the circumstances in which a situation occurs increases with age in lexical variety and semantic function of the prepositions used as well as the syntactic complexity and semantic content of their associated noun phrases (Berman, 2015), (Chapter 2). But see what happens if we take this feature of academic writing too seriously as in Williams, 1987 (with PPs in curly brackets): (5)

Decisions {in regard} {to the administration} {of medication} {despite the inability} {of irrational patients} voluntarily appearing {in Trauma Centers} {to provide legal consent} rest {with a physician alone.} (p. 87)

This example demonstrates that features of analytical writing evaluated positively by experts may place a heavy processing burden on readers (Crossley & McNamara, 2010; McNamara et al., 2010).

7.3.4 Lexical content At a local level of expression, vocabulary has a marked impact on any piece of writing. This includes not only single words, but also commonly occurring

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combinations of words, which are important for academic texts in marking subtopics or shifts in perspective. Set expressions like as a result, it should be noted that, under different circumstances help identify a text as being in an academic register. Termed lexical bundles, clusters, multiword expressions, or collocations (Biber et al., 1999; Scott, 1996), they are composed of words that frequently co-occur in the same expression, and signal competent language use and genre-appropriate proficiency (Haswell, 1991). Researchers have used several measures to capture the lexical quality of a text, often without specifying explicitly what they mean by word, in itself no simple matter (Chapter 5). These include: word-length, lexical diversity, frequency of occurrence, nominal abstractness, and register (Berman, 2014; Nir-Sagiv et al., 2008). Word length. Typically measured by number of letters per content words (verbs, nouns, adjectives), this is a common diagnostic of lexical complexity, since in many languages it correlates inversely with frequency of use (longer words are less common) (Riedemann, 1996; Wimmer & Altmann, 1996). Written texts typically contain more long words than oral, and expository essays more than personal-experience narratives in different languages, both when counted in syllables and in letters (Berman & Ravid, 2009). Lexical diversity. This measures the relative number of different words compared with total number of words in a given text—often by so-called ‘type/token measures,’ the ratio between how many unique words are used (types) compared with all words (tokens) in a text. It is taken to indicate lexical richness and lack of repetitiveness. Nominal abstractness. A semantic criterion measured by a 10-point ‘noun scale’ devised originally for Hebrew (Ravid, 2006), this compares nouns for concrete, countable entities at one end with abstract nouns that make generic reference to categories, at the other. A reduced 4-scale ranking was used by the authors of this book—(1) terms referring to concrete objects and specific people, (2) categorial and generic nouns, (3) metaphorical extensions of everyday terms, and (4) non-imageable, abstract, low-frequency terms, revealing significant differences on relevant dimensions. Nouns increased in genericity and abstractness by age-school leveling (from grade to high school), by genre, in expository versus narratives texts, and by modality, more in written versus spoken texts. Since the measure is semantically based, it is relevant to thematic content and can apply similarly across languages. Linguistic register. Register, in the sense of ‘level of language use,’ on the other hand, differs from other measures of lexical quality as a sociolinguistic feature that varies from one language and culture to another. It, too, is largely dependent on lexical usage in different languages (Bar-Ilan & Berman, 2007; Ravid & Berman, 2009). As discussed in Chapter 3, register ranges from lowlevel slang and substandard usages via standard everyday language and on

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Measures of syntax and lexicon correlate highly with each other. But, and this poses a challenge when trying to characterize text quality, sophisticated syntax and vocabulary at the local level do not always entail ‘good writing’ at the global level of discourse. Getting others to understand what the writer is claiming, helping them learn more about the topic, and accepting the evidence provided is achieved by a balanced interplay between discourse-topic generalizations and data-driven details. This may be aided, but is not necessarily determined, by rich syntactic and lexical means of expression. A successful piece of writing will also elicit manifest approval, in the form of high grades, manuscript acceptance, or wide readership, depending on the writer’s role, as student, teacher, or researcher. This does not always happen, however. In advising writers to pay attention to their audience, to what they know and care about, to win readers’ approval, Steven Pinker (2015) points out: The curse of knowledge is the single best explanation I know of why good people write bad prose. It simply doesn’t occur to the writer that her readers don’t know what she knows—that they haven’t mastered the patois of her guild, can’t divine the missing steps that seem too obvious to mention, have no way to visualize a scene that to her is as clear as day. And so, she doesn’t bother to explain the jargon, or spell out the logic, or supply the necessary detail. (p. 61)

In attempting to clarify what makes for good writing, we have considered different dimensions of a text separately, from genre down to word, as an artificial heuristic device. Again, successful writers apply all these criteria concurrently. They also need to observe the rhetorical conventions of their audience, the topic we move to next.

7.4 Rhetorical traditions Are the properties we have delineated universal requirements for academic writing across the world? In 1966 Robert Kaplan coined the term ‘contrastive rhetoric’ for differing patterns of writing across cultures. He distinguished, rather sweepingly, between American (English) as linear, direct, and to-the-point in contrast to Semitic writing, which supposedly presents arguments in parallel propositions or embedded in stories, similarly to ‘Oriental’ (Asian) argumentative writing.

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Forty years later, Rienecker and Jo¨rgensen compared the Continental (GermanRomanic) ‘topic-oriented’ tradition with the ‘problem-oriented’ Anglo-American approach to academic writing and higher education. They concluded that Europeans emphasize science as thinking, whereas English-speaking writers treat science as investigation based on empirical study and systematic, updated research (2003, p. 104). Table 1 provides a more detailed breakdown of these two traditions. Table 1 Continental and Anglo-American rhetorical traditions Continental (German-Romanic)

Anglo-American (British-American)

Thinking Sources in the foreground Philosophy, history of ideas, epistemology, culture, spirit and mind, arts, and aesthetics Emphasis on concepts and theories (methods) Interpretation (preservation of traditional cultures) Contingent epistemology Numerous points, claims, and conclusions around the subject Often a non-linear, discursive structure Digressions (Gm. Exkurs) allowed Academic writing as an art, relying on inborn abilities

Problem-solving Problems in the foreground Facts, observable matters, empirical data Emphasis on methods (concepts, theories) New insights, evaluations, and actions Controlled, purposeful epistemology One point, one claim, one conclusion Linear structure, digressions discouraged Academic writing as learned craftsmanship

Although a useful heuristic tool, such dichotomous contrasts are inherently artificial. Besides, how valid are they in today’s globalization and the homogenizing impact of the internet on people’s reading and writing? Two opposing positions emerge in this respect. One stresses the universality of analytical discourse (Schwanzer, 1981; Widdowson, 1979), the other its culture-specificity (Bazerman, 2004; House, 1997). Universalists assume that, since scholars all over the world use the same concepts and procedures, the discourse conventions for encoding them are independent of the specific linguistic means used to express them (House, 1997). Bazerman’s more relativistic view (2004) suggest that this depends on how stabilized rhetorical practices are in different disciplines. For example, writing in the hard sciences or medicine shows greater homogeneity and influence of Anglo-American writing than in psychology or the humanities. An example of contrasting views is use of nominalizations, where verbs and adjectives are turned into nouns (like isolate/isolation, lonely/loneliness). Englishlanguage writing studies (Charles, 2003; Hyland, 2005) and style manuals (Pinker, 2015) diverge on this issue. Some take nominalizations as a sign of sophisticated

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lexical usage, suited to analytic discourse, as shown by drills that require students to replace sentences with tense-marked verbs by (typically abstract) nominalizations (e.g., although they objected > in spite of their objections, because he came late > due to his tardiness). Yet over-use of what Pinker (2015) calls ‘zombie nouns’ may make a text heavy and hard to follow. Rhetorical traditions continue to have an impact on the teaching of writing in schools and colleges. Anglo-American ‘Style and Comp’ classes advocate a fixed discourse structure (topic sentence expressing a standpoint, two or three paragraphs of arguments for and against, and a conclusion). Their Latin-American counterparts emphasize motivation, functionality, and creativity. Symbolic of these differences is an anecdote about a personal experience with confronting rhetorical traditions. Several decades back, the first author of this book delivered a draft of her master’s thesis to her then adviser and subsequently dear friend, the late Iris Levin. I was not a typical graduate student, having already taught at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina before moving to Israel. I already had some experience with academic text writing and did not anticipate any problems. Imagine my surprise when I got the text back full of deletions and corrections followed by comments I will never forget: You cannot put down the whole history of philosophy and psychology, stick only to the direct antecedents of your own study and to references directly related to it. And, please! Make clear from the very beginning what you want to say, then say it, and afterwards go back to want you wanted to say.

I was shocked! To reduce my thesis to just what I had done? And, to start from the end? I was not aware at the time that my prose was a product of a Spanish Latin-American rhetorical tradition, while my advisor, although born and raised in Israel, and a native speaker of Hebrew, had been schooled in the Anglo-American academic tradition of writing and research.

7.5 Relationships between writing and reading How writing interacts with reading is pivotal to text-literacy. This makes sense, since one cannot read without something written and reading affects how we write. Our focus on writing in acquiring literacy reverses accepted beliefs in a domain where literacy is often synonymous with learning to read (Alves, 2019). We contend, rather, that writing is connected to reading across the development of literacy and that it plays a particularly important role at two major points in the process: at the outset of learning and, at the other extreme, in academic prose as a hallmark of expertise.

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Studies on early literacy show that, like any other knowledge domain, literacy is rooted in early sensorimotor experience as the basis for the development of later cognitive abilities (Tolchinsky, 2003).29 As noted in Chapter 1, the human child is driven to leave traces everywhere, and writing provides a direct sensorimotor experience which helps children to single it out from other notational objects, such as drawings or pictures. When drawing, toddlers make continuous circular movements, when writing they follow a direction and lift their pencil at regular intervals to create blank spaces (Karmiloff-Smith, 1992). Children produce discontinuous, wavy lines that look like writing before being able to read. This so-called simile writing reflects children’s sensitivities to the visual features of writing which are as yet unrelated to their speech. At the same time, young children connect what is written to what is said by attending to the reading behaviors of adults when putting a text into words. Once they recognize this, children will explore different ways of mapping parts of the written pattern—letters of their own name or ones they may have absorbed from around them—to parts of the spoken utterances they hear. Their invented spellings (Read, 1971) show that preschoolers are sensitive to the phonetic characteristics of words they do not know, helping refine their intuitive notions of letter-tosound correspondences (Read, 1975). As discussed in Chapter 6, exploring the links between spoken and written language enhances children’s phonological awareness, which in turn improves their early reading. Word reading is also important for learning to spell, with acquisition of spelling and reading interacting throughout the process of becoming alphabetically literate. Moving to text-literacy, being a proficient member of the written culture requires experience with diverse types of text. In constructing a text, expert writers (unconsciously) access writing schemas stored in LTM, based on previous reading and writing of similar types of text. And reading what one has written so far helps to construct a text, since there is no way that a person can revise or edit a text without reading it (on or offline). At the other extreme of literacy, for most academics, thinking resides in writing. In Carruthers’s (1996) words, … those of us whose work involves the written word—whether academics, bureaucrats, or business executives—will do much of our thinking on paper, or at the keyboard. In many such cases one does not first entertain a private thought and then write it down; the thinking is the writing. (p. 52)

Such ‘thinking in writing’ is nurtured by deep reading; and the best pieces of writing, both academic and literary, are those produced with the reader in mind. Recall that, historically, making a connection between reading and writing led to changes in the layout of written texts, which in turn transformed the quality of

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reading. Yet both in societies and individuals, reading and writing are distinct competencies. We have all encountered good readers who are bad writers, though the opposite seems less common (Kellogg, 1994). Research reveals a far from perfect correlation between the two activities (Graham & Harris, 2000; Stotsky, 1983), suggesting that each has areas of uniqueness. There are cases of brain-damaged individuals unable to read but able to write (Imtiaz et al., 2001), but the opposite is rarer (Henderson, 2014). Yet the two activities do share certain kinds of knowledge. As characterized by Fitzgerald and Shanahan (2000), first, speakers marshal metacognitive and pragmatic knowledge for both, since reading and writing alike depend on motivational factors like self-evaluation and expectations; second, both rely on the world-knowledge and topic-specific information brought to bear on each task; third, genre-appropriateness and linguistic properties of different text types are applied to both reading and writing; and, finally, the two activities mobilize procedural knowledge and require concurrent integrating of linguistic and cognitive processes. True, what some consider good writing may be a source of difficulty for readers (Crossley & McNamara, 2010; McNamara et al., 2010). Yet both understanding and producing a piece of written language rely on repeated experience and intentional self-regulating strategies (prediction, questioning, seeking analogies). There is little research on the reasons for people’s different attainments in writing and reading, and as far as we know there are no psycholinguistic models that profile individual differences between the two at various levels of literacy. Here, rather, we consider how scholars have proposed to account for the mental processes involved in text composing and text reading, respectively.

7.6 Text composing abilities Composing a text involves a cluster of skills that make it a taxing task even for experts. Professional writers and scholars often experience a feeling of blockage and anguish faced with the demands of writing a paper. Consider the messages our dear colleague and a superb writer, Annette Karmiloff-Smith, hung on her fridge to send her back to the computer: “Don’t open the door, you’re not really hungry, go back to your desk.” Any excuse to avoid having to continue writing. The idea of a relaxed, smiling author delivering a text in one shot is largely fantasy. Not surprisingly, most papers about writing begin with some version of the expression writing is complex.30 Scholars have explained text production from two main points of view. Cognitive models focus on writers’ inner work—the mental operations for constructing a text (or by software based on how writers produce texts); socio-cultural models highlight environmental factors—social, historical, and identity-related. Neither

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perspective alone covers what’s involved in writing. Ideally, we would need to go into the brain to find out what happens there but, as we note in the section below on neurological underpinnings, current knowledge on this issue is scarce. Following Galbraith’s advice (1999), we take models of writing as tools of thought that help to organize phenomena even though they rarely work perfectly. Here, we review major cognitively oriented models of text writing and reading and then touch on pedagogically and clinically motivated approaches. In the early 1980s, Flower and Hayes (1981) produced the first systematic account of the mental processes underlying text writing as a problem-solving activity. By doing so, the two scholars transformed text production into a domain of cognitive science. They had expert writers deliver ‘think-aloud’ protocols: reports on what they were thinking from the moment they sat down to write up to when they considered the text to be completed. Participants’ protocols revealed a non-linear process of production. Writers do not first mentally plan what they will write, then put this down in words, finally revising their text. Rather, the basic processes—planning, which includes organizing of content and goal-setting, generation, converting ideas into text, and revising, by re-reading and editing previously produced text—may occur in different orders and be repeated cyclically. Skillful writers typically review and correct earlier drafts, as they adjust their goals throughout the composition process, attending to the communicative situation along with their own ongoing writing. Thus, a writer also needs skill as a reader. When producing a text, writers read-to-review; they go over their text to detect both local problems (e.g., how appropriate a word is) and more global issues like the order of presenting ideas and transitions between paragraphs. In so doing, writers (internally) compare the meaning they derive from what they wrote to the message they intended to convey. Besides, texts are not created in a vacuum, they are supported by culturally constructed means— other texts, dictionaries, coauthors, reviewers—as aids to the writer (Hayes, 1996). The entire process is subject to writers’ motivations, goals, and, importantly, the writing-schemas stored in their LTM based on previous experience. An inadequate (or inexistent) schema in LTM will impair both the process and output of writing. When a person writes something for the first time, a newspaper editorial, say, the cognitive overload due to lack of the schema for this type of text will undermine the quality of what s/he produces. As we show in the next section, the mixture of flexibility, control, and automatizing in expert writing first hinted at by Flower and Hayes have neural underpinnings. Some years later, Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) found that the way novice writers produce a text differs considerably from experts. Inexperienced writers simply dump on paper what they know about the topic, with no regard for setting goals, or generating writing plans. The authors defined this difference as knowledge-telling by learners versus knowledge-transforming on the part of proficient writers who approach the task as a goal-oriented problem. While

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novice writers focus on content—what to put in the text as it emerges from their LTM—experts deal with both text content (what to say) and rhetorical issues (how to express and organize their ideas). Non-experts spend most of their writing time on text-generation, and very little on planning and revising, whereas proficient writers deal concurrently with both substance and form, yielding a transformation of knowledge. Kellogg (2008) added knowledge crafting as a third level of writing mastery, where writers show heightened sensitivity to their audience, as participants in a shared rhetorical space. More practiced writers can anticipate various interpretations of their text, and so clarify or refute them in advance. These analyses provide useful frameworks for understanding text writing and the potential it has as a tool for learning. A follow-up study of Galbraith and Baaijen (2018) questioned how writing conditions and writing style (measured independently) affected writers’ understanding and the quality of their written outcomes. University students were given five minutes to write down a single sentence summing up their opinion of a given topic (in the ‘synthetic-planning’ condition), or to produce a structured outline of the text (the ‘outline planning’ condition). All participants improved their understanding of the topic, but in different ways. The first condition, where ideas were presented in the order they had been planned, yielded an outcome equivalent to knowledge-telling; when ideas were reorganized to satisfy a set goal while writing, a higher text quality was achieved, closer to knowledge transformation. A few years ago, the first author of this book had high-school and university students write an essay discussing whether people should be free to move across countries (Tolchinsky & Perera, 2020). Before they started to write, participants were asked to rank how much they knew about the topic on a scale from 1 to 10, from knowing nothing to a lot. They also had to perform a similar self-evaluation when they finished writing. Only 30% assigned the same grade both before and after writing, the rest rated themselves either higher or (sometimes considerably) lower. That is, some students (almost 40%) discovered while writing that they knew more than they had expected, others realized they knew less. The multiple mental activities involved in producing a text, especially those requiring the writer to elaborate on a topic, turn writing into a ‘knowledge-constituting’ process. The models reviewed so far emphasize the interaction between high-level activities and contextual cues for successful text-construction. They take into account internal processes of goal-setting, writing schemas, and planning, and how these interact with the factors of task-environment and reader-audience. In contrast, pedagogically motivated approaches to writing view transcription skills (handwriting and spelling) as fundamental for successful text production in the early stages of learning to write (Berninger et al., 1996). To them, lack of automaticity in transcription skills severely interferes with high-level activities of planning or goal-setting, so constraining generation of ideas and content. Young children’s

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limited cognitive resources mean that any variation in the processing cost of a given component (in this case, handwriting and spelling) will impact other components (McCutchen, 1996). We agree that transcription skills are necessary to create a written text, and they are indeed a challenge for young learners. But learning to write is not simply an additive process, where children first learn to trace the letters of the alphabet, then to spell isolated words, and afterward move to constructing a text. High-level activities and transcriptional skills interact at all levels of writing development; and text writing is strongly affected by the reading abilities of novice and expert writers alike (Tolchinsky, 2003).

7.7 Cognitive processes in text reading: printed and digital The goal of reading is, obviously, to understand what you have read. Cognitive psychologists, psycholinguists, and teachers would agree that comprehension is achieved when readers can form a coherent mental representation of the contents of a text by constructing meaningful relationships between the ideas it contains. Ideally, this means going beyond what is explicit to infer from and reacting critically to what the text implies (McNamara & Magliano, 2009). Studies in discourse analysis reveal that certain text features help readers to construct coherent readings—for example, expressing relations of cause and consequence, or introducing the text topic early on and then re-mentioning it across the text. The problem is, as Pinker puts it, that readers are so eager for coherence they may supply it where none exists. Where might the search for coherence lead us from reading the two sentences “We do not tear your clothing with machinery. We do it carefully by hand” (Pinker, 2015, p. 14). Not surprisingly, models of reading comprehension lean toward one or the other approach, tending to be either ‘top-down,’ considering what readers bring to reading, as against ‘bottom-up,’ focusing on what the text offers them. Maryanne Wolf ’s (2018) ideas on reading take a top-down approach that highlights the quality of attention a reader invests in the task. Proficient or ‘deep reading’ marshals the imagination, empathy, background knowledge, and mentalizing, for a person to perceive the text as a whole and access its multiple layers of meaning. Most top-down explanations can be traced to Rumelhart’s (1977) proposal that meaning is not confined to the text alone, but is, rather, the outcome of coconstruction of the information inside the text and the reader’s interpretations from outside. This approach underlines subjective reader-based factors interacting with text-based input, even for basic processes of word recognition. Readers supplement their understanding of what a text mentions explicitly by inferences that draw on both clues provided by the text and their own prior knowledge. Memory-based models of discourse comprehension emphasize the role of background knowledge (Gernsbacher, 1997; Garrod & Sanford, 1994) for processing

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incoming material. Inferential and deductive reasoning, analogical skills, critical analysis, reflection, and insight (attributed by Wolf (2018) to deep reading) all contribute significantly to reading comprehension.31 However, while expert readers may need only milliseconds to execute these processes, it takes young readers years to develop them. Besides, readers’ dispositions, as implied by Bourdieu’s notion of habitus (1984) (see note 21), also play a role in allocating time and attention to reading comprehension. It is still an open question whether electronic texts afford a platform for deep reading. Reading from a computer screen can be as rapid as reading from paper (Gould et al., 1987). But can it be just as demanding of attention and as multilayered? Studies fail to show a systematic difference in synthesizing and understanding printed versus electronic texts (Muter & Maurutto, 1991). True, individual differences did emerge in students’ reports on how well they dealt with digital texts in hypertext format (i.e., containing links to other texts) (Lacroix, 1999).32 But these were, rightly in our opinion, attributed to the higher levels of cognitive processing needed for handling information from multiple sources rather than to the effect of the input being digital. There is evidently no simple answer to the advantages of processing electronic versus printed materials. Naomi Baron (2017) investigated hundreds of university students in the U.S. and other countries with different languages and writing systems. She found that participants attributed certain pros and cons to each medium. They reported that it was easier to search for information when reading on a screen, that they more often reread materials in print than on screen, and that they tended to prefer print when dealing with longer texts, even though it takes more time than on screen (one of the participants reported that this was “because I read more carefully,” p. 18). Baron concludes that although each medium seems to have advantages, reading attentively (Wolf ’s ‘deep reading’) may be jeopardized by young people’s tendency to multitask on digital platforms (emailing, making phone-calls, texting)—confirming studies that note the detrimental cognitive effects of multitasking (Uncapher et al., 2016). Digital reading is a type of ‘hyper-reading,’ reading that aims (Hayles, 2012) “to conserve attention by quickly identifying relevant information so that only relatively few portions of a given text are actually read” (p. 12). Baron found that even academics appear to scan scholarly materials presented digitally more rapidly than when printed. She concludes that there is “an evolving sense that writing is for the here-and-now, not the long haul. Since written communication first emerged … one of its consistent attributes has been that it is a durable form of communication that one can reread or refer to. Today, a nexus of forces is making writing seem more ephemeral” (Baron, 2017), with the challenge today being to domesticate “our now-habitualized instincts that tell us to move things along” (p. 19). Wise advice indeed to scholars and pedagogues alike on how to benefit from the advantages for knowledge-building provided by digital media.

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We move now to explore the neurological processes supporting our possibility to create and interpret (permanent) written messages.

7.8 Neurological underpinnings of text production and comprehension Writing is a relatively recent invention, going back to the Sumerian system of cuneiform about 6000 years ago. Unlike speech, not all people or cultures possess writing, so that the human genome has not yet been affected by writing. It is remarkable that without a genetic predisposal, people learn to read and write relatively easily, a fact that illustrates the process of repurposing: brain regions genetically dedicated to general motor planning or visual processing of objects adapt to the motor skills for handwriting or typing and for decoding the graphic signs of writing. Nothing in our evolution prepares us to receive language through the eyes, yet brain-imaging techniques show that adult readers have brain areas and highly evolved mechanisms adapted to reading. Dehaene (2007) defines this instance of exaptation as neuronal recycling. Brain imagery and cell activation in primates and humans show that similar neural mechanisms are responsible for object discrimination in the macaque and in humans: in the inferior temporal cortex in the ape and the ventral temporal cortex in humans. Brain-scanning studies of the connection between regions that manage visual information and language show that the immediate activation of the left hemisphere observed in adults encountering a written word did not occur in children who had not learned to read. Instead, pre-readers revealed activation in the right hemisphere, showing no link between visual forms and language (Dehaene, 2007). This finding has a behavioral correlate: 3- to- 4-year-old children are sensitive to the visual features of writing (linearity, units, directionality) as distinct from drawings, but are not yet aware that writing represents language (Tolchinsky, 2003). Activation of the neural networks associated with reading (the area attending to the visual form of words in the left occipito-temporal region) occurs from age 7, when children have discovered the writing-language connection. One of the few longitudinal studies in this domain (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2008) showed that activation of this region improves as a function of reading level rather than of chronological age, so that the change in activation pattern is not due to brain maturation. Studies in French (Dehaene, 2007) showed that level of activation typical of adults when they see a word appears in 10-year-old schoolchildren only for well-known words, not for plausible pseudo-words, and this effect does not stabilize until adolescence (on condition they can read!). As reading progresses, the superior temporal sulcus and the inferior frontal cortex are activated: the brain anchors points of language reading, along with other areas of attention.

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The number of networks involved increases as reading comprehension progresses. Fed by visual information (letters, spaces, punctuation marks, paragraphs), multiple networks are activated in parallel, with input from one to the other supporting text comprehension. This occurs particularly when readers obtain new insights or change perspective while reading. Continuing development of executive functions explains why these analytical processes in reading are attained only in adolescence. As we noted in Chapter 1, adolescence is critical in this regard due to the proliferation of synapses and pruning of neuronal connections in the prefrontal cortex until adulthood. Imagery and emotional empathy also play a role in reading comprehension. This occurs in the motor cortex when reading passages and metaphors about movement or texture, evoking readers’ individual perspectives (Chapter 3) and the feeling-thinking networks involved in mentalizing (Chapters 1 and 5), such as the insula and the cingulate cortex (Bernhardt & Singer, 2012). Background knowledge is important for analytical processes—inferring implicit meaning, completing missing information, and selecting hypotheses, etc.—and it pays to “combine inferential capacities with empathy and perspective-taking to ferret out the mysteries in what we read” (Wolf, 2018, p. 61). Readers first process the information in a text through distributed networks in the left and right prefrontal cortex and then proceed to form predictions, as an internal monitoring system to assess the value of the writer’s hypotheses (Aziz-Zadeh et al., 2009). The left prefrontal regions then come into action to make connections between what a reader has understood so far, so that s/he can generate further hypotheses of their own, while at the same time, the right prefrontal cortex evaluates predictions, assessments which are then sent back to the left prefrontal area as the final arbiter. Neuroimaging techniques allow us to explore neural functioning while people are writing, with certain limitations. The rigid horizontal posture in which participants must be positioned is not the best way to write. Nor can people be given a keyboard, because the magnetic field generated by the scanner would propel it across the room. With children, this is even more difficult because it is hard for them to stay still long enough not to cause magnetic field disturbance. Thus, few studies have looked at children’s brain activity as they write (Richards et al., 2011). Overcoming such limitations demands imaginative solutions (not all equally successful) for studying the internal working of the brain when writers produce text. As a result, many correlates of cognitive processes during text writing are still unexplored. The few scholars who have dared to approach text writing have done so by eliciting stretches of text that follow a prompt, rather than being self-generated. A group of neuro-scientists in Germany tracked brain activity while writing using fMRI techniques, comparing non-experts with little experience in text composing to practiced experts (Erhard et al., 2014; Shah et al., 2013). Participants had, first, to copy a piece of text so their brain could be scanned, tracking only

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the graphics of writing without generation of ideas or planning. They then read a few lines from a story which they had to continue in their own words. The short time participants were given for generating ideas before starting to write was called ‘brainstorming’ and the production phase ‘text–creative writing.’ Overall, Lotze and associates (2014) detected a broad network of regions in the brain working together, some becoming active only during text writing, but not while copying. Moreover, different areas were activated at different phases of the writing process, and by expert compared with non-expert writers. These studies showed that both text production and copying marshaled a broad network of motor and visual brain areas in addition to cognitive and linguistic areas. However, creative writing showed stronger bilateral activations of the hippocampus associated with the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) together with both temporal poles. Brain activity was particularly marked in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and the left temporal pole (TP), two structures that support many other language-related processes. This suggests that when completing a story, writers focus broadly on their inner thought processes, navigating to detect novelty and to produce memories enabled by the hippocampus and the PCC. At the same time, writers are occupied with retrieving specific words—supported by the left TP—for selecting relevant and inhibiting irrelevant semantic input. The right IFG and the integrity of the left IFG are important for selecting semantic information and for implementing successful inhibitory control over motor responses. Creative writing showed higher brain activation at prefrontal and left caudate sites (left superior middle prefrontal cortex, the left middle frontal gyrus and the left IFG and right IFG) in experts than in non-experts—suggesting that experts are subject to higher cognitive control and their writing is more flexible and less effortful than that of their non-expert peers. The left middle prefrontal cortex (mPFC), as part of the language network involved in working memory tasks and associated with selection and coordination of multiple sub-goals, ensures the cognitive flexibility to focus on relevant information, and a high working-memory capacity to sustain several lines of incoming information concurrently. Experts recruit the same structures when writing a text as when generating ideas in creative verbal tasks that require them to propose alternative uses for common objects (see Chapter 4) or in producing novel metaphors (see Chapter 5). Recall that the left IFG is consistently involved in verbal creativity tasks, and in semantic and working memory processes, whereas activation of the right IFG occurs during emotional language processing, such as expressive gesturing and metaphors. Finally, the left caudate nucleus (CN) accounts for the more automatic, implicit, and efficient operation that characterizes expert writing. As a subcortical structure, the CN is responsible for effortless transfer of information and skill automatization due to its involvement in procedural memory and implicit motor control. These results suggest that frontal regions are important for text writing: they account for the working memory and critical attitude that writers need, in addition to their being

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connected to areas with domain-specific knowledge stored in the brain for creating text content. In contrast, non-expert writers recruited lateral occipital areas, suggesting that they resort to more visual imagery strategies than their more expert counterparts (a finding consistent with an earlier study on non-creative story-generation (Howard-Jones et al., 2005)). Non-experts produce texts in a kind of freeassociative process, guided by imagined scenes of the story they are attempting to complete. This is consistent with the free-association style observed among poor writers by think-aloud protocols (Hayes, 1996) and in the knowledge-telling model reviewed earlier in this chapter. Neurological differences between expert and non-expert writers emerge as early as the planning phase. Experts showed activation in frontal and occipital regions lateralized to the left hemisphere—in particular at the left IFG and right IFG, the mPFC together with the left precentral gyrus (the anatomical location of the primary motor cortex responsible for the control of voluntary movement), and the bi-lateral inferior occipital gyrus; also the right cerebellar hemisphere, and the right calcarine. Similar activation emerged from studies of reading processes (Shaywitz & Shaywitz, 2008). During the preparation phase, writers apparently anticipate not only the content and organization of the story, but also the motor plans involved in writing. Also, expert writers activated the right putamen, the right insula, the left supplementary motor area (SMA), and the right primary motor cortex more than non-experts, suggesting that brainstorming in expert writers may automatically evoke speech production activation. The insula is described mainly as supporting the integration of interoceptive information and emotional experience, but it is also linked to speech production, together with the right putamen and SMA that participate in articulation-related aspects of sentence-generation. During preparation, experienced writers anticipate their motor response similarly to musicians when reading musical notations—in contrast to non-expert writers, who activate their visual centers. The two groups thus appear to use different strategies during brainstorming: non-experts call to mind their stories as a movie inside their heads, experts by an inner voice. When the two groups started to write, another set of differences emerged. Deep inside the brain, the CN became active for expert writers but not for novices. Recall that the CN plays an essential role in skills that come with practice, like riding a bicycle or playing the piano: when we first acquire a skill, conscious effort is demanded, and with practice our actions become more automatized. It is the CN that handles the shift from effortful to automatic activity. Neural underpinnings in the brain substantiate the behavioral characterization of text writing processes as multifaceted, like their outcomes. In the next section we trace the developmental path in coping with this complex array of tasks to gain command of the multifold features of written outcomes.

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7.9 Developmental trajectories Popular views and linguistics textbooks alike differentiate between spoken language as ‘natural acquisition’ and ‘learning’ to read and write as skills that require specific instruction. The following quote from The Routledge Linguistics Encyclopedia (3rd ed., 2010) illustrates this opposition: We must distinguish carefully between writing and language. Language is an innate ability of human beings. We all learn to speak with no formal training. Writing, however, is not innate; it must always be consciously taught and learned. Children only learn to read and write some years after they have learned to speak. (p. 554)

We do not agree with this assertion. True, people acquire speech all over the world, while not all languages and cultures have a writing system. But in knowledge-based societies, gaining literacy is an integral part of language development. Text-literacy promotes richer vocabulary and syntax, adapting language use to diverse communicative contexts for varied discourse functions, and altering how speakers look at and think about language. Previous chapters in this book have pointed to how, in becoming literate, children change their conception of sounds, words, and sentences; they refine their sensitivity to the distinction between reported facts and inferences, between possible and counterfactual statements, between what is said and what is meant. Formal instruction is clearly important for becoming literate, and text-literacy flourishes in institutional settings. Yet children are primed to literacy well before and outside of formal schooling. A rich body of research in different languages and orthographies shows that before they are ‘taught’ to read and write, children have their own ideas about these activities, they have a sense of the representational status of writing before they learn the alphabetic principle that letters stand for sounds (Tolchinsky, 2003). Charles Read analyzed how preschoolers who knew the names of the letters and were familiar with the letter-to-sound correspondences wrote unfamiliar words. He found that their spellings showed sensitivity to the phonetic characteristics of words they did not know and an intuitive notion of letter-to-sound correspondences, and also that different children “chose the same phonetically motivated spellings to a degree that can hardly be explained as resulting from random choice or the influence of adults” (Read, 1975, p. 420). In other words, even young preschool children could detect phonetic characteristics of words as rendered by conventional English spelling. Late preschool age is also the time for invented reading. Many of us have witnessed how young children appear to read even without knowing how to. Faced

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with a printed page, and helped by the pictures in their storybooks, children produce words with a reading intonation, sometimes even breaking them up into syllables, and continuing to talk until the end of the printed pages. This shows that children have a clear notion about the difference between speaking and reading even before they go to school. Contemporary preschoolers also develop digital reading behaviors, using finger taps for their parents’ (and often their own!) smartphones. Yet even after they do so, children have a long way to go before becoming proficient users of the language of literacy, a shift that involves reading and writing as knowledge-transforming processes.

7.9.1 Developing text-literacy Mastering the alphabetic code is only a first step: developing text-literacy involves commanding the extra-alphabetic conventions that organize extended discourse, gaining familiarity with different genres, and learning to manage text production. For example, defining word boundaries is not a straightforward task, so that children often run words together in their earliest text productions (Everson et al., 2016; Tolchinsky & Cintas, 2001). The notion of a word is by no means a simple one (see Chapter 5). Individuals have their own personal mental lexicon, while word boundaries and spacing between words differ across languages.33 The phrase ‘to the beach’ is written as three words in English and Spanish A LA PLAYA with two spaces, but only one in Italian ALLA SPIAGGIA, and none in Hebrew LYM (pronounced layam). A child attaching the preposition a to the article la in Spanish would be making an error of hypo-segmentation, a space between preposition and article in Italian would be hyper-segmentation. Early on nouns are written with blanks on both sides, but putting spaces between them and grammatical items like prepositions or pronouns is sometimes difficult even for university students. Punctuation shows an even more protracted development. Fabretti & Pontecorvo, (2005) analyzed how 7-year-old speakers of three Romance languages wrote a familiar nursery tale (Little Red Riding Hood). Most of the children made some attempt at punctuation, often inconsistently, while others used it only to signal the beginning or end of the text. Punctuating requires recognizing the boundaries of syntactic constructions such as sentence, which are largely inaccessible to non-experts. A large-scale study of texts produced by Hebrew speakers (Gold, 2001) showed that while punctuation improved in accuracy and variety from 9 to 10 years to adolescence, even educated adults failed to conform to the norms of the Hebrew Language Academy. Another Hebrew-based study showed that 9- to 10-year-olds failed to use punctuation conventionally in different types of texts (Berman & Nir-Sagiv, 2011). Writers in middle childhood rely mainly on affective, communicatively motivated elements like quotation signs, termed by

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Lukeman “the trumpet” (2007, p. 139), and exclamation marks to move elements “into the limelight,” (p. 185) for emphasis or what they see as noteworthy elements of the text. Moving now to overall text structure, children are sensitive early on to different genres of discourse even before gaining command of alphabetic literacy (see Chapter 2). When asked to dictate stories for writing down, 4- to 5-year-olds used linguistic forms typical of written discourse, and avoided expressions suited to spoken usage (Tolchinsky, 2016). Their early writings also use different layouts for distinct discourse genres: they would arrange lists vertically with each item under the next, but presented stories in long horizontal lines. This precocious ability to differentiate between genres orally and in writing can be attributed to early pragmatic development. Even toddlers are exposed to various speech acts—questions, promises, requests, orders—that are the basis for apprehending discourse genres as transformed speech acts in two senses: they involve extended pieces of discourse and are performed in linguistically and socially determined forms (Bazerman, 2004; Todorov & Berrong, 1976). In contrast to more overall communicative features of genres, marking of textinternal units—words by spacing, linguistic segments by punctuation, conceptual chunks by paragraphs—means recourse to elusive metalinguistic notions like word, discourse segment, sentence as well as to ideational concepts like illustration, argumentation, and referencing. These capacities emerge only late in the school years. Schooling promotes access to additional types of different texts. As suggested by Olson & Oatley (2014), “Formal education is little more than an immersion in a world of literacy, learning the conventions of comprehending and producing written texts in a variety of domains. Indeed, schooling is the hallmark and essential ingredient of written culture” (p. 7). When exploring new text genres, children encounter unfamiliar grammatical constructions (for example, making impersonal statements and using generic present tense in analytical essays, or conditional and hypothetical propositions in describing possible scenarios). And they acquire new functions for the grammatical constructions that they already use (exploiting past tense to refer to historical events, or conditional constructions in imaginary fantasies). Experience with contrasting text types underscores the relationship between the form and function of linguistic devices and helps learners use them appropriately for writing and reading different kinds of discourse. The route to command of different genres is staggered. Becoming more distant and objective with age, it proceeds from: (i) personal genres like recounting experiences and telling stories to (ii) factual genres like procedures and reports, and on to (iii) analytical genres employing description, argumentation, and explanations (Schleppegrell, 2004).

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Recall Bereiter & Scardamalia’s (1987) distinction between knowledge-tellers (who retrieve stored information from memory and put it down in writing as it comes to mind) and knowledge-transformers (who elaborate the communicative problem, setting goals for generating and evaluating their text). This helps explain both why some text genres are easier to learn and why, within each genre, certain text structures appear earlier than others. For narrative, children can retrieve isolated events from memory and write them down in the order that they occurred, lessening the cognitive cost of producing a story-like script from LTM (Chapter 2). Analytical prose, in contrast, requires elaborating goals and planning ideas; the global structure of exposition or argumentation is less familiar to children, and cannot be culled from personal experience or familiar stories, so making greater cognitive demands (Boscolo, 1990; Schleppegrell, 2004). Conveying and relating informational features in analytical texts takes even longer to develop. While a knowledge-telling strategy is sufficient for writing a minimal narrative text, a knowledge-transforming strategy is necessary for analytical writing. We applied Britton’s model of rhetorical moves (Britton, 1994)—segments of discourse with a specific communicative goal—to analyze the essays written by Spanish students aged 9, 12, and 16 years of age (Tolchinsky et al., 2005). Identifying three types of moves—advance, to present a topic, expansion, to extend it, and unification, to summarize what preceded—we found that the number of rhetorical moves increased as a function of age-schooling level. Expansions and unifications increased in all three groups, while the number of advance-type moves remained stable. Older students elaborated on new content, younger children simply listed situations (analogously to narrative development, Chapter 2). Adolescents gave explanations and justifications for their claims, and younger children supported their claims by deontic statements, like obligations and prohibitions (as shown in Chapter 4). More recently, a rhetorical-moves analysis was applied to texts written by Spanish-speaking grade-school, high-school, and university students in response to a prompt aimed to elicit analytical prose (Vilar Weber & Tolchinsky, 2021). This time, however, the moves were defined to detect students’ ability to combine exposition and argumentation. We identified (i) assertive moves that mentioned the writer’s standpoint on the topic without any support (e.g., ‘People have the right to travel wherever they want’); (ii) expository moves providing facts or reasons to support their assertions (e.g., ‘Nowadays many people move to different countries for different reasons; some due to the political situation of their country and others try to find a better life’); and (iii) argumentative moves integrating the writer’s standpoint and support in the same move (e.g., ‘Freedom of movement should be a right for everyone because without it the effects of war would worsen in many countries’).

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Not surprisingly, rhetorical structure was more full-blown with age-schooling level: nearly all grade-schoolers can combine assertive and argumentative moves. Among high-schoolers, these are typically elaborated by expository moves. The proportion of ‘supportive’ content increased with age, showing concern for backing up the writer’s stand on the topic (taking into account their potential readers). Using analytic prose also means employing writing as a mode of production different from speech. Small children aged 5 to 7, when asked to write a story, begin to write immediately: the benefits of thinking in advance about what they are going to write is foreign to them, nor do they reread or revise what they have written. In our cross-linguistic study on narratives and expository texts (Berman, 2008), even adolescents and adult participants did not take advantage of the advice to ‘take their time,’ although they were given blank pages for drafts. Instead, they began to write almost immediately on being instructed to do so. Learning to coordinate the various activities enabled by writing (planning, rereading, revising, and editing) is another important step in developing text-literacy, not equally achieved by even mature speaker-writers. Progress in written production is also reflected in how writers manage time while composing a text. Length of pauses, writing speed, and spurts (chunks of written texts without pausing) vary with development and level of expertise. For example, pauses are distributed differently by children and adults (Fayol & Monteil, 1988; Jisa, 2004). Adults typically pause before beginning to write, a sign of planning, and subsequently they use pauses and vary their writing speed to manage different dimensions of the writing task, whereas children begin writing right away, so have to process all dimensions simultaneously. A key difference between mature and novice writers, then, lies in existence of an initial pre-writing phase. These studies also showed that the motives for pausing differed by age-schooling level. Children in later grade school, like adults but unlike younger children, made shorter pauses when the story had familiar content and/or its ending was predictable—factors that had no effect on younger children: they attended to transcription factors like spelling difficulty or handwriting at the expense of higher levels of text production that affect pausing and writing rate. Relative concern with transcription is a sign of how proficient children are in this domain (Alves et al., 2012). Being able to plan and revise a written text demands a complex interweaving of linguistic and cognitive abilities. ‘Work on paper’ (Chenoweth & Hayes, 2003) requires that writers interact with the written form as detached from their intentions, they must be able to shift roles between language producer and language recipient.34 And revision is a source of knowledge-transforming because it affords writers the opportunity to compare what they have written with how it will be read (and interpreted) by potential readers (Holliway & McCutchen, 2004).

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Learning to deal with these complex processes is facilitated by neurobiological and cognitive developments in executive functions which enable anticipation, pre-planning, and flexibility in alternating goals and in self-monitoring. Current instructional approaches indicate that a good way to cope with the multiple factors in producing a text (organization, goals, audience perspectives, and linguistic expression) is to teach novice writers to self-regulate these different activities. The ‘self-regulated strategy development’ (SRSD) developed by Harris and Graham (2009) provides learners with explicit rules, mnemonics, and recipes for coping with these varied demands. Such systematic instruction is useful, but it needs to take into account that textliteracy develops gradually into and beyond adolescence, as a result of cognitive advances and growth in environmental input along with increasing connectivity in the attentional networks that underlie perspective-taking and empathy. Besides, developing text-literacy manifests marked individual differences. Rhetorical traditions combine with discourse genre to dictate shared procedures for writing, but whether and how people comply with these constraints differs from one person to another. Writing is susceptible to the so-called ‘Matthew effect,’ inspired by: “For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them” (Matt. 25:29), as popularized by Stanovich (1986) in the domain of literacy. Some gifted individuals know how to write, they do it seemingly effortlessly; others struggle to put their thoughts down on paper or the computer screen. Besides, it is not necessarily the case that practice makes perfect. Natural endowment interacts with habitus, improved by increasing exposure to varied types of texts, but mediated by intangible individual differences.

7.9.2 Developing reading A highly accepted popular model of reading comprehension, the so-called ‘Simple View of Reading’ advanced by Gough and Tunmer (1986), held that reading ability can be predicted by two components: decoding, measured by “the ability to pronounce (or silently apprehend the pronunciation of ) pseudowords like fland, otphim, or stenk” (p. 7) and listening comprehension, “the process by which given lexical (i.e., word) information, sentences and discourses are interpreted” (p. 7). Subsequent modifications of this model, particularly Scarborough’s ‘Reading Rope’ (2001), included virtually everything under listening comprehension: background knowledge, vocabulary, linguistic structures, verbal reasoning, and literacy knowledge. Recently, Lonigan et al. (2018) and associates showed that this model applies for readers up to 5th grade, with decoding becoming less important with age and/or higher scores on reading comprehension. Other studies, too, have

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detected a significant variance in decoding and linguistic comprehension, with varying ideas on what makes children poor readers (Adlof et al., 2006; Cain et al., 2005). They may have good decoding but poor comprehension skills, or the other way round. A recent study with 2nd graders (Kim, 2020) included working memory, vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, inference, and comprehension monitoring as skills needed for word reading and listening comprehension. The author found that “Word reading and listening comprehension … explained virtually all the variance in reading comprehension” (p. 3)—a conclusion consistent with the less sophisticated but feasible assertion that everything kids know and do influences their reading comprehension. Thus, the simple model is not so simple (Snow, 2018): all reader-related skills appear to be involved, directly or indirectly, in reading comprehension. Decoding and listening comprehension may indeed help in processing simple texts and coping with low-inference comprehension items in early grade school. But subsequently, other more complex variables enter the picture. Older students need to apply the skill of deeply comprehending; using textual evidence in support of a claim, inferring word meanings from careful reading of text, integrating information about a topic from multiple texts, and reading to critique others’ arguments. A study of reading comprehension of Hebrew-speaking 4th-grade to highschool students (Kaplan, 2013) had participants respond to varied types of questions on six texts at different levels of difficulty—from requiring factual knowledge to inferential reasoning. Results revealed a complex interaction between ageschooling level, text difficulty, type of texts, and kind of questions, yielding a far from ‘simple’ account of what is involved in comprehension. A similar multifactor explanation was found for Dutch-speaking high-school students (Segers & Verhoeven, 2016). Two features that had a strong direct effect on reading comprehension were (i) level of lexicon in the texts and (ii) logical reasoning as measured by both simple syllogisms (requiring a yes or no answer), with perspective-taking a third variable contributing to reading comprehension. This complexity also appeared in the study of LaRusso (2016) and associates. They used an ecologically valid measure, giving students a plausible purpose for reading (e.g., blog, website, email, news article, textbook excerpt), accompanied by questions that mobilized the inferencing and integration needed for deep reading. Success on these tasks depended on students’ ability to understand academic language, to consider alternative perspectives, and to engage in reasoning about challenging problems. Diverse studies thus demonstrate that deep reading involves late-developing linguistic and cognitive skills of literate language use, complex reasoning, and perspective-taking. Yet even experienced readers may not necessarily apply these abilities across-the-board, in all types of reading and to all types of texts.

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7.10 What’s involved in becoming a literate language user The sheer number and complexity of (we hope not too bewildering) topics touched on in this concluding chapter highlight the manifold issues involved in becoming a literate language user: from the technology of putting graphic signs on paper or computer screens to writing academic texts, a skill attained, if at all, only in adolescence or later. These abilities are not universally shared. Not all languages have a writing system, nor do all people in ‘literate’ societies know how to read and write. Besides, only part of those who attain script-literacy will become textliterate and only a small proportion of the latter will continue to produce texts after school, while even fewer will meet the demands of what we have termed ‘analytical prose.’ Producing such texts demands cognitive, social, and linguistic faculties that are constrained by conventions of culture, filtered by language-specific traits, and by individual history and abilities. A convincing piece of writing in Latin America may seem circuitous and not goal-oriented enough by a North American reviewer. And a good essay written as a book-report by a high-school student will differ from a professor’s disquisition on current values in fiction prose. Even for nonspecialists, these differences are intuitively recognizable, but awesomely difficult to pinpoint. This chapter has attempted to operationalize the web of abilities involved in this complex human undertaking by tracing its neural underpinnings and the long developmental path from putting graphic signs on paper to analytic writing. There are many gradients to the notion of literacy. Each evokes some change in our perception, use, and conceptualization of language. Going back to the Routledge quotation, we hope to have shown that writing is language; learning to read and write is part of language development. The distinction between a native language user and a proficient language user captures how children acquire the language of literacy and how this variety in turn transforms the use of speech. Native language users early on produce grammatically well-formed structures in everyday conversation. Exposure to and use of written language in knowledge-based school activities challenges (and also enables) learners to expand their vocabulary, syntactic repertoire, and formfunction mappings, as well as to use language appropriate to academic settings: all of these are needed for writing as an instrument of thought and becoming an active member of the textual community. We all learn to speak with no formal training, but schooling helps in the move from being native speakers to becoming proficient writer-readers of a language. The domain of literacy provides further evidence of the complex web of interaction between nature and nurture in using and developing language beyond age 5.

Notes 1. The Mycenaean Greeks kept some palace records in the Linear B script, but there is no evidence that they used writing for texts like literary compositions, diplomatic

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correspondence, or business documents. Literacy was confined to scribes and palace officials and disappeared from the Greek world when Mycenaean civilization collapsed in the twelfth century B.C. When the Homeric poems took on a fixed written form is debatable. According to the ‘transcription hypothesis,’ literate scribes started writing down the words of epic poets in the sixth century or earlier. Yet, given how texts were written on papyrus before the Hellenistic period, a canonical text would not have been feasible at the time (Reynolds & Wilson, 1991). From the sixth century B.C. on, The Iliad and The Odyssey were regularly recited at religious and civic events throughout the Greek world, memorized by generations of schoolchildren, and reproduced in numerous copies until the fall of the Byzantine empire in the fifteenth century A.D. (Finkelberg, 2020). Irish grammarians were influenced by Isidore of Seville’s (ca.560–636) Etymologiae, describing a system of punctuation using points of various heights related to how rhetoricians divided texts into segments of discourse. The scroll remains in marginal use to this day. English monarchs recorded important legislation on scrolls until well into the Middle Ages; Torah scrolls that have hardly changed over 2000 years still figure in Jewish religious observances. Documented by Horace, Sat, II, V. 68. The principles of organization applied to the structure of the text in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries “brought about a change in the disposition of knowledge to the extent that the physical medium of the text began to serve as supports for the structure of knowledge itself ” (Morrison, 1987, p. 250). Foucault describes these changes as alterations in ‘discursive formation,’ not “simple discoveries, but constituting a whole new regime in discourse and the forms of knowledge … [which] are undeniable once one has looked at the texts with sufficient attention” (Foucault, 1980, p. 112). “It is language itself which forms mentalities, not literacy. Writing is one of the means by which encoded language is communicated, it can never be more than that” (Clanchy, 2012, p. 9). A knowledge-based society is innovative, continually adding to its repertoire, and possessing a community of scholars, researchers, engineers, technicians, research networks, and firms engaged in research and production of high-technology goods and services. Typically integrated into international resources, its technological tools for global communication and complex information make vast amounts of human knowledge easily accessible. Knowledge is used to empower and enrich people culturally and materially, and to build a sustainable society (World Science Forum, 2003). For critiques see Tholen (2017). English has an alphabetic system of writing, with a finite set of graphic elements: twenty-six letters for writing all and any of its words one after another, linearly. It is harder to establish a corresponding set for Chinese, whose characters are composed of one or more of five basic strokes and their forty-four variants, interwoven in stroke patterns to form up to 439 component radicals. These radicals observe more than eleven positional constraints in two-dimensional space, making up the compound characters that account for 80% of 7000 frequent characters (Chinese Language Committee, 2009). Consonants like t and vowels like i stand for categories of sounds called ‘phonemes’: they represent classes of phonetic entities that are pronounced differently depending

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L ANGUAGE FOR LITERACY AND LITERACY FOR L ANGUAGE on the environment they occur in. For example, English t does not sound exactly the same in words like tea, after, little, list. Understandably, attaining script-literacy takes longer with writing systems that have larger sets of graphic symbols (see note 9), which require children from 1st to 9th grade to spend hours each day writing and rewriting characters until they are committed to memory (Everson et al., 2016). Digital literacy, defined by the American Library Association as “the ability to use information and communication technologies to find, evaluate, create, and communicate information, requiring both cognitive and technical skills” (Digital Literacy (n.d.), has become an essential component of contemporary education as well as everyday life. Hiller Spires, a professor of literacy and technology (in itself an innovative combination!) at North Carolina State University, defines digital literacy as having three ‘buckets’: finding and consuming digital content; creating digital content; and communicating or sharing it (Spires et al., 2017). These conventions are language-specific even in a given script (English capitalizes at the beginning of a sentence and on proper nouns, German capitalizes all nouns), and they may differ between dialects of the same language (British and American English have different conventions for using commas, while so do Oxford and Cambridge within British English conventions). This text message was sent twenty years ago by Neil Papworth, a former developer at Sema Group Telecoms, to Richard Jarvis at Vodafone. Mobile phones did not yet have keyboards, so Papworth had to type his message on a PC. With the advent of compulsory schooling after the 1870 Education Act, learning difficulties like word blindness began to be more widely identified. The British Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 defined as a “feeble minded person” (Gillard, 2019) someone considered incapable of receiving benefit from instruction in ordinary schools. Translated freely from the French: “Illiteracy characterizes the situation of people over 16 years of age who, while having gone to school, are not able to read and understand a text dealing with situations in their daily life and/or cannot read in order to transmit simple information.” England is the only developed country in which the literacy proficiency of young adults is lower than those approaching retirement, with this gap liable to increase in the future (Kuczera et al., 2016). Bourdieu’s idea of habitus is influential yet ambiguous. It refers to the physical embodiment of cultural capital, also extending to our ‘taste’ for cultural objects such as art, food, and clothing. See Chapter 3 for discussion of the informative discourse functions of describing and arguing. Going beyond well-formedness means deliberately diverging from genre-canonical structure and content, by narrative-like anecdotes in expository texts, or by expositorylike generalizations in narratives. It enhances the discourse by meta-textual and meta-cognitive allusions—to yield a text that is original and interesting, not only ‘well-formed’ but ‘well-written,’ too. I. Winfeld (2006). Aquatic Conserv: Mar. Freshw. Ecosyst. 16: 549–553 (2006). Published online in Wiley InterScience.

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22. This is analogous to providing evaluative elaboration to flesh out events described in narrative discourse, as discussed in Chapter 2. 23. The mental representations of schema and category that serve as the point of departure for this global level of analysis are anchored in the cognitive ability to interrelate parts of a whole (Reinhart, 1984; Talmy, 1978). In narratives, events are the basic components, embedded in a narrative schema or action structure (Mandler, 1984; Shen, 1988). In analytic texts, the topic of discourse functions as a superordinate category that subsumes all other information, referring to categories and concepts that are “established, instantiated … and related one to the other to form a system” (Bruner, 1986, p.12). The distinction between (global) generalizations and (categorial) specifications of the discourse topic (Giora, 1985) underlies analyses that define expository discourse as made up of propositions at different levels of content—for example, ‘move-ons’ and ‘elaborations’ (Britton, 1994), ‘core’ versus ‘satellite’ elements (Mann & Thompson, 1988), or ‘general’ versus ‘specific’ information (Giora, 1990; Mosenthal, 1995). 24. In functional linguistics, the domain of complex syntax is referred to as ‘clause-linkage’ (Haiman & Thompson, 1988), ‘connectivity’ (Berman, 2015), ‘nexus’ (Foley & Van Valin, 1984), or ‘syntactic packaging’ (Berman & Slobin, 1994) (see Chapter 2). We use clause-combining for constructions that express relations between clauses so as not to attribute to young children (and to less literate writers in general) knowledge of a ‘sentence.’ The latter is an abstract, theory-dependent notion that is notoriously difficult to define (Chafe, 1994), with a particularly dubious status in oral language use (Halliday, 1989). 25. On the other hand, complex constructions impose higher demands on comprehension, especially for less skilled readers. Writers are challenged by the need to balance between the amount of ideas they wish to transmit in a single chunk and ease of reader processing. 26. Linguists have adopted different approaches to relate complex syntax and discourse rhetoric, including: Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Matthiessen & Thompson, 1988), Discourse Representation Theory (Kamp & Reyle, 1993), Segmented Discourse Representation Theory (SDRT) (Hobbs, 1979; Lascarides & Asher, 1993), and Coherence Relation approaches (Knott et al., 2001; Sanders et al., 1992). All view discourse structure as part of the conceptual structure (broadly speaking, the semantics) of a text. For RST and SDRT, discourse coherence depends on linking utterances so that the text will ‘make sense’ (Degand, 1998). A taxonomy of rhetorical relations holds between parts of a text by a rhetorical structure that determines, for example, selection of connectives (Fox, 1987) or referring expressions (Lakoff, 1977). Some view the structure of discourse to be a function of the relations between ‘spans of text’ in terms of their thematic unity and hierarchical organization (Mann & Thompson, 1988). 27. The so-called Terminal Unit (T-Unit)—defined as “one main clause plus any subordinate or non-clausal structure that is attached or embedded in it” (Hunt, 1970, p. 4)—is favored by educationists and speech pathologists for assessing syntactic complexity in discourse. Based on surface syntactic criteria, T-Units may fail to segment texts into meaningful units of discourse, since inexperienced writers tend to use connectives like and or so simply as ‘discourse glue’ to indicate that more is to come. Besides, units of

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31. 32.

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L ANGUAGE FOR LITERACY AND LITERACY FOR L ANGUAGE discourse may be related thematically, by topic, without any grammatical dependency, or marked in a separate sentence by words like ‘however’ or ‘besides.’ As a culture-bound feature of language use, register needs to be specified separately for each language community. Very different criteria were used in studies on English, relating to different historical sources in its vocabulary (Biber et al., 1999; Corson, 1984), a factor largely irrelevant to Modern Hebrew (Bar-Ilan & Berman, 2007; Ravid & Berman, 2009). Several decades ago, Gibson and Levin (1975) stated: “For the human species, at least, the marking of nonpictorial graphs is nevertheless interesting and has a genetic development which seems to be to some extent self-directed” (p. 231). Why, then, is writing so dominant in schools and academia? Several centuries ago, the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) suggested that reading improves our understanding, and that this improvement both increases our knowledge and enables us to deliver that knowledge to others. Locke’s formulation seems to us a good way of clarifying what we mean when talking about writing as having epistemic consequences. One exception is analogical processing (identifying similarities between different situations), whose role in text comprehension is controversial (Hammadou, 2000). The term ‘hypertext’ was first used for links between digital texts in 1965 (Nelson, 1965). As early as 1945, Vanover Bush wrote an article in Atlantic Monthly about a photo-electrical device called memex, for memory extension, that could create and follow links between documents on microfiche, while in the early 1960s, Douglas Engelbart, who invented the electronic mouse (see Chapter 5), prototyped an online system for browsing and editing email and other web operations. An agglutinating language like Turkish may have as many as ten endings added to a stem, all representing a single ‘word’ (e.g., el-ler-im-de ‘in my hand-s’), while Hebrew also has complex combinations of suffixes in a single word, e.g., sifr-ey-nu ‘bookplural+possessive-1st plural = our books.’ And multiword bundles like go to sleep, on the one hand are hard for children to break down into their component parts. This is not to deny individual styles of writing: some mature writers first think through an entire idea before putting it down in print, others jot down headings and organize prospective texts into parts before beginning to write, while a less sophisticated procedure throws everything down at one go, then spends a lot of time revising and correcting.

Afterthoughts A good story links its end to its beginning; compelling scientific accounts open with their main goals and outcomes. A seemingly simple question motivated this (ad)venture of ours: how does language develop beyond age 5? For decades linguists claimed that language acquisition is inborn, that everything linguistically relevant (meaning grammar) is attained before then. However, we started out by citing Elizabeth Bates who argued that human capacities, and hence language and language development, need to be explained by considering both nature and nurture (Tomasello & Slobin, 2005). And we concluded, like many of our colleagues today, that language is neither innate nor learned, it is both. Besides, once you go beyond isolated sentences to consider how language develops in authentic communicative situations, everything undergoes linguistically relevant changes (Berman, 2015). We reached these conclusions by setting language in motion, looking at how children and adolescents use language to navigate different worlds: of past experiences, ongoing concerns, (im)possible future contingencies, and indirect, metaphorical, and ironical allusions. We also explored whether youngsters can contemplate linguistic elements (sounds, words, sentences), and how they come to use writing, as a system that represents language, both to communicate and for thinking with. Our approach allowed us to document major developments that take place after childhood in different spheres of language use, uncovering several developmental puzzles en route. And it provided an opportunity to address the neurobiological mechanisms and socio-cultural scenarios that drive developmental changes.

Major developments beyond early childhood Growing into language, like development in other conceptual domains, can be divided into four main phases: infancy and toddlerhood (ages 0 to 3 years), which we describe as a period of ‘moving into language’; late preschool (ages 4 to 5), ‘toward a psycholinguistic frontier’; middle childhood (ages 6 to 12), ‘going conventional’; and adolescence (ages 13 to 19), ‘toward non-conformity and gaining autonomy’. The decision to focus on the latter two periods lies at the heart of our endeavor. In this, we diverge from mainstream research in what is variously termed child language (in education and language pathology), language acquisition (from the nativist perspective of formal linguistics), language learning (in 2nd language research), and, from our point of view, language development. What we found missing in accepted approaches was an overall view of language development “from emergence via acquisition to mastery” (Berman 2004, p. 13). Psycholinguists typically delineate developments (usually in the early stages) in particular areas (tense/aspect, making reference, vocabulary size, narrative skills), rather than aiming at a more integrated view of the domain as a whole. To confront this question, we rely largely on two developmental approaches: the epistemological domain-general model of Piaget (as outlined in Chapter 1) and the neuroconstructivist model of Karmiloff-Smith (1979, 1992), who characterizes development of language and other cognitive domains (like theory

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of mind or physics), as progressing from local, data-based representations to an integrated rerepresentation of knowledge. Our explorations showed that command of linguistic forms (morphemes, words, phrases, clauses), is best understood when they occur in an authentic communicative context (telling a story, chatting with one’s peers, writing an essay) to meet particular discourse functions (describing an entity, giving examples, arguing a point). This means that two of the themes we mentioned at the outset as driving our endeavor—the connection between linguistic form and discursive function and between linguistic knowledge and language use—turned out to be intimately interrelated. As a corollary, we hope to have shown that knowledge of these forms remains arid unless they are used to meet well-motivated communicative goals, which increase both in variety and specification as a function of age/schooling development. To trace developments beyond early childhood, we first looked at using language for recollection of past experiences, by linguistic marking of narrative temporality, connectivity, and reference (Chapter 2). We found that these three dimensions of storytelling develop in tandem, although temporal marking is established before narrative connectivity, and clear reference to entities takes still longer to consolidate. Each is supported by thematic shifts in what young people tell about in their stories (more abstract and impersonal, more varied and original) and by genre-related developments (increasing use of descriptive and interpretive elements fleshing out the skeleton of plot-advancing events). The (obligatory) grammatical and (optional) rhetorical facets of recollection are supported by an event-based internalized narrative schema that consolidates around middle childhood, while interpretive commentary increases toward adolescence. Among adults, stories are weighted in favor of evaluative elements and reference to story-external circumstances beyond the core narrative events. In other words, recollection grows from canonical narration to a personalized style of narrative rhetoric, at the meeting-point of ordinary language use and literary skill. These observations challenge accepted accounts of development as a linear path toward attaining the conventional features of a genre. In narrative, as in other domains, genre-canonical language use, sticking to what is expected, is only one and by no means the final station in the developmental trajectory. Here, too, linguistic flexibility is the key to mature command of language use: in narrative, for example, by alternating tense-aspect markings of temporality to express background-foreground distinctions, or by going beyond ‘story time’ to ‘storytelling’ time by relating narrative events to present circumstances. Telling a story is supported by neural networks involved in memory processes, each mediated by experiential, contextual, emotional, and linguistic factors. This implies a considerable amount of mentalizing, much like life itself. Not only telling but also mimicking and graphic depiction (of a story) are supported by these multiple areas. The suggestion raised by Bruner more than forty years ago that narrative is not only a mode of discourse but also a unique mode of thought is today supported by neurobiological findings. Most of all, good stories create a feeling of trust—expressed in the brain by increase in cortisol and oxytocin—a feeling of empathy with and concern for the characters and the events they experience. These insights, involving dimensions of language, cognition, and emotion, help explain why narrative is such a universal and early-acquired type of discourse, yet one that presents cognitive and discursive challenges which blossom only toward adolescence. We moved next (in Chapter 3) to how children and adolescents talk and write about what is currently going on in their lives, a common topic in conversation, gossip, newspapers, and social media. Surprisingly, the issue is rarely addressed in developmental research, even in this age of Twitter and online chats. The present is not easy to conceptualize, and is an

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elusive issue in scholarly research. Yet it plays an important role in use of language. We noted developmental changes in what children say and write about in actuality, in the range of social actions they deploy to do so, in how much they take into account actual or potential interlocutors, and in how appropriately they adapt the type of language they use in this domain to a particular discourse-setting or social context. Grade-school children chat (in both senses of the word) about quarrels with friends or family, about assignments they find difficult, about games they enjoy, shifting to more abstract issues of politics, climate change, or religious beliefs only later in life. This change in content over time is accompanied by command of more varied types of discourse, from describing entities to providing information, on to arguing the pros and cons of a situation. With age, more social actions are accomplished through language in more communicative contexts. By adolescence, diverse discourse functions call into play social empathy in conversation, self-awareness in diaries, powers of observation in description, worldknowledge in conveying information, analytical thought in argumentation. Underlying these developments is a path toward decentering and more distanced, divergent thinking— reflected, for example, in the settings youngsters provide when describing an entity, as increasingly more detailed and precise with age. Other late-developing abilities are being able to make a convincing argument by providing positive evidence and/or counter-claims anticipating possible objections to one’s point of view on the part of a real or potential audience. How and why people choose to talk or write about ongoing matters sheds light on the notion of discursive adequacy. Some types of usage may be good enough for interpersonal relationships or to solve conflicting opinions, but these may not be supported by fact (remember the grade-schooler’s proposal to vote for Dali’s death in Chapter 3). Others may be factually adequate but open to disagreement, as in evidence that may be correct in itself but which goes against another’s point of view; or they may have differing levels of descriptive adequacy, depending on speakers’ current state of knowledge and their ability to spark the addressee’s interest in the topic. The actual world provided us with a platform for exploring another facet of linguistic flexibility: variation in language use. We looked at different communicative contexts in which people use language (from the dinner table to the supermarket, from classroom to laboratory); the types of discourse these involve (describing, arguing, reasoning); and the range of registers of usage children must acquire to fit different situations (everyday colloquial, chat messaging, distant and elevated). Discussing language for actual worlds also highlights a usage-based theme that runs across the book: the role of language development in socialization, in adapting to the conventions and beliefs of a particular culture and speech community. We detected the impact of both shared social practices and individual cognitive development, for example in coming to grips with possible, hypothetical, and counter-factual situations in the irrealis world (Chapter 4), using language to relate to future contingencies. What are the main changes in this world of necessary, likely, possible, or contrary to fact eventualities? Two important shifts emerged in this domain. The first, from childhood to adolescence, proceeds from deontic to epistemic modality to express more sophisticated and abstract propositional attitudes, and progresses from actual probabilities to contrary-to-fact contingencies. The second, from adolescence to adulthood, shows growing concern with the semantic dimensions of probability, reflected in a broader range of modal expressions. Young children initially use irrealis mainly for instrumental means, later, for making requests in culturally appropriate ways, while grade-schoolers’ talk is largely confined to

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prescriptive and socially accepted deontic attitudes. It takes until adolescence to entertain original thoughts on a topic expressing epistemic modality and relating to knowledge or beliefs about hypothetical situations, entertaining mentalized attitudes to possible contingencies in the future. In this connection, then, we re-encountered a shift from limited, conventional thinking to an opening up of possibilities similar to what we depicted for recounting events and for relating verbally to ongoing affairs. Talking and writing about possible worlds turns out to be a linguistic and conceptual pivot in the shift from the socially conditioned attitudes and ways of thinking typical of middle childhood to the more abstract reasoning of adolescence. This domain also revealed a marked shift in usage between adolescents and adults, suggesting, first, that language development does not end with high school and, second, that there is a difference between less and more literate users of a language in this respect. Although by and large adolescents and adults express epistemic rather than deontic attitudes to much the same extent, only adults relate to the semantic dimensions of probability (as in English it is likely that, Hebrew yitaxen) and enablement (e.g., ‘language allows us to do certain things’). Second, while high-schoolers use a broader range of modal expressions than younger children (e.g., not only English should, but also must and need to), it is mainly educated adults who give voice to richly and varied means of talking or writing about alternative future scenarios. Moving from deontic to epistemic modality reflects a major cognitive leap in being able to entertain diverse, individually conceptualized alternatives in the future; it shows social growth in shifting from conventionally accepted judgments and attitudes to ideas based on personalized perspectives, and it shows linguistic advances in using abstract generalized subjects when contemplating possibilities together with lexical growth in the modal expressions that speaker-writers can apply. The capacity to anticipate, a basic property of the functioning of our brain, develops ontogenetically toward increased opening up of possibilities and generation of alternatives. Looking at the neurological support to this broadening of horizons, we discover a crucial interplay between more frontally controlled (reflective, slow, and analytic) and less controlled (intuitive, fast, automatic, and associative) processes, and between past, pre-existing knowledge and novel alternatives. The less controlled processes underlie the opening up of alternatives, and this happens while our brain is at rest! (Remember how much our brain does when not engaged in a particular task?) But the more controlled are essential to select the best alternative among available possibilities. It is the interaction between the two kinds of processes that provides the best solution. Where does the opening up of alternatives come if not from our previous experience and from our existing state of knowledge? Since stored wisdom needs to adapt to novel circumstances, once again it is flexible integration that provides the key, in this case, for selecting the best of alternative options. Flexible integration is also necessary for distinguishing between possible, conditional, and counterfactual alternatives. These require similar mental processes, but they are differentially constrained by reality. Possible future and conditional alternatives are inherently uncertain, and so are open to freer suppositional thinking. Counterfactuals, in contrast, are more constrained by what (really) did or did not happen, so requiring factual considerations as well. Hypothetical conditionals have a different neural basis from counterfactuals, which require one to integrate contrasting and incompatible states of the world into the same piece of discourse. The need to keep both factual and suppositional information in mind at once could explain why understanding of counterfactual conditionals is such an arduous task with such a protracted development.

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Changes in each domain flourish in different facets of language use driven by combined cognitive, social, and linguistic development. In talking about possible worlds, moving from deontic to epistemic modality reflects cognitive development toward diverse, individually conceptualized alternatives in the future; it shows social growth in moving from conventionally accepted judgments and attitudes to ideas based on personalized perspectives; and it shows linguistic advances in using abstract generalized subjects when contemplating possibilities together with lexical growth in the modal expressions that are put to use. We moved next to the peculiarities that feature the developmental path in non-literal uses of language (Chapter 5). We treat figurative language as a distinct realm of language use, although philosophers and cognitive scientists have largely failed to establish clear boundaries separating literal from non-literal uses of language, nor have they had much success in defining differences between types of non-literal expressions. It turns out, in effect, that similar constraints are involved for grasping literal as well as non-literal expressions: both depend on context, inference-making, resolving ambiguity, and recognizing incongruity. Given their similar processing requirements, we take the view suggested by some scholars that differences in ease of interpreting figurative expressions depend on their popularity, salience, or predictability and, above all, in how conventionalized they are—from newly innovated to fully established and an accepted part of the language. All alike are strongly impacted by culture, with each speech community having its own sayings and jokes, some of which are popular, frequent, and predictable, others sophisticated or confined to certain in-groups. This panorama conspires against assigning a straightforward developmental trajectory in the domain. Research shows that similes (Jimmy is as calm as a cat) are understood before metaphors (Jimmy is a cat) due to the transparency of the linguistic cues to the relation between the two entities involved. Idioms and proverbs require more exposure and acculturation before becoming part of a speaker’s repertoire. Ironical uses of language are grasped latest: they involve a high level of mentalizing that require speakers to access and react to their hearers’ thoughts, But these are broad generalizations, given the varied factors (familiarity, salience, context, speaker expectations, mentalizing) that carry more or less weight in each case. Studies on processing demonstrate an interplay between top-down, memory-based, semantic activation of word meaning and bottom-up pragmatic constraints of context in this domain. All non-literal usages develop as part of children’s growing knowledge and use of language in general, based on their ordinary lexical and semantic development. The different varieties all recruit brain regions that are part of the canonical language network, supplemented by other regions activated for inferring intentions, integrating context(s) and emotional connotations. Some cortical and subcortical structures are implicated across varieties, forming a core figurative network complemented by structures that serve to integrate elements into meaningful wholes, resolve ambiguities, and suppress alternative interpretations. All alike depend on linguistic skills, they require children to process both interactive and extended discourse, to seek a coherent global meaning beyond pieceby-piece processing, integrating different sources of information that elicit alternative interpretations. Yet each type and subtype of figurative usage, from proverbs to jokes, from metaphor to irony, from riddles to lies, relies on its own neural center. The common network is predominantly left lateralized, while the right hemisphere also plays a (far less dominant) role in the shared core. This finding contrasts with the long-held view that the RH controls relations in metaphor and, by extension, in any figurative language use. And, importantly, the few neurophysiological studies with children point to a

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developmental shift from bilateral to left activation like that observed in literacy development (Chapter 7), confirming that functional specialization continues across development and domains of knowledge. Non-literal language introduces children to indirect requests, double meanings, humor, hinting, and also deception and sarcasm. Telling a joke is an effective tool for social communication when the joker is suitably sensitive to the context, and lies may serve to avoid conflicts or hide insecurities. There is no way to become a member of your speech community without sharing idioms and proverbs or reacting appropriately to irony and sarcasm. Moreover, conscious and sustained monitoring is needed to interpret or produce figurative language: for example, to identify what causes the comic effect of an utterance or to keep track of earlier justifications to sustain lying. That is, language for imagery involves less automatic, more monitored behavior than ordinary use of language, perhaps also calling for different degrees of metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness (Chapter 6) refers here to the ability speakers develop to overtly control what they are saying, going beyond implicit or unconscious use of language. Well before school age, young children will coin innovative words by analogy to others with the same form, calling a repairman a ‘fixer’ in English, or, in Hebrew, from the root t-q-n, takan (cf. conventional sapar ‘barber’), taknay (cf. xaklay ‘farmer’); and they will combine words in novel ways to meet different communicative goals. This intuitive knowledge of linguistic structure and of form-meaning pairings in the native language will later become explicitly accessible and amenable to verbal expression, in metalinguistic activities. So far we have reviewed developments in the linguistic means that children and adolescents mobilize to accomplish communicative goals. In performing metalinguistic activities, people turn to the linguistic means in themselves as objects of reflection. Speakerwriters consciously access various linguistic domains (phonology, lexicon, morphosyntax, semantics-pragmatics) that eventually become integrated into a unified experience of language knowledge and use. The shift from implicit knowledge to reflecting on the motives underlying verbal expression represents a critical advance in how language develops and why it matters. This drive is beautifully captured by Natalia Ginzburg (2002) in her recollection of adolescence.1 Todo lo que nos importa no sucede ya entre las paredes de nuestra casa, sino fuera, en la calle y en la escuela: sentimos que no podemos ser felices, si en la escuela los dema´s chicos nos han despreciado un poco. Harı´amos cualquier cosa con tal de salvarnos de este desprecio. Escribimos versitos cómicos para agradar a nuestros compañeros; coleccionamos palabras soeces para que nos estimen un poco, durante todo el dı´a vamos a la caza de palabras soeces … (pp. 115–116) ‘Everything that matters to us does not happen within the walls of our home, but outside, on the street and at school: We feel that we cannot be happy, if at school the other kids have derided us. We would do anything to save ourselves from such contempt. We write funny verses to please our classmates, we collect bad words so that they elevate us a little, throughout the day we go hunting for profanity … ’ The developmental route of metalinguistic activity starts with self-repairs among young children while, at the other end of the scale, metalinguistic knowledge enables people to verbalize and explain features of the object language (the language reflected on) in the specialized usage of linguists, language teachers, editors, or translators as the main purveyors of metalanguage. We have shown that gradualism characterizes the development of metalinguistic access in every area, and that this is neurologically supported. Attentional resources provide different degrees of awareness to various stimuli, regulating how accessible they are

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to reflection. However, regardless of whether access to the highest levels of consciousness is accomplished in the neural structures that analyze the objects of attention or is finally attained in the brain’s central system, the different features of a stimulus combine to enable a unified conceptualization. We suggest that the gradients of metalinguistic activities do not simply add a layer onto our knowledge of language: they are, rather, an indispensable aspect of becoming a proficient language user, interacting powerfully with literacy development (the final topic we addressed, in Chapter 7). The activities involved in writing and reading—from children’s early attempts to spell a word by letter-to-sound correspondences to the more complex tasks of text production— play a dual role in developing language: they facilitate contemplating language as an object of reflection by providing it with an external representation, and they transform speakers’ access to knowledge that is expressed in words, so shaping the language of speech in a bidirectional pathway. Children exposed to different writing systems (European alphabets, Semitic consonantal scripts, Asian syllabaries, or Far Eastern logographies) gain command of script-literacy in the early years of grade-school, when they learn the elements of their writing system and how to combine them to form meaningful units. In the alphabetic systems we focused on, this means understanding that there are systematic and predictable relationships between written letters and spoken sounds. Written texts today combine two complementary notational systems, one consisting of the elements of the writing system (the letters of the alphabet, say) and the other made up of graphic devices (spacing between words, punctuation marks, division into sections signaling changes of content, and layouts in different genres). These extra-alphabetic conventions signal procedures for how a text is organized into linguistic and conceptual units, so providing guidelines for how to read and interpret it and enabling the text to function as an autonomous piece of discourse. To learn from and convey knowledge to others by reading and writing texts in different genres, children must go beyond alphabetic literacy and develop what we called text-literacy, a level of literacy that turns writing into an instrument of thought, a way of thinking on paper. In contrast to alphabetic literacy, achieving text-literacy is a process of acculturation that transcends command of the writing system. It requires experience with autonomous text composing and deep reading, linguistic and conceptual understanding of what is written. Writing plays a key role at the outset of literacy learning and, at the other extreme, in academic prose as a hallmark of expertise. But across the lifespan, writing needs to be connected to reading in order to become proficiently literate. The development from alphabetic to text-literacy creates a new order of discourse, what we term the ‘language of literacy,’ which relies on features of language essential for written texts to stand autonomously, on their own—like making unambiguous reference or explicitly marking connections between utterances. These ensure that the context of a text will be understandable even when distanced in time and space from whoever produced them. These constraints are not so necessary, clearly, in oral communication when interlocutors are present and can provide on-the-spot feedback. Again, full command of the language of literacy follows a lengthy route that is by no means achieved by all, even in so-called literate societies. Becoming more distant and objective with age, the path to text-literacy proceeds from: (i) personal genres like recounting experiences and telling stories to (ii) factual genres like procedures and reports, and on to (iii) analytical genres employing description, argumentation, and explanation. This trajectory is accounted for by a shift in the processes of text production and reading comprehension. Young writers progress from knowledge-tellers—who retrieve stored

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information from memory and put it down in writing as it comes to mind—to knowledgetransformers, who detail communicative issues, so setting goals for generating and evaluating the texts they produce. Learning to coordinate the various activities involved in writing (planning, rereading, revising, and editing) contributes to being a knowledge-transforming writer. Critical reading, too, involves a similar integration of late-developing linguistic and cognitive skills of literate language use, complex reasoning, and perspective-taking. Yet even experienced readers may not necessarily apply these abilities across-the-board, in all types of reading and to all types of texts. Being a successful reader entails a complex interaction between age-schooling level, text difficulty, genre, and the kinds of questions that are posed. Different communicative contexts demand different skills of writers. Throughout the history of writing, changing technologies have transformed its material underpinnings (from parchments to screens), the units of encoding (from long rolls to smartphones), and the speed of encoding and decoding (from months to seconds). The contemporary spread of digital language epitomizes such a revolution. The very notion of text has been transformed in digital space, as more fluid, more interactive, and increasingly multimodal compared with the printed page. Digitalization is breaking barriers between texts by hypertext reading via external links, blurring formal and colloquial registers, and allowing writers to use languages they do not know when dealing with emails. Digital communication has created new literacy spaces, expanding the interactive situations people need to command so as to be text-literate. Current instructional approaches suggest that a good way to cope with the multiple factors involved in producing a text (organization, communicative goals, audience needs and perspectives, along with linguistic expression) is to teach novice writers to self-regulate these activities. This process of acculturation is facilitated by neurobiological and cognitive developments in executive functions that enable anticipation, preplanning, and flexibility in alternating goals and in self-monitoring. As reading comprehension progresses, the brain anchors points of reading language along with other areas of attention, and the number of networks involved increase. Fed by visual information (letters, spaces, punctuation marks, paragraphs), multiple networks are activated in parallel, with input from one to the other supporting text comprehension. This is particularly so when readers obtain new insights or change perspective while reading. Continuing development of executive functions explains why these analytical processes in reading are attained only in adolescence. A broad network of regions in the brain working together are activated at different phases of writing, but different areas are involved in text production by expert compared with non-expert writers. The production process of experts is subject to higher cognitive control and their writing is more flexible and less effortful than that of their non-expert peers. Experts recruit the same structures when writing a text as when generating ideas in creative verbal tasks such as proposing alternative uses for common objects; nonexperts produce texts by free association, led by imagined scenes of the story they are attempting to tell. Neurobiological approaches to text production are consistent with the free-association style observed among poor writers. Neural underpinnings in the brain substantiate the behavioral characterization of text-writing as a multifaceted process, like its outcomes. The distinction between a native language user and a proficient language user captures how children acquire the language of literacy and how this in turn transforms the use of speech. We all learn to speak with no formal training, but schooling helps in the move from being native speakers to becoming proficient writer-readers of a language, particularly when this process is boostered by and helps to booster maturational and socio-cultural growth.

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Boosters of development What, then, boosts development beyond childhood? Over and above the maturational processes we reviewed, we reiterate here two factors which in our view drive development: (i) ‘bi-directional interactivity’ as an inevitable mechanism of the neurobiological functioning of the human organism and (ii) adequate socio-cultural functioning of the environment input to human beings. Maturational processes in the brain include, for example, the global increase in myelinization that speeds up neural connections with a corresponding rise in efficiency of neural computations. At the same time, various high-level executive capacities (long-term memory, error detection, inhibition, flexibility) underlie developmental changes. We earlier referred to the neurobiological basis of human behavior and development as a virtual circle, what Judy Reilly has called the brain’s “iterative bidirectional interactivity” (Chapter 1). This interactivity governs the relationships between what is external and what is internal to the organism, between what was past and what is present, and between cognition, language, and affect. A nurturing social-cultural scenario is one in which children and adolescents participate actively in different communicative contexts. We take the two together as accounting for the growth of linguistic resources and increased decentering. A bi-directional interactivity underlies the main features of brain functioning: increasing specialization, a growing capacity for parallel processing and predictive powers which, in turn, enable people to take advantage of positive socio-cultural experiences. Bi-directional interactivity takes place in brain regions that are demarcated by a genetically determined readiness to process certain kinds of input which become increasingly specialized due to interacting with particular inputs. This is illustrated by the developmental shift toward lateralization to left hemisphere predominance as a result of experience with language. Relatedly, regions genetically designed for processing the shape, size, and serial ordering of objects undergo repurposing to process elements of written language (e.g., letters, words, paragraphs). While our brain is designed to work in parallel on different aspects of a task, immature brains need to accumulate experience in order to cope with different operations at the same time and so achieve a meaningful integration. Our explorations have addressed how the developmental route toward increasing integration of juxtaposed bits of knowledge is reflected in constructing narratives (Chapters 1 and 2), in relating to current states of affairs (Chapter 3), managing hypothetical and counterfactual alternatives (Chapter 4), grasping figurative uses of language (Chapter 5), in reflecting on language as an object (Chapter 6), and in producing written texts (Chapter 7). A bi-directional interactivity between past registers and ongoing circumstances accounts for the development of cognitive control, which is exerted bi-directionally: by top-down feedback—from the desired or expected state of affairs to the actions and perceptions required for attaining them—and bottom-up feedforward—from sensory inputs to actions, perceptions, and anticipated goals. Internal representation of the desired state of affairs is necessary to guide thoughts and actions toward the goal(s) involved, while the specifics of a given situation is needed for adapting behavior to current circumstances. Our brain constructs the future based on the past, envisioning the future guides the present. We illustrated this interaction with the dynamic process of belief updating. A bidirectional cascade between the predicted and the upcoming message guarantees effective comprehension. Comprehension would probably fail if reader-hearers relied exclusively on the anticipated content of the message. And it would take much longer if they analyzed each incoming utterance from scratch or waited until the end of the message before interpreting it.

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The construction of well-formed texts is another example of the interplay between topdown and bottom-up processing to attain integrated re-representation (see Chapter 6). And this applies across domains of knowledge and use of language: to plan stories—controlling for referential, temporal, and syntactic connectivity; to converse with others—sticking to a topic and attending to one’s interlocutors; and to distinguish between actual and hypothetical uses of language or between literal and figurative meanings. In these and other areas of language use, the brain manifests an interplay between high-level cognitive control, particular communicative circumstances, and attention to local decisions. It also takes careful register of all previous experiences of the individual, in order to function competently as a memory-dependent anticipatory machine. Another instance of interactivity is Slobin’s two-pronged idea of filtering. People use language to encode the ‘same’ events or entities via their own subjective perspective, individual aptitudes, and world knowledge; and they do so by means of the expressive options provided by a particular language (English, Hebrew, Spanish, or Turkish). These dispositions result from the entire history of communicative interactions between members of a linguistic community, which lead us unconsciously to make our own personal choices when speaking and writing. Cross-linguistic studies we noted across the book show that languages impose different constraints on how people talk, how they depict events in narrative, refer to their current concerns, understand figurative language, and construct their analytical discourse. This bi-directional interaction applies not only, as we have noted, between factors that are both internal and external to the human organism and between past and current registers. It also holds between cognitive, linguistic, and emotional processes. The material we activate in retrieval is stored in long-term memory from innumerable experiences throughout our lives and up to the last few minutes. However, the process is highly selective; we do not encode every object, face, or sound that we encounter. Encodings most likely to be stored comply with existing patterns, they have high emotional value, and are readily accessible to typological features of the language in use. In telling a narrative as in any other sphere of language use, people put thoughts into words filtered by their previous experiences, the cultural conventions of storytelling, the communicative setting in which narratives are produced, and by the expressive options available in their native language (even though they may perceive and understand the recollected events similarly). In reading comprehension, background knowledge is essential, backed up by imagery and emotional empathy. Together, these support analytical processes such as inferring implicit meaning, completing missing information, and selecting hypotheses. Participation in diverse communicative contexts provides children and adolescents with a platform for enriching the interrelations between linguistic forms and discourse functions, and a basis for metalinguistic awareness and appropriate use of language in unfamiliar circumstances. With time, youngsters encounter and produce less familiar grammatical constructions (for example, impersonal statements and use of generic present tense in analytical essays, or conditional and hypothetical propositions in describing possible scenarios). And they acquire new functions for the grammatical constructions that they already use (exploiting past tense to refer to historical events, or conditional constructions in imaginary fantasies). The features of neurobiological functioning that result from bi-directional interactivity help developing language users to make the most of the favorable scenarios provided by a nurturing socio-cultural environment. Being involved in richly varied situations boosts linguistic skills and literacy-related activities. Conversely, restricted participation in diverse

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communicative settings is a major factor in less proficient language and literacy development (Chapters 1 and 7). Opportunities for sharing new communicative contexts, exploring diverse discourse genres, and interacting with varied interlocutors have an enhancing effect in every sphere of language use—those we consider in this book and, no doubt, many more that we have failed to address.

Puzzles, open questions, and lacunae We started out regarding conscious access as a marginal facet of our linguistic knowledge. David Eagleman, as quoted in Chapter 1, expressed our take compellingly, relating to conscious access “like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.” We have come to recognize that this “massive engineering” is, in fact, the unconscious processing work responsible for understanding the world and ourselves. This insight is supplemented by Karmiloff-Smith’s understanding that development proceeds in two complementary directions: a gradual process of proceduralization that renders behavior more automatic and less accessible to consciousness coupled with information that was previously implicit becoming increasingly accessible and explicable. Yet in examining developmental paths in the different realms we addressed, we were puzzled by the distance between explicit, verbally expressed conceptualization and the unconscious processing underlying use of language on the part of children and adolescents alike. Two examples should help illustrate this distance. Efforts to qualify what is meant by the actual world have intrigued philosophers for centuries, and it took us a lot of (deep) reading and pondering to conceptualize actuality in a way suited to our purposes. In Chapter 3, we defined actuality as lying at the crossroads of a temporal dimension where the present is perceived as different from past and future, of a conceptual dimension where real is distinct from imaginary, and a logical dimension distinguishing factual from hypothetical, or impossible. But recall how simply our brain accounts for this phenomenon: if familiar then actual. There’s quite a shocking distance between our thoughtful involvement for conceptualizing a construct and the economical path taken by our brain! Another instance emerged when we entered the world of figurative language. Again, philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have struggled for centuries to find distinguishing features and all-encompassing definitions of literal versus figurative language. Their efforts belie how readily speakers recognize, accept, and process expressions in which what is said is not what is meant. Challenging the basic principle of communication be as clear and precise as possible, people take for granted non-sense combinations of words and physically impossible allusions used to illuminate what we are talking about. It is indeed surprising that “metaphors that are outside our conventional conceptual system, metaphors that are imaginative and creative, make sense of our experience in the same way conventional metaphors do: they provide coherent structure, highlighting some things and hiding others” (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 139). Analogous to the gap between scholarly definitions and the ordinary distinctions people make when using language is the distance between children’s ease and rapidity in using language—to find words to express what they want to say, to construct grammatical sentences, to derive agent nouns from verbs, to correct how foreigners pronounce words, etc. etc.—as against their difficulty in conceptualizing and explaining such operations. Gaining full command of the “tiny stowaway” (explicit representation of implicit knowledge), as shown in Chapter 6, is important for literacy and proficient use of language. Yet both

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the developmental path from implicit knowledge to explicit verbalization and exactly how explicit access impinges on language development are still open questions: two riddles among the many we are left with coming to the end of our venture. Our integrative view of language use in varied communicative settings reveals numerous lacunae and unresolved issues. One topic that calls for carefully designed empirical study is the role played in cognitive and linguistic development by overt grammatical marking of conceptual distinctions in some languages but not in others. Our avoidance of anglocentrism highlights two common threads. On the one hand (in the Western industrialized world at all events) grade-school children manifest similar patterning in cognitive development and linguistic abilities, differing dramatically from toddlers and from teenagers. Yet their language use and development are strongly affected by the particularities of the ambient language. One puzzle emerged across the book: what, if any, effect is there if a language has a grammaticized distinction—that is obligatory in context and overtly expressed by morpho-syntactic means—for expressing a particular semantic distinction? In talking about the past, does the grammar of a language mark the difference between (i) episodic events and durative background states of affairs and/or (ii) whether an event is directly experienced or learned of by hearsay (Chapter 2); in describing states of affairs in the present, (iii) do speaker-writers distinguish overtly between ongoing versus habitual or generic present tense (Chapter 3); and (iv) in relating to eventualities in the future, does a language have grammatical means to distinguish between hypothetical and counterfactual (im)possibilities (Chapter 4). Our study did not target directly comparable evidence of the kind available in the research of scholars like Bowerman (1973, 1996) and Slobin (1982, 2004) in analyzing children’s grammar and their encoding of spatial relations in different languages. We assume that speaker-writers can conceive of and talk about distinctions—between background and foreground, between possible and impossible eventualities, say—that are not overtly marked in the grammar of their language. But their task may be both more and less difficult than that of speakers of languages that do mark them. It may be harder because they have to acquire an additional grammatical category (is talking ~ talks, would be better ~ would have been better, say). But the very fact their language affords a specific means for expressing these distinctions in a linguistically direct, obligatory fashion may well facilitate the conceptual task facing them. We are left with the sense that when it comes to asking how hard it is to learn a first language, there will generally be a trade-off between the number of distinctions learners need to make, how many categories they must learn to mark, in one domain compared with another. For example, English, like German, uses particles to mark direction of movement (e.g., go out/up/in/through) where French encodes these distinction lexically in the verb (sortir, ascendere, entrer, traverser), but only French verbs make a grammatical distinction between background situations and foreground events; Spanish has a far more elaborate system of marking temporal distinctions of tense, aspect, and mood than Hebrew, but Hebrew, unlike most European languages, encodes distinctions of voice and transitivity by verb-internal morphology. This needs more extensive cross-linguistic comparisons (in addition to our comments on the theme we adopted from Slobin of “filtering by language”). Two directions seem important here: linguistically, going beyond the comparisons we made from Western European languages, with little or no note of, say, Slavic languages or those of Asia and Africa.2 Cognitively, this topic warrants dedicated, carefully structured research, along the lines available in cross-linguistic studies comparing two typologies of encoding paths of movements in space, between so-called verb-framed as against verb-satellite languages. And this would

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ideally compare different languages and different linguistic systems in early childhood and in adolescence. Another topic that we have not touched upon is the use of the body as a medium for communication. We discussed the role of embodiment in explanations of cognitive development and metaphorical understanding, but we have not addressed the gestural systems that accompany oral languages, nor the use of sign languages around the world. In both domains, body language plays an important role. Besides, by restricting our examples largely to languages with which the two authors are familiar, we have disregarded findings from the languages and cultures of Asia, Africa, and Australia which could illuminate cross-linguistic facets of issues like use of metaphor (Chapter 5), developing metalinguistic awareness (Chapter 6), and learning to write and read (Chapter 7). Two other topics important for understanding of development are missing from our account. Except for occasional comments on the impact of bilingualism on metalinguistic awareness (Chapter 6), we focus on monolingual first language development. As a result, we have neglected important issues of second or third language acquisition in the multilingual reality of today’s world of globalization and migratory movement. And we have largely disregarded important neurological and behavioral insights from research on youngsters suffering from language deficits due to internal disorders such as Down’s or William’s syndrome, being deaf or hard-of-hearing, or having motor difficulties in articulation. In sum, our work has led us to realize how much scholars have revealed on the topics we chose to discuss and how much remains to be investigated. We hope to have helped close the gap between the two.

Notes 1. N. Ginzsburg (2002). Las pequeñas virtudes. 2. Hebrew, as a non-European language, has largely retained its Semitic roots in its morphology, both in grammatical inflections and derivational means for new-word formation. Its syntax, however, while deviating in significant areas from that of Standard Average European (SAE) is not strictly Semitic, having shifted in post-Biblical times, for example, to being largely SVO in order and marking tense rather than aspect in its verb system (Nir, 2020; Zeldes, 2013).

Glossary I Terms related to brain sites and functions Entries are ordered alphabetically by main sites (e.g., cerebellum, ganglia), within which are entered subsites (e.g., junctions, occipital lobe), generally with two levels of subsites. Items in italics are entered elsewhere in the glossary. arcuate fasciculus (AF). Connects the frontal and temporal lobes. axons. Long, twisting cables that transmit signals over a distance (like telephone wires). brainstem. The lower part of the brain, a direct continuation of the spinal cord, the brainstem is made up of undifferentiated or partly differentiated cells that can divide and proliferate indefinitely. It controls functions such as breathing and heartbeat, as well as articulate speech, so that a stroke affecting the brainstem may be life-threatening. cerebellum. Located at the back of the brain, immediately inferior to the occipital and temporal lobes, the cerebellum is divided into right and left hemispheres. It interacts regularly with the forebrain and is involved in mood and cognition. The cerebellum is part of the figurative core. cerebral cortex. [see cortex] cerebral hemisphere, hemisphere. The cerebral cortex is divided into two hemispheres (the left LH and the right RH) separated by a longitudinal fissure which contains the corpus callosum. Dominance of one or another of the two hemispheres for a particular function (such as language or metaphor) is termed lateralization. cerebrum. The largest part of the human brain, it is located in the forebrain. Each cerebral hemisphere is composed of six lobes: frontal, parietal, temporal, occipital, insular, and limbic. It is composed of two types of tissues: grey and white matter. corpus callosum (CC). Connects the associative cortex of the two hemispheres. cortex. The thin, outer multilayered sheet of tissue of the cerebrum, covering the different lobes of the brain, the cortex is the site where all our higher mental functions are conducted. cranium. The large round top part of the skull, which encloses and protects the brain. forebrain. The largest part of the brain, it contains the cerebral cortex and a number of subcortical structures that lie beneath it, including the thalamus and the limbic system. The cerebral cortex, which is the outer surface of the brain, is associated with higher-level processes such as consciousness, thought, emotion, reasoning, language, and memory.

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frontal lobe. Located at the front of the cerebral hemispheres, in front of the parietal and temporal lobe, separated from the parietal lobe by the central sulcus and from the temporal lobe by the lateral sulcus (Sylvian fissure). It is covered by the frontal cortex which contains the primary motor cortex, premotor cortex and supplementary motor cortex, frontal eye field, prefrontal cortex. • medial superior frontal cortex (SFC). Includes the supplementary motor area (SMA) and presupplementary motor area (preSMA) implicated in movement and cognitive control, among other functions central to decision-making. ◦ supplementary motor area (SMA). Demarcates the boundary between the motor area and the prefrontal ones. It is critical for linking cognition to action in normal behaviors. Tied to motor output and involved in processing lies and emotional aspects of humor. ◦ pre-SMA (preSMA). Involved in higher level processes. • prefrontal cortex (PFC). Covers the front part of the cerebral cortex, and is broadly divided into two sections: (a) the medial PFC (mPFC) and (b) the lateral PFC (lPFC). It serves to coordinate auditory, visual, and motor stimuli and exerts control of other neural regions, skills, and abilities. It is involved in learning from experience and supports the construction of abstract rules in both linguistic and visual domains. Also involved in decision making, planning, cognitive flexibility, cognitive control, and inhibition of irrelevant information or inappropriate behavior, the PFC enables improved organization of events by temporal as well as causal and other logical relations. It handles longer memory spans and the ability to hold different pieces of information simultaneously in the mind, and manifests increased activity during episodic memory and episodic future thinking. Different parts of the PFC control mentalizing processes (the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), the temporal pole, and the cingulate cortex). The PFC plays a role in non-literal language comprehension, including irony. It exerts inhibitory control over activation of the amygdala and response to stress. The PFC is part of the core network, the default mode network (DMN) and the figurative core network. ◦ dorsal medial prefrontal cortex (dMPFC). Made up of the dACC and the secondary motor area, this area differs from other prefrontal regions in that it receives afferent input from sensory and parietal regions of the cortex, enabling it to respond appropriately to situations that require immediate attention. It acts as a conduit between cognitive control areas and emotional-triggering regions by detection and awareness of emotional states. It has dense connections to sensorimotor areas and the ACC and is involved in goal-directed behavior—working together with the dlPFC in learning and together with the ACC in signaling conflict to the dlPFC and vlPFC. It is part of the default mode network. ◦ dorsolateral (DLPFC) and ventrolateral (VLPFC). Both parts of the PFC are involved in spontaneous lying.

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TERMS REL ATED TO BRAIN SITES AND FUNCTIONS ◦ medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Has reciprocal connections with brain regions that are implicated in emotional processing (amygdala), memory (hippocampus), and higher-order sensory regions (inside the temporal cortex). It is mainly involved in processing, representing, and integrating social and affective information. The mPFC supports higher cognitive control and is essential in the preparation phase of constructing a narrative for planning, selecting ideas, and monitoring, and for suppressing irrelevant information.

frontal gyrus. • inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Known as ‘ventrolateral’ (VLPFC), it is the lowest of the frontal gyri, located below the inferior frontal sulcus, and is part of the prefrontal cortex. Pierre Paul Broca called this area (later ‘Broca’s area’) the locus for production of articulate language and the seat of motor speech. Functionally, it forms part of the figurative core, involved in processing idioms, metaphors, irony, and humor; it is important for the hierarchical organization and processing of actions during multicomponent behavior and mentalizing: it integrates the content and meaning of each utterance into the entire text; and also handles the distinction between known and new information. As such, the IFG is strongly involved in language and semantic knowledge relating to abstract concepts. • Broca(’s) area. Located in the IFG, the region is involved in how words are produced, interpreted, and combined, with different sections overseeing the semantic and phonological processing of words. Broca’s aphasia, often due to a stroke, results in loss of the ability to speak. • left superior frontal gyrus. Part of the figurative core and involved in spontaneous production of lies. • middle frontal left gyrus. Lies between the superior and the inferior frontal sulci, rostral to the precentral gyrus. It is involved in error processing, a central aspect of inhibitory control. Part of the figurative core and involved in irony. • middle frontal right gyrus (rMFG). A site of convergence of the dorsal and ventral attention networks, it serves to interrupt ongoing endogenous attention processes (produced from within the organism) in the dorsal network and reorient attention to an exogenous stimulus (coming from outside the organism). Functionally, the rMFG is involved in processing of irony. • right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG). Involved in differentiating between shared knowledge that functions as background to the content of a message as against new information. • precentral frontal gyrus (PCG). Site of the primary motor cortex, which is topographically organized and creates a somatotropic map referred to as the motor homunculus, or ‘little man.’ The trunk control is more medial, the upper limb and hand are more

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laterally organized, and the far lateral regions, just superior to the lateral fissure, control the face and head. More fine-tuned motor control, for the hand and face, are larger than the others. It also contains a portion of the supplementary motor cortex, which is involved in the planning of voluntary limb movement. ganglia [singular: ganglius] Clusters of nerve cells throughout the body, they are part of the peripheral nervous system and carry nerve signals to and from the central nervous system. gyrus [plural: gyri] Bumpy ridges on the surface of the cerebral cortex, made up of grey matter. The gyri are home to key components of executive functions, as well as motorrelated areas that include sensory and cognitive skills, and they exhibit increased neural oscillations during creative ideation. hub(s). A basic or central region that connects multiple parts of a network. insula, insular lobes. Bilaterally located within the lateral sulcus that separates the temporal from the parietal and frontal lobes. Three parts (frontal, parietal, temporal) are formed by the portions of the lobes covering the insula. Gyri: subcallosal, cingulate, parahippocampal. Connected to the neocortex, basal ganglia, thalamus, and the limbic system, the insula is involved in the modulation of emotions, visceral and autonomic functions, learning, and memory, and serves to shift between the default mode network (DMN) and the central executive network (CEN). Part of the figurative core and the salience network, it is involved in processing irony and emotional aspects of humor. junctions. Place where two lobes meet. • temporo parietal junction (TPJ). Detects and resolves incongruity in humor. Involved in mentalizing. ◦ right and left temporoparietal junction (rTPJ, lTPJ). Activates bilaterally across speech, drawing, and pantomime for processing narratives. Part of the site for narrative thought. ◦ temporo-occipital-parietal junction (TOPJ). Detects and resolves incongruity because it receives multimodal input from different sensory sources and shows increased connectivity with ventral frontoparietal areas associated with attention and decision making. Involved in processing cognitive aspects of humor and in mentalizing. limbic lobes, limbic system ~ structures. Located at the medial surface of each hemisphere and around the corpus callosum, the limbic system modulates emotional and motivational aspect of narration, and is responsible for the storage and retrieval of episodic autobiographical memory. • amygdala (AMG). A subcortical structure of the limbic system, located deep beneath the medial temporal lobe, just in front of the hippocampus. The amygdala modulates both the encoding and the storage of hippocampal-dependent memories and is responsible for our sensations, movements, and emotions. A paired structure, one in each

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• basal ganglia. A subcortical structure of the limbic system located at the inferior part of the cerebral hemispheres, lateral to the thalamus. Engaged mainly in motor control, together with fine-tuning of timing and sequencing in speaking and executive functions, the basal ganglia also store and retrieve procedural memory. ◦ left basal ganglia. Part of the language processing network, these are activated in the process of integration of linguistic information (such as relating sentences in discourse). They are sensitive to syntactic complexity and play a major role when inhibition of a preferred verbal representation is required. ◦ right basal ganglia. Activated in understanding metaphors and jokes as well as all behaviors that require drawing associations between entities, and contribute to integrating contrasting or incompatible states of affairs in discourse. They are also sensitive to differences in linguistic mood (e.g., subjunctive for counterfactual conditionals, indicative for hypothetical conditional). • caudate nucleus (CN). Contained in each of the brain’s hemispheres, both caudate nuclei are located centrally and near the basal ganglia. The CN plays a vital role in how the brain learns, specifically the storing and processing of memories. It works as a feedback processor, using information from past experiences to influence future actions and decisions. The CN is also involved in processing irony. • cingulate cortex (CC). Part of the limbic system, it embraces four functionally distinct regions: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), midcingulate cortex, posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and retrosplenial cortex. It shares many important neural circuits with reward centers, amygdala, lateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, motor areas, spinal cord, hippocampus, and limbic regions. ◦ anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). This region serves to shift between the default mode network (DMN) and the central executive network (CEN) and is part of the salience network. [See network.] ◦ anterior left cingulate cortex (lACC). Activated in lying, both directed and spontaneous, this region is responsible for error detection and monitoring, social evaluation, and consciousness. ◦ dorsal left anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). Associated with executive control, learning, adjustment, economic choice, and self-control. It has prominent anatomical connections to other structures in the prefrontal cortex, including the orbitofrontal cortex and pre/motor structures, as well as to the amygdala. ◦ posterior cingulate cortex (PCC). The region has a complex functional organization with high metabolic activity and dense structural connectivity to widespread brain regions, suggesting that it plays a role as a cortical hub. Involved in internally directed thought, in imagination, and in the formation and consolidation of episodic

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memory and episodic future thinking. Also involved in mentalizing and in processing of metaphor and humor. It is part of the site for narrative thought, the default mode network (DMN), and the core network. ◦ retrosplenial cortex (RSC). Part of the posterior cingulate cortex, lying immediately posterior to the corpus callosum. This region is heavily interconnected with an array of brain networks, both cortical and subcortical, and as such plays a role in numerous cognitive tasks, including as part of the figurative core network. ◦ ventral left cingulate cortex (vlCC). Responsible for regulation of emotion, and apparently also aggression. • hippocampus. A subcortical structure, part of the limbic system, deep in the medial temporal lobe. A paired structure, one in each hemisphere, it combines information between the neocortex and emotional areas, binding this information into memory traces (episodic representations of emotional significance). It consolidates information from short-term to long-term memory and enables spatial navigation, and also forms part of the figurative core network. • hypothalamus (hypo ‘under’ + thalamus ‘chamber’). Subcortical structure, below and in front of the thalamus. Responsible for sensations, movements, and emotions. It enables a state of physiological equilibrium by controlling mechanisms related to survival such as food, sleep, body temperature. • thalamus. A grey-matter structure in both hemispheres, located near the center of the brain, allowing for nerve fiber connections to the cerebral cortex in all directions. In charge of translating stimuli from the sensory receptors to the cerebral cortex in the form of action potentials. Involved in the processing of metaphors and irony. matter. • white matter (WM). Composed of myelinated axons connecting different parts of the brain, it forms the bulk of the deeper structures of the cerebrum, so contrasting with grey matter. Axons can be myelinated or unmyelinated, and it is myelin’s chemical composition of mainly lipids that gives the WM its appearance. • grey matter. Composed of neural cell bodies, it forms the outer, surface layer of the cerebral hemispheres. mentalizing areas. A group of brain regions that is recruited when people consider what goes on in the minds of others. Including temporal parietal junction (RTPJ, LTPJ), right superior temporal sulcus (RSTS), precuneus (PC), and medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC). mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic system. Dopaminergic pathways synthesize and release the neurotransmitter dopamine and are involved in executive function, learning, reward, and motivation. Involved in processing of emotional aspects of humor. neocortex. The largest part of the cerebral cortex, made up of six layers, labeled from the outermost layer inward, I to VI.

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network, brain networks. Collections of widespread brain regions showing functional connectivity, including: • central executive network (CEN). This frontoparietal network connects areas of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex. It supports the cognitive regulation of emotion, behavior, and thought. It is activated during efforts to exert selfcontrol, reappraise threatening stimuli, and suppress intrusive, unpleasant thoughts. • core figurative network. Composed of the medial temporal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, PCC, RSC, and lateral temporal and prefrontal regions. This network shows increased activity during episodic memory, thinking about future events, and counterfactual thinking. • core network (CN). Made up of key brain regions that ensure separation between and integration of brain functions. Located mainly in the cingulate and the medial frontal cortex, the bulk of the hubs that have been identified belong to the default mode network. • default mode network (DMN). Also termed default network or the default state network, this is a large-scale brain network composed mainly of the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus. Found in certain non-human primates and other animals as well as humans. The network is active when a person is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest (daydreaming or mind-wandering). • face network (FN). Face-selective regions that are strongly connected under both task-state and resting-state in the adult brain, its effective connectivity increases from childhood to adulthood. Composed by the fusiform face area (FFA), occipital face area (OFA), superior temporal sulcus (STS), amygdala (AMG), inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), anterior temporal cortex (ATC), and visual cortex (VC). • language network (LN). A functional network that is common and persistent across individuals that wires together BA, WA, ventral preMA, and pre-SMA in the left dominant hemisphere for seventeen out of twenty right-handed healthy subjects. Language is formulated together with other right-hemispheric structures, particularly the right angular gyrus (rAG) and right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG). • salience network (SL). Composed of dACC, anterior insular cortices and several subcortical regions, this network serves to shift between the default mode network (DMN) and the central executive network (CEN). occipital lobe. Located in the rear part of the upper brain, behind the temporal and parietal lobes and above the cerebellum behind. It functions as the center for visual processing, and is associated with the construction of a visual scene in the absence of appropriate external stimulus, by means of the process of mental imagery as a component of scene construction. It exhibits decreased neural oscillations during creative ideation.

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• right occipital cortex (cuneus). On the medial surface of the occipital lobe. Shows a stronger activation for counterfactual conditions compared to hypothetical ones. • fusiform gyrus. Located at the basal surface of the occipital and temporal lobe specialized in processing faces; on the right hemisphere it is identified as the fusiform face area (FFA). parietal lobe. Located above the occipital lobe (separated by parieto-occipital sulcus) and behind the central sulcus, the lobe integrates proprioceptive stimuli and is involved in language processing. It is covered by the parietal cortex (= relating to or situated at the walls) which includes the primary somatosensory cortex, somatosensory association cortex, angular and supramarginal gyri. • angular gyrus (AG). A region of the anterolateral region of the parietal lobe, near the superior edge of the temporal lobe, and immediately posterior to the supramarginal gyrus. It is activated in processes related to language, number processing and spatial cognition, memory retrieval, attention, and mentalizing. ◦ right angular gyrus (rAG). Directs spatio-visual attention by a bottom-up strategy which draws on the area’s ability to attend to salient features and to retrieved memories. Integrates the content and meaning of each utterance into the communicative situation. ◦ left angular gyrus (lAG). Part of the default mode and language networks. Activated in retrieval, memory (both semantic and sentential/syntactic), consciousness, narrative discourse, intentional, and familiar, and plays a major role in processing of metaphors. • inferior parietal lobe (IPL). Involved in episodic and autobiographical memory retrieval. It overlaps with brain regions associated with semantic processing that manipulate semantic and social knowledge, creativity, problem solving, thinking about the future, and planning. Part of the default mode network (DMN). ◦ left inferior parietal lobe (lIPL). Represents a zone of topographical convergence, it has a functional contribution to social cognition and language and is involved in processing irony and spontaneous lying. Part of figurative core. ◦ right inferior parietal lobe (rIPL). Involved in processing of irony. • posterior parietal cortex. Integrates input from sensory areas to facilitate the execution of higher-order functions and preferential support to memory. Also involved in decision-making, with preferential involvement in attending task-relevant sensory stimuli compared with motor planning. • precuneus (PC). The portion of the superior parietal lobule on the medial surface of each brain hemisphere in front of the cuneus (the upper portion of the occipital lobe). Involved in mentalizing areas, visuo-spatial imagery, episodic memory retrieval, selfperspective taking and an experience of agency.

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temporal lobe. Located beneath the lateral sulcus (Sylvian fissure), the temporal lobe subdivides further into the superior temporal lobe, the middle temporal lobe, and the inferior temporal lobe. It houses the hippocampus and the amygdala. It is covered by the temporal cortex which includes the primary auditory cortex, secondary auditory cortex, and the superior, middle, and inferior temporal gyrus (STG, MTG, ITG, respectively), parahippocampal/entorhinal gyri, and fusiform gyrus. It is involved in language fluency, producing and interpreting individual words and their combinations (mostly left hemisphere). It is also involved in processing of idioms. • anterior superior temporal sulcus (aSTS). Involved in discourse level processing across different modalities (spoken, written). Part of the site for narrative thought. Involved in language functions, each part has different levels of activation depending on whether it involves spatial information, memory consolidation, or the rapid encoding of new associations in episodic memory. The MTL exhibits increased activity during episodic memory and episodic future thinking, and forms part of the core network. • left superior temporal gyrus (lSTG). Involved in the processing of irony, also in children, and humor. Part of canonical language network and part of figurative core. • medial temporal lobe (MTL). Structure essential for declarative memory (conscious memory for facts and events). The system consists of the hippocampal region and the adjacent perirhinal, entorhinal, and parahippocampal cortices. ◦ left parahippocampal/enthornial (lPHC). Cortices activated for contextual associations. Part of the figurative core. • left middle temporal gyrus (lMTG). Part of the canonical language networks. • posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG). Activates bilaterally for processing narratives in speech and drawing, but only in the left hemisphere for narratives in mime. • posterior superior temporal sulcus (pSTS). Involved in analyzing the intentions underlying actions and is sensitive to the context within which actions occur. • right superior temporal sulcus (rSTS). Plays a role in encoding the goals and the intentions underlying actions; it is sensitive to the context within which actions occur. Part of the site for narrative thought. • right temporal pole (rTP). Involved in emotional empathy and affective perspectivetaking. It supports idioms, irony in children, and humor processing. • right middle temporal gyrus (rMTG). Involved in processing of idioms and production of metaphors, it is predominantly involved in the semantic memory and semantic control networks, modulating brain activations during language production on a semantic level.

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• superior temporal sulcus (STS). The structure of the temporal lobe that divides the superior temporal gyrus (STG) from the middle temporal gyrus (MTG). • superior temporal sulcus (STS). Divides the superior temporal gyrus (STG) from the middle temporal gyrus (MTG). It accepts multisensory input and takes part in various perceptual and cognitive functions including perception, audiovisual integration, speech, (biological) motion processing, and mentalizing capacities. Involved in irony processing. • fusiform gyrus. Located on the basal surface of the occipital and temporal lobe (inferior temporal cortex). The right FS is part of the face network (FN) and the Fusiform Face Area (FFA). • Wernicke’s area. Located in the left temporal lobe, it contrasts with Broca’s area in being involved in comprehension of spoken and written language, which may be impaired and result in aphasia following a stroke. perisylvian brain areas ~ language network. The region around the lateral sulcus (the Sylvian fissure) of the left hemisphere, it includes Broca’s area (at the frontal lobe) and Wernicke’s area (at the temporal lobe). The lateral sulcus is a deep fissure in each hemisphere that separates the frontal and parietal lobes from the temporal lobe. posterior cortex. The posterior part of the cerebral cortex, it includes all of the cerebral cortex except for the frontal cortex. [See brainstem.] somatosensory cortex. The region of the brain responsible for getting and processing sensory information (touch, temperature, pain) across the body. subcortical structures. A group of neural formations deep within the brain, including the diencephalon, pituitary gland, limbic structures, and the basal ganglia. Sylvian fissure. Another term for the lateral sulcus or lateral fissure, it separates the temporal from the parietal and frontal lobes. system. An interconnected collection of structures in the brain.

Glossary II Terms related to brain sites and neuro-imaging techniques Note: Items in italics are entered elsewhere in the glossary. action potentials. The numerous electrical impulses that our brains send to different muscles. Action potentials play an important role in cell-to-cell communication between neurons, by providing for the propagation of signals along axons toward synaptic boutons situated at the ends of an axon. These signals can then connect with other neurons at synapses, or with motor cells or glands. alpha waves. Measurable brain waves detected by EEG or MEG. anterior. Toward the front of the body. Specifies location for the gross anatomical description of body. aphasia. A disorder resulting from damage to areas of the brain that produce and process language. Aphasics may have difficulty in speaking, reading, writing, and/or understanding language. Impairment in one or more of these abilities can range from mild to severe, when a person becomes unable to engage in any verbal communication at all. atom. The smallest existing particle of a chemical element. behavior(al). Evidence of cognitive processes that is derived from a person’s behavior by means of experimental designs, questionnaires, or on-site observations, as opposed to the inner workings of the brain. CAT scans. Computerized Axial Tomography -X-rays creating an image of the brain, without indicating which areas of the brain are active at a given moment. caudal. Toward the tail. Specifies location in the central nervous system, refers to the long axis opposite to the rostral. cellular. Of, relating to, or consisting of cells. connectivity, neural. Connections between neurons, in which a neuron sends information via a neurotransmitter. The connectivity of neural circuits, together with their intrinsic dynamics, determines how they are computed in the brain. Effective connectivity refers to the physical connections (such as chemical or electrical synapses) that reflect the directed or causal influence of one node on another. Functional connectivity refers to

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the functionally integrated relationship between spatially separated brain regions, which demonstrates the symmetrical statistical dependence between the activities of pairs of nodes. connectome. The exact pattern of connections between neurons in a brain circuit. cortical. Relating to, or consisting of tissue from the cortex. [See Glossary I.] cranium. Part of the skull that encloses the brain, brain-case. CT scans. [See CAT scans.] dendrites. Fibers resembling thick brushes that communicate between neurons. EEG = Electroencephalography, measuring the electrical activity generated by neurons in the brain by placing electrodes on a person’s scalp. Unlike single-cell recordings, these electrodes are not invasive. Because they are external to the brain, they do not disclose the activity of individual neurons or even groups of neurons, instead showing the total electrical fields generated from the brain. electro-physiological methods. Measuring techniques, taking advantage of the fact that some classes of neurons create an electromagnetic field, which can be detected and recorded externally. They do not provide a photograph of an individual brain in action, but create statistical charts allowing for comparison with an experimental condition averaged over a group of participants and trials. ERP = Event-Related Potentials (ERP) or ‘evoked potentials’ measure the brain’s response to a specific sensory, cognitive, or motor event. They can do so as rapidly as to the millisecond, the speed at which the brain can process the relevant input. fingerprinting. A technique identifying a person’s distinct profile of neural connections; it is unique to each individual, like fingerprints. fMRI = Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging: a combined structural and functional procedure, showing the strength of activation. Neurons that are fired intensively work hard and require more oxygen than inactive neurons, so that measuring the relative amounts of oxygenated to deoxygenated blood in the brain identifies the parts of the brain that are active and employed in performing a given task. functional connectivity analysis. A technique measuring the strength to which activity between a pair of brain regions covaries or correlates over time. functional coupling. A technique measuring the effective interactions between recorded units, thus explaining the observed pattern of correlations in their neural activity. functional techniques. Neuro-imaging techniques describing brain function and making use of hemodynamic methods, such as PET and fMRI, and electro-physiological methods such as EEG and MEG. ganglion. A mass of gray matter formed by collections of neuronal cell bodies.

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hemodynamic methods. Neuro-imaging technique using blood flow, glucose, or oxygen uptake in the brain as biochemical correlates of neural activation. interoceptive. People’s internal representation or sense of their physiological state of being, both conscious and non-conscious, based on neural processes of integrating signals relayed from the body to specific subregions of the brain (e.g., the brainstem, thalamus, insula, somatosensory, and anterior cingulate cortex). intrinsic activity. The spontaneous neural state at rest, when a person is not engaged in any specific task. kinesthetic. [See proprioceptive.] lateralization. The division of labor between the two hemispheres of the brain. Only humans manifest asymmetric motor behavior, 90% preferring their right hand, and 10% the left. This motor behavior is cross-lateralized, so that when the right hand is used, the dominant left hemisphere (LH) is activated. Like motor behavior, language is a highly lateralized function since the brain networks controlling language are located asymmetrically, in the brain’s left or right hemisphere. A dominant LH is present in 88% of right-handers and 78% of left-handers, but 12% of right-handers and 15% of left-handers do not present a clearly dominant hemisphere and 7% of left-handers present a dominant right-hemisphere (RH) bias. MEG = Magnetoencephalography, is the measurement of the magnetic field generated by the electrical activity of neurons. It is usually combined with MRI to get a good structural perspective of the brain. molecular biology. The branch of biology that studies how molecules interact with one another in living organisms in order to perform the functions of life. molecule. The smallest possible quantity of a substance made up of several atoms still retaining the chemical properties of the substance. MRI = Magnetic Resonance Imaging, in which a person’s head is exposed to a strong magnetic field that causes the atoms in the brain to align in a certain direction. Different types of atoms emit different signals, giving a detailed picture of the brain, but without showing what the brain is doing. [See also fMRI.] myelin. A substance made up of fatty lipids and proteins, which accumulates around neurons in the brain. The process of myelination plays an essential role in the development, health, and functioning of nerve cells, the brain, and the nervous system. neurobiology. The branch of the life sciences that deals with the anatomy, physiology, and pathology of the nervous system. neurocognitive. Having to do with the abilities to think and reason, including to remember events and entities, to process information, and to learn, speak, and understand language.

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Neurocognitive functions are linked to particular areas, neural pathways, or cortical networks in the brain, and are ultimately served by the substrate of the brain’s neurological matrix (at both the cellular and molecular level). neuroconstructivism. The theory that ontogeny, gene–to-gene interactions, and gene– to-environment interactions all play a role in how the brain progressively organizes and transforms itself, and how it becomes increasingly specialized over the course of development. neuroemergentism. A framework for the study of cognition and the brain that integrates developmental approaches with recent accounts based on neuroimaging, and which includes notions of neuronal recycling/neural reuse and language as shaped by the brain. neurogenesis. The process by which new neurons are formed in the brain. neuroimaging. Various methods of identifying different cognitive operations in terms of their neuro-physiological correlates, on the assumption that, if two experimental conditions generate qualitatively distinct patterns of neural activity, they are more likely than not to engage in functionally distinct cognitive operations neurology. The branch of medicine or biology dealing with the anatomy, functions, and organic disorders of nerves and the nervous system. neurons. Special cells that transfer information throughout the body. Neurons are like other cells in that they have a cell body with a nucleus and organelles. Additional features that make them particularly efficient at transferring electric impulses (action potentials) are: • axons: transmit signals over a distance • axon terminals: transmit signals to other neuron dendrites or tissues • dendrites: receive signals from neighboring neurons • myelin sheath: speeds up signal transmission along the axon neurophysiology. The study of the functional properties of neurons, ganglia, and networks in the brain. The most important measure for neurophysiological assessment is P300 Event-Related Potentials (see ERPs), in contrast to neuropsychological or behavioral evaluations, which require a battery of tests. neuropsychology. A field of psychology and neurology concerned with how the nervous system and brain affect cognition and behavior, often addressing how these may be affected by injuries or illness. neurotransmitter. Any of a group of chemical agents released by neurons to stimulate neighboring neurons; also called a chemical transmitter or a chemical messenger. node. Literally a knot, a node is a collection of tissue. For example, a lymph node is a collection of lymphoid tissue. A nodule is a small node.

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nucleus. In cell biology, the structure housing the chromosomes; in neuroanatomy, a group of nerve cells. organelles. Any of a number of organized or specialized structures within a living cell. PET = Positron Emission Tomography, both a structural and a functional tool. A radioactive glucose is injected into the body, making this a relatively invasive procedure. Since active cells naturally use more glucose to replenish energy, PET scans reveal which areas of the brain are more active at a given moment. phrenology. The study of the shape and size of the cranium as a supposed indication of character and mental abilities. posterior. Toward the back of the body. Specifies location for the gross anatomical description of body. proprioceptive (or kinesthetic). The sense by which we can perceive the location, movement, and action of parts of the body. Proprioceptive signals are transmitted to the central nervous system, where they are integrated with information from other sensory systems. pruning. Elimination of redundant synapses over the course of development. This differs from the regressive processes in older people in that it is experience-dependent, without the deteriorating connections associated with old age. registers. Records left by stimuli in the neural systems. resilience. The ability of most people, when exposed to extraordinary levels of stress and trauma, to maintain normal psychological and physical functioning and avoid serious mental illness. rostral. Toward the head. Specifies location in the central nervous system, refers to the long axis toward the top of the head for the brainstem and the spinal cord but toward the face for the forebrain. signal. An electrical impulse or radio wave transmitted or received. single unit recording. A method in which microelectrode probes inserted in the brain measure electrical activity of single neurons (units) while performing a task. somatosensory cortex. The region of the brain responsible for getting and processing sensory information (touch, temperature, pain) across the body. structural techniques. Neuro-imaging techniques that describe brain structures, such as CAT scans and MRI. symmetrical. A distribution where splitting the data down the middle produces a mirror image. synapses. The one to ten thousand contacts made by a neuron with other neurons. Information is shared between cells and learning takes place at the synapses. synaptogenesis. Formation of new synapses.

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transcranial magnetic stimulation. A non-invasive form of brain stimulation in which a changing magnetic field is used to create an electric current at a specific area of the brain. [See cranium.] voxel-based morphometry. A computational approach to neuroanatomy measuring differences in local concentrations of brain tissue.

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Author Index A Abbott, R. D. 246 Abdel-Azim E. 167, 178 Abe, J. I. 167 Abraham, A. 95 Abramovitch, R. 144 Addis, D. R. 126–7 Åden, U. 26 Adlof, S. M. 259 Aguert, M. 182 Aichhorn, M. 121, 128 Airenti, G. 177, 181 Aitchison, J. 181 Aksu-Koç, A. 70, 117 Alegria, J. 198 Alfaro, L. 248 Allen, S. E. M. 43 Alonso-Cortes Fradejas, M. D. 215 Altemeier, L. 250 Altmann, G. 239 Alves, R. A. 242, 257 Amidon, A. 153 Ampe, L. 127 Anand, V. 117 Anderson, R. C. 200–1, 204 Andrews-Hanna, J. R. 125 Andriessen, J. E. B. 109 Angeleri, R. 181 Anshen, F. 185 Antolini, E. 109 Antoniello, D. 4 Antoniou, F. 204 Aparici, M. 256 Aram, D. 198 Arnett, J. J. 180 Arnon, I. 213 Aro, M. 228 Aronoff, M. 185 Arredondo, M. M. 195, 223 Asher, N. 263 Ashkenazi, O. 99, 102, 153, 178, 203, 218 Aslin, R. N. 126 Astington, J. W. 222 Atifi, H. 182 Attardo, D. H. 158 Attardo, S. 158, 185

Au, T. K.-F. 144 Austin, J. L. 152 Aziz-Zadeh, L. 250 B Baaijen, V. M. 246 Baba, T. 131 Babarczy, A. 215 Badger, J. R. 138, 141 Badre, D. 35 Baetens, K. 127 Ball, W. S., Jr. 12 Baltes, P. 158, 185 Bargh, J. A. 6 Barlow, J. M. 150 Bar-Ilan, L. 215, 239, 264, 239 Bar-On, A. 107 Baron, N. S. 248 Bartlett, F. C. 47 Barton, D. 229 Bartrip, J. 192 Baruch, E. 118, 123, 130, 134, 145 Bastide, A. 218 Bates, E. A. 2, 13, 74, 265 Bavin, E. L. 49 Bazerman, C. 241, 255 Beck, J. 36 Beharelle, R. A. 4 Behrens, H. 208 Bekkering, H. 152 Benaki, A. 204 Benedek, M. 124 Benoit, R. G. 126 Bereiter, C. 233, 245, 256 Bergh, H. 199 Berman, R. A. 22, 25, 32, 37, 41–2, 45, 49–50, 73–4, 84, 90, 106, 144, 173, 183, 202–4, 209, 215–6, 223, 232–3, 237–9, 254, 257, 263–5 Bernard, S. 225 Bernhardt, B. C. 250 Bernicot, J. 92 Berninger, V. 246, 250 Beron, K. J. 100, 113 Berrong, R. M. 255 Bertelson, P. 198 Bert-Erboul, A. 92

328

AUTHOR INDE X

Berthele, R. 49 Berthoud-Papandropoulou, I. 206 Bertus, E. L. 161 Biber, D. 91, 239–40, 264 Binder, J. R. 165, 182 Binnick, R. I. 41 Bitterly, T. B. 184 Black, J. M. 166, 197 Blake, R. J. 136 Blakemore, S. J. 252 Blanche-Benveniste, C. 206, 216, 231 Blangero, J. 23 Blennow, M. 26 Blum, P. 199–200 Blumenfeld, H. 194 Blumenthal, J. D. 23 Blum-Kulka, S. 82–3, 99, 102–3, 131 Bogetic, K. 216 Bohannon, J. 211 Bookheimer, S. 13 Borer, H. 28 Borges, J. L. 149 Boscolo, P. 256 Boudelaa, S. 36 Bourdieu, P. 231, 248, 262 Bowdle, B. 157, 185 Bowerman, M. 50, 138, 140, 276 Boxer, P. 232 Bramen, J. 13 Branco, M. 257 Branum-Martin, L. 199 Brasil-Neto, J. 95 Brauer, J. 12 Braun, A. R. 164 Braver, T. S. 23 Brazelton, T. B. 98 Bright, W. 228 Britton, B. K. 90, 256, 263 Brisson, J. 138–9 Brodt, S. 36 Brooks, A. W. 184 Brown, P. 131 Brown, R. ix, 5, 174 Brown, S. 54 Brown, T. T. 28 Brown, V. R. 125 Bruner, J. S. 39, 54, 90, 232, 266 Bryant, P. 201 Buckner, R. L. 125–7 Budwig, N. 48 Bunge, S. A. 23 Burgess, S. R. 258 Burnell, K. 100, 113

Butcher, K. 155 Bybee, J. 117 C Cacciari, C. 18, 154, 164, 171–2, 175 Caillies, S. 155 Cain, K. 259 Calderón de la Barca, P. 75, 112 Campbell, R. N. xi Capdevila, A. 13 Capelli, C. A. 181 Cappa, St. 164, 172 Cappelen, H. 188 Cardillo, E. R. 164, 172 Carlisle, J. F. 196, 203, 206, 223 Carr, D. B. 211 Carreiras, M. 201 Carroll, L. xv, 159 Carruthers, P. 243 Cartwright, M. 227 Cary, L. 198 Casasanto, D. 152 Castilla-Earls, A. P. 8 Castro, S. L. 257 Catts, H. 259 Cauda, F. 189, 194 Cauffman, S. 180 Cavanna, A. E. 169, 194 Caviness, V. S., Jr. 31 Cazden, C. B. 100, 190 Čeginskas, V. L. A. 199 Cekaite, A. 99 Chafe, W. L. xiv, 84, 263 Chang, K. 254, 262 Chang, P. xii Changeux, J. P. 195 Chanquoy, L. 109 Charles, M. 241 Charney, D. S. 166 Chartier, R. 226 Chatterjee, A. 157 Chechik, G. 23 Chenoweth, N. A. 257 Chiat, S. 211 Chomsky, N. x, xiii, 14, 36, 193, 221 Chung, S. 117, 130 Cintas, C. 254 Clanchy, M. 261, 227 Clark, A. 20 Clark, E. V. 27, 137, 183, 190, 204 Clark, H. A. 87 Clark, H. H. 191 Clarke, D. 158 Clasen, L. S. 23

AUTHOR INDE X Claussenius-Kalman, H. L. 8 Claxton, G. 252 Cohen, A. 215 Cohen, J. D. 23 Cohen, L. G. 195 Coirier, P. 109 Collentine, J. 136 Collins, D. L. 23 Conant, L. L. 161, 165 Conrad, S. 239, 264 Cornell, J. 23 Correa, J. 229 Corson, D. 215, 264 Corter, C. M. 144 Corthals, P. 208 Costa, T. 189, 194 Craik, K. J. W. 183 Crick, F. 223 Crossley, S. A. 238, 244 Cuckle, P. 192, 207–8 Cuoto, M. 228 Curtiss, S. 3 D Dabholkar, A. S. 12 Damasio, A. R. 4 Daniels, P. T. 228 Dapretto, M. 13, 167–8, 180, 186 Davies, M. 152, 185 Davis, L. A. 174 Dawson, T. 259 De Bernardi, B. 109 De Brigard, F. 126–7 De Busser, R. xiv de Cervantes Saavedra, M. 155 de Chantal, P-L. 138–9 De León, L. 70 De Schryver, M. 179 de Swart, H. 199 Deater-Deckard, K. 182 Debey, E. 179 Degand, L. 263 Dehaene, S. 14, 195, 249 Dehaene-Lambertz, G. 12 Demetra, K. 144 Demorest, A. 180 Dennet, D. C. 114, 193 Desai, R. H. 165 Deus, J. 27 Deutsch, G. K. 197 Dews, S. 182, 153 Diamanti, V. 204 Dick, A. S. 4 Ding, X. P. 30, 169

Dixon, S. 98 Dobbs, C. L. 24 Dockrell, J. E. xi, 229 Dolan, R. J. 51 Donovan, M. 259 Dor, D. 162, 180 Doron-Geller, D. 137, 144 Douani, O. 107 Dowker, A. 219 Du Bois, J. W. 84, 103 Dubow, E. F. 232 Duck, T. 162, 168 E Eagleman, D. 6, 36, 275 Eder, D. 178 Edwards, A. D. 99 Ehrenreich, S. E. 100, 113 Eickhoff, S. B. 251 Eitan Stanzas, S. 99, 102 Ekman, P. 180 Elman, J. L. 13 Elsabbagh, M. 9 Emerson, H. F. 137, 144 Englebretson, R. 84 Epstein, H. T. 31 Erb, M. 163, 165, 185 Erhard, K. 250–1 Erskine, J. M. 228 Ervin-Tripp, S. 49 Evans, A. C. 23 Evans, M. A. 191 Evely, S. 73, 144 Everson, M. E. 254, 262 F Fabbretti, D. 254 Faizi, A. 196 Fauconnier, G. 152 Faust, M. 165 Fayol, M. 257 Feldman, S. S. 180 Felton, M. 108–9 Feng, Y. 246 Ferguson, C. A. 146, 231 Fernald, A. 99 Fernandez, A. 196 Ferna´ndez Ruiz, G. 218 Ferreiro, E. 201 Ferrer, E. 23 Field, S. 262 Filipek, P. A. 31 Filippova, E. 219 Fillmore, C. J. 155

329

330

AUTHOR INDE X

Fine, H. J. 150 Finegan, E. 239, 264 Fink, A. 124 Finkelberg, M. 261 Finn, R. 248 Fitzgerald, J. 244 Fize, D. 96 Flavell, J. H. 222 Fleischman, S. 39, 117 Flower, L. 245 Fodor, J. A. 14, 36, 223 Foley, W. A. 263 Ford, J. H. 127 Foucault, M. 226, 261 Fowler, H. W. 160, 184 Fox, B. A. 263 Fox, P. 23 Francis, M. 115 Fransson, P. 26 Freud, S. 14–5, 31 Friederici, A. D. 12, 196 Friedmann, N. 213 Friesen, W. V. 180 Frith, C. 186 Frith, U. 186 Frost, R. 195 Fu, G. 46 Fu¨hr, M. 179 Fulghum, R. 34 G Gabora, L. 125–6 Gabrieli, J. D. 99, 197 Gaesser, B. 127 Gais, S. 36 Galbraith, D. 245–6 Galinsky, A. D. 184 Gall, F. J. 11 Gallo, P. 136 Gardner, D. 152, 185 Gardner, H. 180, 218 Garnaat, S. 199 Garrod, S. C. 247 Garssen, B. 87 Gauducheau, N. 182 Gee, J. P. 49 German, T. 137 Gentner, D. 18, 157, 175, 185 Gernsbacher, M. A. 247 Ghossainy, M. E. 92 Gibbs, R. W. 161, 174, 182 Gibson, E. J. 264 Gibson, K. R. 23 Giedd, J. N. 23

Gierhan, S. M. E. 22 Gilbert, D. T. 114 Gilboa, A. 11 Gillard, D. 230, 262 Gillis, S. 199 Gino, F. 184 Ginzsburg, N. 277 Giora, R. 90, 153, 160, 165, 263 Giorgadze, M. 159 Giovanello, K. S. 127 Glahn, D. C. 23 Gleitman, H. 190, 211 Gleitman, L. R. 190, 211 Glenn, C. G. 47 Glucksberg, S. 149, 152, 156–7 Gogtay, N. 23 Goikoetxea, E. 199–201 Gold, R. 254 Golder, C. 109 Goldsmith, J. 113 Gombert, J. E. 199, 208, 218, 222 Goodman, N. 120 Goodwin, A. P. 196, 203, 206 Goody, J. 225 Goswami, U. 201 Gough, P. B. 258 Gould, J. D. 248 Goumi, A. 92 Graesser, A. C. 238, 244 Graham, S. 89, 108, 239, 244, 258 Granger, D. A. 28 Grant, J. 192, 207–8 Graves, K. N. 177 Graves, W. W. 165 Greenstein, D. K. 23 Greicius, M. D. 167, 178 Grice, H. P. 29, 37, 151, 158, 162 Grimshaw, A. D. 91, 240 Grodd, W. 12 Grøver, V. 99 Guilford, J. P. 114, 124, 147 Gumperz, J. J. 41, 50, 215 Guo, J. 45 H Hagoort, P. 15, 129 Haiman, J. 263 Halliday, M. A. K. xiv, 44, 91, 237, 263 Hammadou, J. 264 Hammett, D. 42 Han, M. H. 166 Hancock, J. T. 161 Happé, F. G. 181

AUTHOR INDE X Harris, K. R. 230, 244, 258 Harris, L. 162, 168 Harris, M. 181, 218 Harris, P. L. 137 Hart, B. 99 Hartshorne, J. K. 5 Harvey, A. H. 17 Harvey, F. D. 225 Hasan, R. 44, 237 Haspelmath, M. 146 Haswell, R. 239 Hauch, V. 180 Haupt, B. 248 Havron, N. 5 Hayes, J. R. 245, 252, 257 Hayles, K. 248 Heath, S. B. 49 Henderson, V. W. 244 Henkemans, A. F. S 87 Hendler, T. 165 Hermelin, B. 219 Hernandez, A. E. 8 Hernandez Pina, F. 136 Hersh, R. H. 142 Hershkovitz, L. 99, 102 Hertz-Pannier, L. 12 Hess Zimmermann, K. 218 Heyman, G. D. 30 Hickmann, M. 44, 74 Higgins, A. 142 Hines, P. J. 25, 36 Hobbs, J. R. 263 Hoeft, F. 196 Hofstadter, D. R. 188 Hogendoorn, H. 96 Ho¨hle, B. ix, 5 Holland, S. K. 12, 23 Holliway, D. R. 257 Holmes, R. M. 98 House, J. 241 Howard, M. 136 Howard-Jones, P. A. 252 Hsu, L. S.-J. 195, 223 Huang, L. 184 Huesmann, L. R. 232 Huette, S. 145 Hunt, K. W. 263 Hunt, M. 182 Huttenlocher, P. R. 4, 12 Hyland, K. 241 I Iacoboni, M. 250 Imtiaz, K. E. 244

331

Ip, K. I. 195, 223 Itoh, H. 167 J Jackendoff, R. 154 Jaeger, T. F. 20, 36 Jakobson, R. 221 James, W. 26, 36 Jefferson, G. 191 Jensen, L. A. 180 Jernigan, T. L. 28, 31 Jespersen, O. 145, 193 Jin, Z. 196 Jisa, H. 118, 123, 130, 134, 145, 216, 257 Johansson, S. 239, 264 Johnson, B. K. 161 Johnson, H. 192 Johnson, M. 156–7, 275 Johnson, M. H. 5, 12, 168, 170 Johnson, S. B. 28 Jones, M. 192, 207–8 Jones, S. 259 Jo¨rgensen, P. S. 241 Josse, G. 4 Juel, C. 196 Jung-Beeman, M. 125, 164 Junqué, C. 13, 27 K Kalandadze, T. 181 Kamp, H. 263 Kan, E. 13 Kaplan, D. 183, 213, 259 Kaplan, J. 182 Kaplan, J. T. 250 Kaplan, R. 240 Kappes, A. 17 Karmiloff, Y. 192 Karmiloff-Smith, A. ix–x, xiii, 9, 12–3, 25, 30, 35, 44, 55, 61–3, 74, 178, 190, 192, 195–8, 207–8, 212, 214, 220, 222–3, 236, 243–4, 265, 275 Karpova, S. N. 207–8 Karunanayaka, P. R. 12 Katriel, T. 131 Katz, A. N. 152 Katzenberger, I. 237 Katzir, T. 13 Kaup, B. 145 Kay, P. 155 Kaza, E. 250 Keefer, C. H. 98 Keenan, J. xi Keil, F. C. 174 Kellogg, R. T. 115, 244, 246

332

AUTHOR INDE X

Kennedy, D. N. 31 Kerkhoff, S. N. 262 Kerr, S. 117 Kessler, C. 250 Kessler, F. 250 Khaleeli, A. 244 Kim, H. Y. 259 Kim, J. 182, 215 Kim, Y.-S. G. 259 Knott, A. 263 Knudsen, E. I. 3 Koch, C. 223 Kochunov, P. 23 Kohlberg, L. 68, 142 Kolchugina, G. 196 Kounios, J. 125 Kovelman, I. 195, 223 Krabbe, E. C. W. 87 Kra¨geloh-Mann, I. 12, 23 Kranjec, A. 157 Kreuz, R. J. 161 Krings, T. 13 Kronbichler, M. 121, 128 Kuczera, M. 262 Kuhn, D. 108–9 Kulakova, E. 121, 128 Kuo, L. 204 Kuperberg, G. R. 20, 36 Kupersmitt, J. 56 Kurvers, J. 207–8 L Labov, W. xiv, 45, 47, 64, 296 Lacroix, N. 248 Lagercrantz, H. 26 Lakoff, G. 18, 36, 156–7, 263, 275 Lancaster, J. 23 Langacker, R. W. 237 Langner, R. 251 LaPolla, R. xiv Lara, A. H. 20 Lareau, A. 231–2 LaRusso, M. 259 Lascarides, A. 263 Lashley, K. S. 12, 15 Laureys, S. 194 Lauro, L. 164 Laval, V. 182 Lazar, R. M. 4 Lederer, R. 187 Lee, C. 229 Lee, D. 140–1 Lee, K. 30, 169, 180 Lee, S. S. 167–8, 180, 186 Leech, G. 239, 264 Leech, R. 54

Leezenberg, M. 217, 221 Lehrman, D. S. ix Leichtman, M. D. 49 Leiderman, P. H. 98 Lemmon, K. 259 Lenneberg, E. H. 3 Lenroot, R. K. 23 Leonard, J. 99 Leopold, W. F. 223 Lepore, E. 188 Lerch, J. 23 Leslie, A. M. 37 Lester, N. A. 147 Levelt, W. J. M. 189, 222, 223 Levie, R. 99, 102, 107 Levin, H. 264 Levin, I. 313 LeVine, R. A. 98 LeVine, S. 98 Levine, S. C. 4, 23, 35 Levine, T. R. 162 Levinson, S. C. 15, 41, 50 Levorato, M. C. 164, 171–2, 175 Levy, S. 41, 56 Lian, L. C. 131 Liberman, G. 232 Lidzba, K. 12 Lieven, E. 45, 213 Liloia, D. 189, 194 Lim, K. 182 Litowitz, B. 210 Little, T. 259 Liu, J. 169 Llauradó, A. 185 Loban, W. 238 Locke, J. 264 Locke, J. L. 3 Loeber, R. 184 Logan, G. D. 179 Lohmann, G. 12 Lohrenz, T. 17 Lonigan, C. J. 258 López-Ornat, S. 136 Losilla, J. M. 27 Lotze, M. 250–1 Louwerse, M. M. 238, 244 Lu¨dtke, J. 145 Lukeman, N. 255 M Ma, N. 127 Macagno, F. 88 Macdonald, T. B. xi Mackey, A. 99 MacWhinney, B. xi, 223 Madden, C. J. 145

AUTHOR INDE X Madden, C. M. 181 Magliano, J. 247 Mahony, D. 203 Mair, V. 200 Major-Girardin, J. 54 Mancuso, L. 189, 194 Mandler, J. M. 18, 47 Manfredi, D. 157 Mann, V. 203 Mann, W. C. 263 Mano, Q. R. 165 Manuello, J. 189, 194 Maravilla, K. 250 Marchman, V. A. 99 Marcoccia, M. 182 Mareschal, D. 8 Mariscal, S. 136 Markovits, H. J. 138–9 Marlatte, H. 11 Marlot, C. 96 Marr, D. 9 Martey, N. 84 Martı´, M. A. 185 Martı´-Vilalta, J. L. 13 Martindale, J. L. 196 Martı´nez, O. J. 147 Mashal, N. 165 Matter, G. A. 174 Mattingly, I. G. 199 Maurutto, P. 248 Maybin, J. 102, 104 Mayer, M. 43, 47, 49, 56 McArdle, J. J. 164 McBride, C. 198 McCabe, A. E. 47, 65, 73, 144 McCarthy, P. M. 238, 244 McConnachie, D. 182 McCutchen, D. 115, 247, 257 McDermott, K. B. 96 McElree, B. 185 McGhee, P. E. 177 McGhee-Bidlack, B. 210 McGilchrist, I. 15 McGlone, M. S. 157 McGovern, A. 182 McMillon, G. 196 McNamara, D. S. 238, 244, 247 Meilijson, I. 23 Meissner, C. 180 Mellanby, J. H. V. 138, 141 Mellish, C. 263 Meltzer, J. A. 164 Menon, V. 125 Mercier, H. 102 Mertz, E. 193, 215 Meter, D. J. 100–1, 113

Meyer, C. 180 Meyler, A. 196 Michael, S. 180 Mills, P. 137 Minuto, A. 248 Mithun, M. 116 Mobbs, D. 167, 178 Monaco, C. 83, 103 Montague, P. R. 17 Monteil, J.-M. 257 Morais, J. 198 Moreall, J. 156 Morgan, G. 35 Morrison, K. 225–6, 261 Morsella, E. 6 Mosenthal, J. H. 263 Moses, P. 4, 35 Mouzaki, A. 204 Mulay, D. 162, 168 Murdoch, B. E. 164 Murrough, J. W. 166 Muter, P. 248 Mutschler, D. E. 163, 165, 185 Muus, R. E. 36 N Naccache, L. 195 Nærland, T. 181 Næss, K. B. 181 Nagy, W. 200–1, 203, 206, 209 Nakagawa, N. 181 Nakamura, K. 45 Nani, A. 194 Nass, R. 4, 23, 35 Neal, M. 169 Nee, D. E. 19 Nehls-Lowe, A. 140–1 Nel, III 211 Nelson, K. 46 Nelson, T. H. 264 Nerlich, B. 158 Nestler, E. J. 166 Neumann, N. 250–1 Newport, E. L. 3, 26 Nguyet, D. 95 Nippold, M. A. 90, 140–1, 184 Nir-Sagiv, B. 25, 90, 144, 237, 239, 254 Nirodi, G. 244 Noelle, D. C. 23 Noordman, L. G. M. 263 Norbury, C. 181 Nordlie, J. 185 Noveck, I. A. 218 Novogrodsky, R. 213 Nunberg, G. 155

333

334

AUTHOR INDE X

Nuñez, S. C. 13 Nwokah, E. E. 177 O Oakhill, J. 259 Oakley, A. 39 Oatley, K. 231, 255 Obama, B. 237 Oberlander, J. 263 O’Connor, M. C. 155 O’Donnel, M. 263 Olive, T. 257 Olshtain, E. 131 Olson, D. R. 87, 222, 225, 231, 255 Ong, W. 225 Oomen, C. C. E. 222 Opie, I. 177 O’Reilly, R. C. 23 Orsolini, M. 212 Ortheil, H. J. 266 Ortiz, H. 27 Ortony, A. 166, 185 Ozçalișkan, S. 45 Ouellette, G. 209 P Palmer, F. R. 122, 145 Pan, B. A. 82, 102, 112 Pander Maat, H. 237 Paolitto, D. P. 142 Papafragou, A. 117, 130 Papagno, C. 164, 172 Papaioannou, S. 204 Papousek, I. 124 Parisi, D. 13 Parkes, M. B. 226 Parrish, T. B. 125 Pascual-Leone, A. 95 Pascual-Leone, J. 53 Paul, B. 4, 35 Paul, C. M. 262 Paulus, P. B. 125 Paus, T. 23, 32 Penfield, W. 14 Pepler, D. J. 144 Pepys, S. 84 Perchtold, C. M. 124 Perea, M. 201 Perera, J. 246, 256 Perfetti, C. A. 196 Perlman, R. Y. 102, 112 Perner, J. 121, 128, 140 Peskin, J. 87 Pessoa, L. 10, 14, 36

Petersen, A. C. 23 Peterson, C. 47, 65, 73 Petraki, A. G. 230 Petray, M. J. 158, 185 Petrill, S. A. 182 Petrucci, A. 226 Pexman, P. M. 181–2, 218 Phelps, E. 180 Piaget, J. xiii, 8, 18, 31, 55, 109, 141–2, 145, 174, 177, 197, 206–7, 231, 265 Pinker, S. 14, 121, 140, 240–2, 247 Plante, E. 12 Plunkett, K. 13 Poggio, T. 9 Polišenska´, K. 211 Politzer, G. 218 Pollio, H. R. 150 Pollio, M. R. 150 Pontecorvo, C. 83, 103, 212, 254 Postma, A. 222 Pouscoulous, N. 218 Power, F. C. 142 Premack, D. 37 Pring, L. 219 Pringle, A. 125–6 Protopapas, A. 204 Proust, M. 40, 114 Puértolas, R. 73 Pujol, J. 13, 27 Q Qualter, A. 182 R Rademacher, J. 31 Radvansky, G. A. 53 Rafetseder, E. 140 Ragnarsdóttir, H. 84 Ralli, A. 204 Rapoport, J. L. 23 Rapp, A. M. 163, 165, 185 Raskin, V. 158 Rasmussen, T. 14 Ravid, D. 99, 106–7, 137, 144, 153, 173, 178, 199, 203–5, 216, 218, 239, 264 Raz, E. 99, 102 Read, C. 30, 243, 253 Reed, C. 88 Reilly, J. S. 4, 23, 35, 54, 74, 118, 123, 130, 134, 145–6, 273 Reimer, J. 142 Reinhart, T. 45, 263 Reiss, A. L. 166 Reul, J. 13

AUTHOR INDE X Reuter, M. 168 Reyle, U. 263 Reynolds, L. D. 225, 261 Richards, T. 250 Richardson, M. P. 51 Richelme, C. 31 Richman, A. 98 Riedemann, H. 239 Rienecker, L. 241 Riis, J. 28 Riley, A. W. 28 Risley, T. R. 99 Roberts, R. M. 161 Robinson, S. 99 Roessler, F. 13 Rolles, S. 89–90 Romberg, A. R. 17 Romeo, R. 99 Romero Lauro, L. J. 164, 172 Rominger, C. 124 Ronderos, J. 8 Rosado, E. 256 Rosenblatt, E. 182 Rosenstiel, A. K. 213 Ross, C. 254, 262 Roth-Gordon, J. 105 Rougier, N. P. 23 Rowe, M. 99 Roy, P. 211 Rueschemeyer, S. A. 152 Rumelhart, D. E. 247 Ruppin, E. 23 Russo, S. J. 166 S Sacks, H. 191 Sackur, J. 195 Saenger, P. H. 226 Saffran, J. R. 17, 26 Sag, I. A. 155 Sai, L. 46 Saiegh-Haddad, E. 200 Samuel, E. A. 252 Sandbank, A. 107 Sanders, T. J. M. 237, 263 Sanford, A. J. 247 Sanford, S. 178 Santangelo, T. 230 Sapir, E. vii Sartor, G. 88 Savage, C. 213 Saver, J. L. 4, 51, 53 Scarborough, H. S. 258 Scardamalia, M. 233, 245, 256

Schacter, D. L. 126–8 Schafer, R. J. 164 Schank, R. C. 53 Schatschneider, C. 258 Schegloff, E. A. 191 Scheffler, K. 36 Schieffelin, B. B. 98 Schleppegrell, M. J. xii, 25–6 Schmidt, G. L. 157 Schmidt, P. 13 Schmithorst, V. J. 12 Scho¨nauer, M. 36 Schurz, M. 121, 128 Schwanzer, V. 241 Schweitzer, M. E. 184 Schwerdtfeger, A. 124 Schwilling, E. 12 Schwitalla, M. 140 Schwoebel, J. 153 Scott, C. M. 90 Scott, J. 24 Scott, M. 239 Searle, J. R. 151, 153–4 Sebastia´n-Gallés, N. 27 Segal, M. 48, 67–8 Segers, E. 259 Seidenberg, M. S. 208 Selman, R. 259 Sergent, C. 195 Seroussi, B. 109, 176, 204, 210 Serratrice, L. 43 Seymour, P. H. K. 228 Shah, C. 250 Shanahan, T. 244 Share, D. L. 199–200 Sharot, T. 17 Sharp, D. J. 54 Shaw, E. 209 Shaywitz, B. A. 249, 252 Shaywitz, S. E. 249, 252 Shen, Y. 74, 263 Shibata, M. 167 Shipley, E. F. 190 Shively, R. 215 Sickinger, J. P. 225 Siegel, M. 98 Sigman, M. 167–8, 180, 186 Silva-Corvala´n, C. 136, 146 Silva López, A. M. 218 Silverstein, M. 193, 215, 222 Simpson, P. 159–60 Sims, K. 208 Singer, T. 250 Singson, M. 203

335

336

AUTHOR INDE X

Siok, W. T. 196 Sirin, S. R. 99 Sirois, S. 8 Slobin, D. I. x, xii–iii, 22, 27, 37, 41–2, 45, 48–50, 53, 55, 70, 73, 113, 136, 144, 223, 237, 263, 274, 276 Small, S. L. 4 Smarsh, B. 182 Snow, C. E. 82, 102, 112, 259 Solodkin, A. 4 Soriano-Mas, C. 27 Sowden, P. T. 125–6 Sowell, E. R. 13 Spence, S. A. 169 Sperber, D. 161 Spinney, L. 96 Spires, H. A. 262 Spooren, W. P. M. 263 Sporer, S. 180 Spratling, M. W. 8 Srinivas, K. 153 Stanovich, K. 258 Starr, A. 13 Stavans, A. 109 Steen, G. 157 Stein, N. L. 47 Steinberg, L. 33 Steiner, R. 31 Stern, P. 25, 36 Stiles, J. 4, 23, 31, 35 Stock, P. 250 Stotsky, S. 244 Stouthamer-Loeber, M. 180 Strange, B. A. 51 Strawsburg, R. H. 12 Stro¨mqvist, S. 84 Subramaniam, K. 125 Suchotzki, K. 179 Suddendorf, T. 7 Summers, I. R. 252 Sun, L. 8 Surian, L. 98 Suzuki, T. 213 Swanson, H. L. 246 Sweetser, E. E. 118 Szaflarski, J. P. 12 Szpunar, K. K. 96 Szu¨cs, M. 215 T Tagliamonte, S. A. 102, 105 Talmy, L. 263 Talwar, V. 180 Tan, L. H. 196

Tao, S. 199 Tappe, H. 49 Tarchi, C. 90 Tardif, T. 195, 223 Taylor, T. 193 Taylor-Hill, H. 196 Teberosky, A. 201 Tenenbaum, J. B. 5 ter Meulen, A. 146 Tettamanti, M. 164, 172 Teubal, E. 99 Theakston, A. 213 Thieu, M. 248 Tholen, G. 261 Thomas, M. S. C. xiii, 8 Thompson, P. M. 23 Thompson, S. A. 263 Thorpe, S. 96 Thron, A. 13 Timberlake, A. 117, 130 Todd, Z. 158 Todorov, T. 255 Toga, A. W. 23 Tolchinsky, L. 30, 107, 185, 198, 200–1, 228, 232, 243, 246–7, 249, 253–6 Tolstoy, L. 84, 112 Tomasello, M. 46, 52, 265 Toulmin, S. E. 88 Tower, C. 107–8 Toyomura, A. 167 Traugott, E. C. 146 Trauner, D. A. 4, 23, 35 Trivedi, P. 250 Tulving, E. 52 Tunmer, W. E. 258 Turner, M. 152 Turner, N. E. 152 U Uccelli, P. 24, 259 Uddin, L. Q. 125 Uncapher, M. R. 248 Underwood, M. K. 100–1, 113 Ursin, H. 36 V Vallen, T. 207–8 Van Ackeren, M. J. 152 van Eemeren, F. H. 87 Van Hoeck, N. 127 van Hout, R. 207 Van Overwalle, F. 127 Van Valin, R. D., Jr. 263 Vandekerckhove, M. 127

AUTHOR INDE X Vannest, J. 12 Vendrell, P. 13 Veneziano, E. 98 Verheij, B. 87 Verhoeven, L. 45, 259 Vernon, S. A. 201 Verschuere, B. 179 Vilar Weber, H. 256 Volckaert-Legrier, O. 92 von Cramon, D. Y. 95 Von Wright, G. H. 145 Vorstman, E. 199 Vosniadou, S. 174–5 Vrticka, P. 166 Vygotsky, L. S. 170, 193, 206, 208 W Wachowski, L. 76, 112 Wagemans, J. H. M. 87 Wagner, A. D. 248 Walczyk, J. 162, 168 Wallace, G. L. 23 Wallis, J. D. 20 Walton, D. 88 Wang, A. T. 167–8, 180, 186 Wang, Q. 49 Wasow, T. 155 Watson, J. M. 96 Watt, I. 225 Weber, B. 168 Weber Byars, A. 12 Weisleder, A. 99 Weiss, E. M. 124 Weiss, S. D. 8 Weissenborn, J. ix, 5 Wells, E. M. 23 Wendelken, C. 23 West, M. 99 Westermann, G. 8 Wexler, K. 28 Whitaker, D. 246 Whitaker, K. J. 23 Whitehead, A. 77, 101, 111 Whitfield-Gabrieli, S. 196

Widdowson, H. G. 241 Wigginton, E. 38 Wigglesworth, G. 62 Wilke, M. 12, 23 Williams, E. 238 Williamson, D. E. 23 Willmes, K. 13 Wilson, D. 161–2 Wilson, N. G. 225, 261 Wimmer, G. 239 Windisch, H. C. 262 Winkielman, P. 30 Winner, E. 153, 165, 174, 180–1 Wittgenstein, L. 148 Woisetschlaeger, E. 113 Wolf, M. 13, 231, 247–8, 250 Woodruff, G. 37 Woolf, V. 84, 112, 160 Woolley, J. D. 76 Worsley, K. 23 Wu, S. J. 169 Y Yaxley, R. H. 145 Yin, L. 168 Yong, Q. 147 Young, D. R. 8 Young, K. 4, 51, 53 Yovel, J. 193, 215 Yuan, F. 30 Yuan, Y. 54 Z Zacks, J. M. 53 Zadunaisky Ehrlich, S. 109 Zak, P. J. 54 Zdrazilova, L. 182 Zeldes, A. 277 Zijdenbos, A. P. 23 Zilberbuch, S. 204 Zimmer, E. 213 Zucchermaglio, Ch. 212 Zwaan, R. A. 145 Zwilling, R. 99, 102

337

Subject Index The Subject Index includes all and only topics critical to following the main themes discussed in the book. Languages mentioned are indicated with initial capitals (e.g., Greek, Turkish). Hebrew and Spanish are referenced throughout the book and are indexed only in language-specific and empirical contexts. See also Glossary (I) and (II) and Author Index. Authors whose names are mentioned in passing, without publication details are included below. abstract nouns (see parts of speech, nouns, see nominal abstractness) accessibility (see awareness, see consciousness, see explicitation) acceptability 180, 189, 212, 214 accommodation (see also assimilation, equilibration) 8 acculturation 98, 171, 231, 271–2 action potential(s) (see also Glossary I) 17, 283 action(s), social 98, 267 activation (see also priming, see also representation, see also lying, lies (=deception, dishonesty)) lateral(ized)/bilateral 13, 23, 163–8, 170, 178, 196, 251–2, 269–70 neural (see also brain) 8, 13–4, 23, 94–9, 125, 127, 129, 163–70, 178, 186, 196, 249–52, 270 semantic 170, 269 adaptation, developmental 4 adolescents (see age groups) age/schooling levels adolescent(s) xiii, 4, 25, 32–3, 52, 58–60, 68, 87, 89, 98, 100–2, 104, 106, 108–110, 134, 139–43, 145, 175–6, 180, 182, 193, 210, 215–6, 218, 234, 256–7, 265–8, 270, 273–5 adult(s) ix, 4–5, 12–3, 23–5, 43, 48–9, 60, 65, 68, 71–3, 99, 101, 109, 111, 122, 128, 134–5, 139–40, 142–5, 161, 163, 166–8, 170, 175–80, 186, 196, 198, 201, 204, 207–10, 220, 230, 235, 249–50, 254, 257, 262, 266–8, 284 high school(er) xi, 32–3, 57, 59, 66, 68, 72, 100–1, 105, 109–10, 134–5, 142–3, 176, 178, 180, 191, 202–4, 216, 233, 238–9, 246, 256–7, 259–60, 268 infant(s) 5–6, 12, 17–8, 26–8, 35, 80, 207 middle childhood 12, 31, 54, 59, 74, 90, 100, 105, 117, 132, 140, 142, 144, 166–7, 173,

178, 180–3, 197, 206, 212–13, 254, 265–6, 268 preschool(er) ix, 2, 5, 16, 21–2, 28–30, 55, 58–60, 62, 68, 74, 94, 98, 138, 141, 177, 180, 190, 199–200, 203, 207, 210–11, 213–14, 220, 228, 243, 253–4, 265 school child(ren) vii, 16, 32, 56, 63, 65, 67, 72, 74, 98–103, 105–9, 132, 134–5, 137, 141–5, 172–3, 176–8, 180, 191, 203–5, 207–10, 212–14, 218, 249, 255–7, 261, 267, 271, 276 toddler(s) 27, 141, 174–5, 203, 219, 243, 255, 265, 276 2-year(s)-old(s) viii, xiii, 2, 40–2, 70, 98, 136–7, 174, 209 3-year(s)-old(s) 25–6, 28, 50, 52, 55, 58, 61, 66, 70, 73, 98–9, 108, 130, 137, 174, 211, 249 4-year(s)-old(s) xiii, 28–9, 61–2, 65, 77, 82, 99, 129, 174, 200, 202–4, 207, 211, 213, 249, 255 5-year(s)-old(s) 21, 24–5, 28–9, 47, 58, 59, 61, 65–6, 70, 99, 102, 174–5, 177, 182, 191, 197, 200–1, 207, 211, 218, 255 6-year(s)-old(s) 25, 42, 59, 66, 77–8, 82, 99, 107, 136, 172, 175, 177, 182, 190, 195–6, 201–2, 207, 218, 220 7-year(s)-old(s) viii, 58, 61, 66, 70, 99, 109, 136–7, 169, 177, 191, 200, 204, 207, 212–3, 218, 220, 254 8-year(s)-old(s) 56, 62, 99, 102–3, 107, 109, 137, 141, 177, 182, 211–12, 218 9-year(s)-old(s) 32, 59, 61, 64, 66, 69–70, 103, 108–9, 132–4, 137, 139, 167, 173–5, 182, 196, 212, 215, 254, 256 10-year(s)-old(s) 18, 32, 56, 61, 65–6, 68, 132–3, 140, 160, 177, 182, 210, 249, 254 11-year(s)-old(s) 104, 140, 172, 175, 177, 210, 215

SUBJECT INDE X 12-year(s)-old(s) 25, 109, 139–40, 169, 172, 182, 195–6, 210, 219, 256 13-year(s)-old(s) 25, 64, 173 14-year(s)-old(s) 140, 167, 173, 210 15-year(s)-old(s) 70, 210, 215, 219, 233 16-year(s)-old(s) 32, 64, 101, 105, 134, 182, 210, 215, 256 17-year(s)-old(s) 32, 59, 101, 134 18-year(s)-old(s) 210 19-year(s)-old(s) 25 agreement, grammatical 50, 70 alphabet (see script, alphabetic) ambient language vii, ix, 1–2, 27, 31, 35, 53, 70, 98, 191, 200–1, 276 ambiguity (un)ambiguous 16, 43–4, 55, 60–1, 63, 70, 72, 150, 153, 159–60, 164, 168, 177–8, 184–6, 194, 204, 208–10, 213–14, 219–20, 224, 226, 231, 269, 271 anaphora (see reference, anaphoric) anomaly, anomalous 17, 154, 174, 211–14 anticipation machine 3, 17, 114, 154, 274 aphasia (see disorders, aphasia) argumentation (see function(s), discourse ~ communicative, argumentation) Aristotle 7, 36, 158 article(s) (see grammar, determiners) aspect, aspectual 33, 41–2, 53, 56, 58, 66, 68, 71, 73, 92–3, 113, 116, 122, 197, 202, 265–6, 276–7 durative 56, 57, 69, 93, 276 generic 85, 93, 255, 274, 276 habitual xii, 40, 71, 93–4, 104, 155, 276 imperfect(ive) 53, 56–7, 71, 69, 202 iterative 35, 93, 104 perfect, past 56, 58, 122, 128, 141 perfect, present 58, 113, 136 perfective 53, 56–7, 66, 69 pluperfect 122 progressive 93, 104, 113 punctual 41, 56–7, 93 recurrent (see iterative) simple 56, 58, 66, 93, 104, 128, 136, 216 assimilation (see also accommodation, equilibration) 8, 68 attention(al) xiv, 5, 19, 23, 36, 54–5, 124–5, 169, 187, 189–91, 194–6, 198–9, 212, 220, 247–9, 258, 270–2, 274, 279–81, 285 attitude(s) 15, 45, 54, 67, 83, 106, 116, 123, 133, 135, 142, 145, 161, 214, 217, 219, 251, 268 deontic 117, 143, 268 epistemic 117, 134, 143 judgmental, prescriptive 32, 134, 135, 268–9 propositional 116–19, 122, 143–5, 267 subjective 117

339

auditory mode (see mode(s)/modality2 , auditory) awareness, self 98, 189, 194, 267 axon(s) (see also Glossary I, II) 10, 22, 278, 283, 288, 291 belief 30, 54, 84, 97, 117, 134, 142, 172 false 162 order, first 162, 181 order, second (see also second order belief/intention/knowledge)161–3, 181 updating 20–1, 97, 153, 273 bilingual(s), bilingualism 19, 144, 177, 198–9, 202, 208, 220, 23, 277 brain sites (see also Glossary I, II) amygdala (see also Glossary I) 51–3, 166, 168–9, 279–82, 284, 286 angular gyrus (AG) (see also Glossary I) 15, 53, 165, 284–5 anterior regions (see also frontal regions, see also Glossary II) 19 basal ganglia (see also glossary I) 52, 128–9, 281–2, 287 Broca area (see also glossary I) 10, 12–3, 99, 280, 287 caudal regions (see also Glossary II) 19 cerebellum (see also Glossary I and II) 10, 96, 164, 252, 278, 284 cerebral cortex/cortices 10–2, 16–7, 19, 23, 153, 278–9, 281, 283, 287 cingulate (CC) 54, 95, 125, 127, 147, 165–6, 169, 194, 250–1, 279, 282–4 frontal 51, 129, 167, 186, 194, 249, 279, 284, 287 motor 14, 26, 250, 252, 279–81 occipital 96, 124, 128, 167, 285 prefrontal (PFC) 10, 12, 19, 53, 95, 127, 147, 163–5, 168–9, 250–1, 279–84 premotor 12, 54, 96, 279 visual 20, 26, 195, 284 cerebral hemisphere (see also Glossary I, see also hemisphere, left see also hemisphere, right) 15, 278–9, 282–3 corpus callosum (CC) (see also glossary I) 13, 278, 281, 283 frontal gyrus, gyri 12–3, 53, 163–5, 196, 251, 279–80, 284 hemisphere, left (LH) (see also glossary I) 4–5, 10, 12–3, 15, 23, 36, 54, 124, 164–5, 170, 249, 252, 269, 273, 278, 283–7, 290

340

SUBJECT INDE X

brain sites (see also Glossary I, II) (Continued) hemisphere, right (RH) (see also glossary I) 4, 12–3, 15, 36, 53, 164–5, 168, 249, 269, 278, 283, 287, 290 hippocampus 23, 51–3, 127, 129, 251, 280–3, 286 junction (see also glossary I) 10, 54, 166, 278–9, 281, 283 limbic system (see brain sites, lobes, limbic, limbic system) lobes (see also glossary I) 10, 281, 289 frontal (see also glossary I) 19–20, 22, 278–9, 281, 287 insular (see also glossary I) 281 limbic, limbic system (see also glossary I) 33, 51–2, 281–3, 287 occipital (see also glossary I) 278, 284–5 parietal (see also glossary I) 53, 166, 279, 281, 284–5, 287 temporal (see also glossary I) 12, 23, 126, 278–9, 281, 283–7 perisylvian (see network, perisylvian) rostral regions 19 sulcus 10, 54, 167, 249, 279–81, 283–7 sylvian fissure (see also glossary I) 12, 279, 286–7 temporal gyrus 12, 54, 163, 165–6, 196 thalamus (see also glossary I) 17, 20, 194, 278, 281–3, 290 Wernicke’s area (see also glossary I) 10, 12, 287 brain structure (see brain sites) Broca area (see brain sites) Broca, Paul 11, 280 canonic(al) (see also genre appropriateness: canonic/violation, see also network, canonical language) 25, 33, 40, 49, 65–7, 72–3, 165, 171, 200, 209, 222, 225, 261–2, 266, 269, 286 caretaker, caregiver 29, 32, 68, 79–80, 98–100, 130, 221 categorization 39, 90, 174, 177, 203, 236 causative 53 CesCa corpus 160, 177, 185 Chomskian (see also Chomsky, Noam (author index)) 47, 223 classroom (talk) (see communicative settings, contexts classroom (talk)) clause(s) x, xiv, 7, 29, 37, 45–6, 56, 60, 64, 68–70, 73, 106–7, 118–21, 123, 128, 136–40, 144, 146–7, 214, 236–8, 263, 266 antecedent 121, 128–9, 137–9, 146 complement 119, 136

if (see conditionals) main 120, 123, 137–8, 147, 236–7, 263 relative 136, 209, 213, 237 subordinate 237 cognition, cognitive vii, xiii, 18, 34, 60, 266, 278–9, 291 comfort 167 (over)load 91, 122, 168, 180–1, 245 coherence 44, 168, 247, 263 cohesion, cohesive 18, 43–4, 138, 197, 236–7 coinage(s) (word innovations) 28, 176, 203, 206, 223, 270 collocation(s) 239 commentary (see also function(s), discourse ~ communicative, commentary, communicative settings, context(s)) classroom (talk) 83, 91, 99–100, 103, 106, 267 table talk (=mealtime talk) 82–3, 267 compensation 4, 10 compound(s) (nouns) 154, 190–1, 199, 204 comprehension xi, 12, 20–2, 27, 156, 164, 170, 180–1, 198, 213, 230, 247–50, 258–9, 264, 271–4, 279, 287 conditional(s) 115, 119–23, 126–9, 134, 137–43, 144, 146–7, 255, 268, 274, 282 actual 120, 144 counterfactual 115, 120–2, 126–30, 137–8, 140–1, 144, 146–7, 268, 282 factual 115, 120–1, 128–9, 137–8 false if clause(s) 121, 144 hypothetical 71, 115, 118, 120–3, 126–30, 137–8, 140–1, 144, 146–7, 255, 268, 274, 282, 285 connectivity (see narrative, narration, connectivity, see neural, connectivity, see syntax, syntactic, connectivity) conscious(ness) (see also awareness) 6, 33, 188, 189, 191, 193–6, 198, 222–3, 278, 282, 285 access 2, 5, 7, 35, 188–9, 192–5, 198, 200, 211, 214, 217–18, 222, 270, 275 phenomenal 189, 194, 222 context attributive (grammar) 107 communicative vii, x, 15, 63, 74, 77–9, 82–3, 85–6, 91–2, 98–9, 101, 111, 131, 181, 183, 215, 218, 228, 231–2, 145, 266–7, 272–6 dialogical 80, 88 monologic (see discourse, monologic) context-free 52 context-specific 44, 52, 54, 131 deontic 136 figurative 152–3, 170–4, 176, 181, 183–4, 269, 286

SUBJECT INDE X formal x, 83, 91, 100, 130, 231 physical 29, 79, 83, 85, 88 pragmatic(al) 158, 170, 190, 220, 269 predictive 17 situational 141, 172 syntactic 146 verbal 158, 174, 214 contingency, contingencies 19, 93, 97, 102, 111–12, 115, 117–18, 120, 122, 130, 134, 142, 145, 265, 267 continuum as opposed to dichotomy 77, 90, 111, 154–5, 166, 175, 192, 219 contrastive rhetoric (see rhetoric, contrastive) control attentional 5, 187, 189, 194, 196, 212, 217 cognitive 3, 10, 19–22, 24, 29, 31–2, 34–5, 51, 53, 163, 179–80, 186, 220, 236, 251, 272–4, 279–80, 284 executive (see also executive functions) 20, 24, 32, 124–5, 199, 282 self xiv, 272, 282, 284 conventional ~ novel metaphor(s) (see metaphor(s), conventional, see metaphor(s), established) convention(s) cultural xi, 39, 48–9, 68, 98, 173, 274 extra-alphabetic(al) (see extra-alphabetic (=graphic cues)) orthographic 228 politeness 83, 130–2, 142, 147 rhetorical xi, 131, 229, 232, 240 social ix, xi, 25, 39, 98, 130–1, 134, 142, 155, 255, 268 storytelling ~ narrative 68, 266, 274 stylistic 115 conversation(al) (see genre, conversation) conversational maxims (see maxims, conversational) correction(s), self (see repair(s)) cortisol 55, 95 counterfactuals (see conditionals, counterfactual) critical period 2–5 cross-linguistic (see typology, typological) culture, cultural vii, xi, 2, 30, 38–9, 48–9, 68, 82–3, 98, 100, 123, 131, 157–60, 171, 182, 184, 221, 225, 231–2, 239–41, 249, 253, 249, 253, 255, 260, 264, 267, 269, 277 debate (see discourse function, argumentation) decentering 109, 231, 267, 273 deception, deceive (see lying, lies (=deception, dishonesty)) decode, decoding (see also interpretation) 152–3, 221, 223, 249, 258–9, 272

341

default mode (see network(s), brain/neural, default, see also glossary I) definite(ness) (see also article) 61–2, 190 definition, define 72, 87, 108, 209–10, 221, 232 deixis (see reference, deixis) demonstrative(s) (see parts of speech, demonstrative(s)) dendrite(s) (see also glossary II) 22 derivation(al) (see morphology, derivation(al)) description, describing, descriptive (see also discourse functions, see also genre) viii, xi–ii, 2, 18, 30, 38–9, 41, 43, 45–6, 48–50, 53, 63–5, 70, 72–3, 77–80, 82, 85–7, 90, 92–4, 98, 101, 103, 106–11, 113, 128, 152, 158, 175, 197, 213, 219, 220, 255, 262, 266–7, 271, 274, 276 adequate 111 emotion(al) 46 informative 45, 78–0, 85–7, 90, 92, 94, 101, 106, 108, 110–11, 232, 262, 267 neutral 87, 90 verbal 175, 220 dialect(s) (see also diglossia) 113, 136, 231, 262 diary (studies), diaries vii, 79, 84–5, 92, 98, 100–1, 174, 223, 267 digitalization (see also mode(s)/modality2 , digital) 229, 272 diglossia 231 disadvantage (see socio-economical background (SES)) discourse, discursive (see also function(s), discourse ~ communicative) adequacy 78, 267 analysis 247 coherence (see coherence) development 34, 79–80, 91, 98, 100–1, 105–6, 111, 115, 123, 144, 190, 192, 275 level 168, 240, 286 monologic 39, 61, 78–9, 84, 86, 88, 91–2, 101, 105 processing 53–4, 63, 128–9, 164, 168, 172, 247, 269, 282, 285–6 types (see genre(s), see function(s), discourse ~ communicative) unit(s) (see also: package, packaging, clause packaging (CP)) 73, 236–7, 263–4 disfluency, disfluencies 191 disorder(s) xiii, 186, 277, 288, 291 aphasia (see also glossary II) 280, 287 brain damage 4–5, 10, 165, 244, 288 deaf(ness) 3–4, 35, 277

342

SUBJECT INDE X

disorder(s) (Continued) feral child(ren) 3 hearing disorder 277 (see also disorder(s), deaf(ness)) disposition(s) 231, 248, 261, 274 divergent thinking (see thinking, divergent) domain-specific(ity) 13–14, 19–29, 34, 51, 185, 252 echo(ing) 161, 163, 181 electro-encephalography (EEG) (see also glossary II) 31, 288–9 elicit(ation) 6, 28, 39, 61, 65, 70, 73–4, 80, 108, 116, 166, 182, 210, 250, 256, 269 embodiment, embodied, embody 18, 156, 165, 262 emotion(s) vii, 18, 33, 36, 45–6, 51–2, 54–5, 68, 87, 101, 104, 111, 162, 164, 166, 168–9, 172, 175–6, 180, 186, 250–2, 266, 269, 274, 278–91, 283–4, 286 empathy 54–5, 98, 247, 250, 258, 266–7, 274, 286 environment(al) vii, ix, xi, 2, 5–6, 8, 11, 13, 17, 19, 24–5, 28, 30, 34–5, 51, 54–5, 74, 99, 101, 112, 166, 194, 244, 273–4, 291 epilinguistic (see also awareness) 204, 223 epistemic (see modality1 , epistemic) epistemic consequences 227, 230, 264 equilibration (see also accommodation, assimilation) 8 equipotentiality 12 error(s) viii, 11, 17, 19, 31, 115, 170, 186, 188–90, 212, 220, 222, 233, 254, 273, 280, 282 ethnography, ethnographic 82, 11 etymology, etymological 151, 261 event complexes (see scripts (=event complexes)) executive control (see control, executive) executive function(s) ix, xiv, 23, 35, 125, 141, 164, 166, 168–9, 196, 250, 158, 272, 281–3 extension (of meaning) 152, 164, 174, 239 extra-alphabetic (=graphic cues) 225–6, 229, 254, 271 paragraph(s) 74, 79, 225, 229, 245, 255, 272–3 punctuation 79, 225–6, 228–9, 250, 254–5, 261, 272 space(s), spacing 226, 229, 243, 250, 254, 272 text layout 16, 225–6, 228–9, 243, 255, 271 falsehood (see lying, lies (=deception, dishonesty))

familiar(ity) 55, 71, 95–7, 112, 141, 153–4, 156–7, 160, 165, 171–3, 176, 211, 221, 257, 275, 285 feedback/feedforward 11, 15, 17, 20, 84, 273, 282 auditory 189, 222 unconscious 189 fiction, fictive (see genre, fiction) figurative language/figures of speech (see also embodiment) viii, 18, 34, 149–54, 156, 158, 160, 162–6, 169–76, 181, 183–6, 189, 198, 217, 219, 224, 269–70, 273–5, 278–86 established (=conventional) (see also proverb(s), see also metaphor(s), metaphorical, established) 154–7, 165, 172–4, 186, 217, 269, 275 idiom(s) (see idiom(s)) irony (see irony, ironic) joke(s) (see humor, joke(s)) lie(s) (see lying, lies (=deception, dishonesty)) metaphor (see metaphor(s)) proverb(s) (see proverb(s)) riddle(s) 149, 158–9, 170, 176–8, 183, 269 innovative (=novel) (see coinage) filter(ed/ing) xii, 38, 41, 48–9, 67–8, 93, 130, 144, 260, 274, 276 finger-spelling (see mode(s)/modality2 , digital) flexibility 24, 32–3, 58, 94, 168, 183, 214, 245, 251, 258, 272–3, 279 linguistic 25, 183, 266 rhetorical 104 fMRI (see Glossary II, see neural imaging, fMRI) foreign language (see second language) form/function relations x27, 55, 138, 142, 145, 203, 205–6, 208, 217, 220, 226, 255, 274 formulaic 192, 201, 207 free association (see thinking, associative) function(s), discourse ~ communicative x, 77–80, 86, 92, 98, 100, 106, 197, 228, 253, 232, 262–3, 266–7 argument(ation), argumentative viii, 24, 30, 79, 86–90, 94, 98, 108–11, 225, 232, 240, 242, 255–7, 259, 267, 271 commentary 41, 46, 65, 67–8, 91, 111, 143, 167, 182, 217, 266 description, describing, descriptive (see description, describing, descriptive) evaluation, evaluative 32, 42, 70, 100, 107, 111, 124–5, 192, 263 explanation 72, 83, 88, 90, 178, 188, 210, 212, 213–14, 255–6, 271 instrumental 99, 101, 130, 132, 142, 267

SUBJECT INDE X persuasion, persuasive (see function(s), discourse ~ communicative) reasoning (see also embodiment, see also thinking, divergent) 20, 88, 111, 121–2, 128, 138, 141, 170, 230–1, 258–9, 267–8, 272, 278 abilities 23 abstract 142, 268 argumentative (see function(s), discourse ~ communicative, argumentation) basic 128, 170 conditional 121, 123, 127–8, 138–42 counterfactual 115, 121–2, 128, 140–1 deductive 33, 123, 241, 248 factual 128, 140 hypothetical 115, 121, 123, 127–8 inferential 248, 259 logical 115, 121, 123, 139–42, 259 metaphorical 18, 165 processes 88, 231, 278 scientific 123, 231 ganglia (see also glossary I, see also brain sites, basal ganglia) 14, 278, 281, 291 generate (generating) possibilities 114–15, 123, 126, 135, 139, 268 generative (see models, generative) generic reference (see reference, generic) tense (see aspect, generic) gene(s), genetic vii, ix, xiv, 2–3, 8, 13–14, 33–4, 74, 249, 264, 268, 273, 291 genre(s) x, 33, 39, 44, 74, 78, 84–5, 87, 91–2, 99, 109, 115, 123, 185, 226, 232–5, 237, 239–40, 244, 254–6, 258, 262, 266, 271–2, 275 academic writing/analytic prose vii–viii, xii, 60, 84, 215, 227, 232–5, 238–43, 256–7, 259–60, 271 commentary, sports 85, 91 conversation (see discourse) description (see description, describing, descriptive) encyclopedic 87, 91, 108, 111, 232 expository xi, 24–5, 33, 90, 216, 237, 239–40, 256–7, 262–3 fiction, fictive 95, 104, 232, 260 informative 45, 78–9, 85–7, 90, 92, 94, 101, 106, 108, 110–11, 232, 262, 267 narrative (see narrative, narration) peer-talk (see peer(s), peer talk) poetry 73, 184, 232 scientific x, 39, 76, 88, 90–1, 115, 138, 141, 232

343

genre appropriateness: canonic/violation 33, 40, 73, 233–5, 239, 244, 262, 266 gesture 15, 35, 79, 80 gradualism 195, 270 grammar, grammatical x, xiv, 7, 27, 35, 45, 56–7, 80–1, 93, 113, 123, 131, 138, 142, 147, 159, 187, 193, 212, 217, 222, 232, 237, 265, 276 morpho-syntax (see morphology, morphological, morpho-syntax, morpho-syntactic) phonology, phonological (see phonology, phonological) semantics, semantic (see semantics, semantic) story grammar 47, 49 syntax, syntactic (see syntax, syntactic) Universal Grammar (see also Chomskian) 223 grammaticization, grammaticize 68, 119, 276 grounding background 24, 33, 38, 41–2, 46–7, 49, 53–4, 57–8, 64–7, 69, 71, 266, 276, 280 foreground 24, 33, 41–2, 53, 58, 66, 69, 71, 241, 266, 276 Guilford test 147 gyrus/gyri (see brain sites, angular (AG), see brain sites frontal, see brain sites, temporal) habitus 231, 248, 258, 262 Homer 225, 261 humor 150, 157–60, 163, 166–7, 176–9, 185, 198, 218, 270, 279–81, 283, 286 joke(s) vii, x, xii, 78, 149, 154, 158–60, 163, 167, 170–1, 176–9, 183–4, 186, 269–70, 282 punchline(s) 158 referential (see refer(ence), referring, referential, joke) pun(s) 159, 177–8, 187, 202 riddle(s) 149, 158–9, 170, 176–8, 183, 269, 276 hypertext (see intertextuality) hypothesis 114–15, 120, 129, 138, 141, 231, 250, 274 ideation 16, 33, 124–6, 237, 255, 281, 284 idiom(s), idiomatic viii, 149–50, 155–6, 163–7, 171–3, 183–7, 217, 269–70, 280, 286 illiteracy, illiterate 13, 198, 201, 207–8, 262 functional 230 textual 230 imagination 83, 114, 116, 124, 247, 282 impersonal (constructions) 119 implicature(s) 151, 153, 184

344

SUBJECT INDE X

implicit (see implicatures, see knowledge, implicit) incongruity (see also humor) 158–60, 166, 177–8, 184, 269, 281 indefinite(ness) (see definite(ness)) inference, inferring (see also implicatures) 15, 43, 45, 53, 118, 123, 139, 150, 152–3, 164, 171–2, 184, 186, 247, 250, 253, 259, 269, 274 information, new ~ old/given 15, 24, 44, 46, 53, 63, 76, 280 inflection (see morphology, inflection(al)) inhibition, inhibitory 3, 19–20, 23, 124, 164–5, 169, 179, 187, 198, 251, 273, 279–80, 282 input vii, 2, 5, 6, 9, 13, 15, 17, 23–4, 26, 61, 73, 99, 153, 166–7, 173, 248, 250–1, 258, 272–3, 281, 287, 289 language 3, 5, 7, 9, 21, 35, 98, 172, 188, 207, 247 sensory 11, 20, 26, 34, 279, 285 intended sense (see also figurative language) 155–6, 162, 168 interlocutor(s) 24–5, 44, 51, 60, 72–3, 79–80, 83, 91, 98, 101, 105, 109–10, 130–1, 149, 152, 161–2, 176, 183, 189–90, 217–20, 226, 267, 271, 274–5 interpretation (see also decoding) 41, 45, 52, 65, 68, 72, 138–9, 145, 151–3, 158, 164–5, 167, 170, 172–3, 175, 186, 203, 213–14, 219, 226, 241, 247, 269 online 155 intertext(uality) 229–30 introspection 189, 194, 202, 215 irony, ironic 149–50, 154, 160–3, 167–71, 176–7, 180–6, 198, 218–19, 269–70, 279–3, 285–7 sarcasm 161–2, 176, 182, 183, 270 joke(s) (see humor, joke(s)) judgment (task) 204–5 kinetic (see mode(s)/modality2 , kinetic) knowledge (see also memory) background 247, 250, 274 explicit xi, 11, 192, 197, 199, 213, 275–6 implicit xi, 174, 192–3, 195, 197, 217, 270, 275–6 knowledge-based society 227, 261 procedural (see also memory, procedural, see also learning, procedural) 196–7, 214 metaprocedural 195, 197, 202, 212, 214, 220 shared (see information, new ~ old/given)

languages Arabic 121, 147, 160, 205, 223, 228–9, 231 Chinese 41, 74, 131, 144, 196, 224, 228, 261 Dutch 207, 259 English 3, 5, 22, 24, 41, 50, 53, 56–62, 64, 66, 70, 76, 84–5, 92–4, 97, 104, 106–7, 113, 118–23, 128, 130–4, 136–8, 143–6, 154, 185–7, 191–2, 196, 201–5, 208, 213, 215–16, 224, 229, 232, 237, 240–1, 253, 262, 264, 268, 276 French 53, 36–7, 68–70, 74, 76, 93, 109, 113, 118–21, 130, 133–6, 139, 145, 190, 208, 216, 228, 237, 249 German 35, 50, 53, 36–7, 70, 74, 93–4, 113, 119, 121, 128, 131, 155, 202, 224, 262, 276 Greek 144, 204 Hebrew 21, 35, 40–1, 50, 53, 56–8, 61, 69–71, 74, 82, 93–4, 104, 106, 109, 113, 118–19, 121, 130–4, 137, 143–7, 156, 173, 176, 178, 186, 190, 200–5, 210, 216, 218, 223–3, 228, 232, 237, 239, 259, 264, 268, 270, 276–7 Italian xiii, 50, 70–1, 103, 106, 119, 172, 175, 212 Japanese 68, 131, 213, 228 Latin 146, 227, 229 Polish 121 Portuguese 105 Russian 93, 119, 146, 207 Spanish 41, 50, 53, 56, 59, 61, 69–71, 93–4, 106–7, 113, 118–22, 130–4, 136, 145–7, 155, 160, 177, 196, 200–2, 224, 228–9, 234, 237, 256, 276 Swedish 70, 216 Turkish xiii, 53, 70, 94, 113, 138, 146, 207, 224, 228, 264, 274 Xhosa 35 Zulu 35 language families Bantu 6, 35, 208 Germanic 119, 121, 146, 215 Romance 121, 146, 254 Semitic 74, 121, 205, 223, 225, 228, 240, 271, 277 Slavic 121, 146, 276 Standard Average European 146 lateralization, lateralized (see also hemisphere see also Glossary II) 12–3, 23, 36, 163–4, 166, 168, 178, 252, 269, 273, 278, 290 learning capabilities 22 conscious xiv, 6, 253 domain-general 14, 34, 55, 265

SUBJECT INDE X implicit 34–5, 182 integrative 23, 72, 196 processes 5, 111, 130 reading, to read xi, 13, 196, 198, 201, 205–6, 220, 223, 225, 242–3, 249, 253, 255, 258, 260, 272, 277 relearning 2, 6, 10 rote learning 172, 202 school-based 30–1, 100, 105, 135, 255, 260, 271–2 second-language, L2 (see second-language), L2 social 181, 215 spelling, to spell (see spelling, to spell, see learning, writing, to write) statistical 26–7, 34 writing, to write x–xi, 6, 13, 35, 130, 198, 201, 206, 220, 223, 225, 231, 241–3, 245–7, 249, 253–8, 260, 271–2, 277 lesion method 4 letter(s) 16, 30, 178, 200, 218, 223, 225–6, 228–9, 239, 243, 247, 250, 253, 261, 271–2 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 47 lexicon, lexical (see also part(s) of speech (=lexical categories)) x, 25, 27–8, 33, 35, 50, 70, 91, 94, 102, 105, 118, 135, 144, 152–5, 157, 159–60, 171, 173–4, 182–3, 185–7, 188–9, 195–7, 200, 202–10, 215–17, 220, 224, 231, 233, 236, 238–40, 242, 254, 258, 259, 268–70, 276 diversity 239 lies (see lying, lies (=deception, dishonesty)) linguistic relativity 41 listen(ing) 12, 23, 39, 43–4, 94, 128, 158, 163, 172, 175, 184, 207, 258–9 literacy, literate xi, 2, 5, 13, 24, 30–1, 33, 39, 65, 72, 80, 99, 105, 111, 141–2, 144, 183–4, 195–6, 198, 201, 203–4, 207–8, 214–15, 217, 220–1, 223, 225–64, 268, 270–2, 274–5 digital viii, 30, 217, 227, 229, 231, 248, 254, 262, 272 script viii–ix, 225, 227–8, 231, 260, 262, 271 text viii–ix, 225–39, 243–6, 253–8, 260, 262, 271–2 literal (use of language) 131, 149–58, 160–1, 164–8, 170, 172–3, 175, 182–3, 184–5, 189, 218, 269, 274–5 literature 39–40, 149, 159, 161, 176 localism, localist 14–15, 34, 36 localization 11, 12, 36 logic (formal) 18, 76, 109, 121, 138–9, 150, 146–7

345

lying, lies (=deception, dishonesty) 30, 33, 94, 149, 154, 162–3, 168–70, 176, 179–80, 184, 198, 218, 269–70, 275, 279–80, 282, 285 maxim(s), conversation(al) (see also pragmatic(al), standard) 29, 37, 184 meaning xi, xiv, 6–7, 15, 18, 21, 35, 105, 117, 150–3, 155, 159–60, 162, 168, 170, 172, 175, 177, 181–9, 194, 196, 199, 200, 210–11, 212, 214, 217, 220, 222, 224, 230, 236, 250, 259, 269–70, 273, 280, 285 basic ~ core ~ standard ~ primary 18, 150–2, 223 literal (see literal (use of language)) metaphoric(al) viii, 152–3, 155 referential (see refer(ence), referring, referential, content/meaning) memory 6, 11, 16, 23, 36, 39, 44, 49, 51, 53–4, 60–1, 63, 74, 96, 124, 126, 169–70, 185, 191, 247, 256, 262, 264, 266, 269, 272, 274, 278–81, 283, 285–6 episodic (autobiographical) (EAM) 40, 52, 72, 125, 279, 281–6 long-term (LTM) 6, 20, 40, 51, 115, 233, 273–4, 283 perceptual 46, 52 procedural 52, 251, 282 semantic (SM) 40, 52, 124, 164 short-term (ETM) 211 working xiv, 20, 125, 168–9, 211, 237, 251, 259 mental image(s) 114, 129, 145, 284 mentalizing (=mind-reading) (see also theory of mind (ToM)) 15, 30, 44, 53–4, 61, 72–3, 79, 163, 166–8, 171, 173, 181, 184, 186, 217, 247, 250, 266, 268–9, 279–81, 283, 285, 287 metacognition 219, 221–2, 244 metalanguage 178, 188, 192–4, 215, 219–20, 270 metalinguistic 7, 143, 178, 186–90, 192–3, 195–200, 202, 203–5, 207, 210–11, 213, 215, 217–22, 255, 270–1 awareness (MA), sensitivity (see also morphology, awareness, see also phonological, awareness (see also pragmati(cal), awareness, see also syntactic awareness) 35, 144, 172, 177–8, 188–90, 192, 211–13, 215, 222, 270, 274, 277 metaphor(s), metaphorical vii–viii, 2, 18, 72, 87, 149–50, 152–8, 163–7, 169–71, 174–6, 181, 183–5, 217–18, 224, 234, 239, 250–1, 265, 269, 275, 277–8, 280, 282–3, 285–6 attributional ~ relational 175

346

SUBJECT INDE X

metaphor(s), metaphorical (Continued) conceptual 18, 156 conventional 151, 157, 174, 275 emotional 18 established 156–7, 165, 217 forward referring 157 innovative/novel 156–7, 165, 174, 176, 198, 251, 275 primary 18 simile(s) 157, 171, 221, 243, 269 source ~ target 18, 156–7, 171, 185 modal(s) (expressions) 119–20, 122–3, 130–1, 134–5, 137, 143, 146 auxiliaries 97, 118–19, 131, 143 predicates 118–19, 142–3 semi-modals 118, 137, 146 modality1 73, 97, 115–18, 122, 135, 145–6, 267–9 deontic (=root) 117–18, 122–3, 130, 132, 134–43, 145–6, 256, 267–9 desiderative 117 epistemic 117–18, 122–3, 130, 132, 134–5, 137, 142–3, 145–6, 267–9 existential 145 jussive 117, 145 obligatory 117 volitive 145 model(s) xiv, 11–12, 16–17, 36, 45, 112, 114, 136, 147, 177, 197, 214, 244, 246–7, 252, 256, 258–9, 265 generative 45, 222 processing 16 writing (see writing, model) mode(s)/modality2 34, 39, 54, 77, 98, 165, 194–5, 222, 229, 237, 239, 272, 281, 286 auditory 13, 26, 28, 35, 129, 189, 194, 222, 279, 286–7 digital (100-101) (see also literacy, digital) 30, 77, 79, 92, 98–102, 108, 111, 113, 182, 217, 229, 247–8, 254, 262, 264, 272 text(ing) viii, ix, xi, 83, 92, 101–2, 111, 231, 248 kinetic 194 pictured 6, 22, 24, 39, 43–4, 47, 49–51, 54, 58–9, 61–3, 66, 72–4, 83, 139, 152, 164–6, 197, 213, 243, 254 spatial (see also spatial) 19, 96, 166, 283, 285–6 spoken 3, 6, 15, 20, 32–3, 54, 74, 77, 83, 85, 92, 98, 111, 176, 216, 222, 225, 228–9, 232, 237, 239–40, 243, 253, 271, 286–7 verbal ix, 9, 16, 19, 39, 51, 73, 84–5, 98–9, 158–9, 165, 188, 194

visual 26, 28, 35, 84, 128–9, 165, 194–5, 243, 249–52, 272, 279, 284–5, 287 written (see writing) modularity 14, 36, 223 monitor(ing) xiv, 19–20, 30, 92, 101, 162, 170, 176, 180, 186, 191, 194, 202, 215, 218, 220, 222, 250, 258–9, 270, 272, 280, 282 monologic (see discourse, monologic) mood 73, 92, 116, 276, 282 assertive 145 counterfactual (see also conditional, counterfactual, see also reasoning, counterfactual) 121 deontic 130, 146 dubitative 117, 145 evidentiality 70, 146 exclamatory 117 hortative 117, 145 hypothetical 117 imperative 130, 132 indicative 121, 129, 136, 282 intentive 117 irrealis 116, 118–20, 122, 129–30, 132–6, 141–2, 145–6, 267 jussive 117, 145 presumptive 145 realis 116, 130, 135, 145 subjunctive 121, 135–6, 141, 145 morpheme(s) x, xiv, 146, 185, 195, 200, 204, 220, 223–4, 229, 266 morphology, morphological(y) x, xv, 27, 35, 53, 70, 74, 119, 185, 190, 196, 203–7, 209, 212, 214, 219–20, 223–4, 231, 276–7 awareness 178, 196, 198–9, 202–7 derivation(al) xiv, 204, 223, 277 inflection(al) xiv, 119, 132, 204, 223–4, 277 morpho-syntax, morpho-syntactic 135, 147, 196, 212, 214, 216, 270, 276 multi-word expression(s) MWE (=multilexemic expression(s), MLE) (see also collocations) 154–5, 185, 229, 239 myelin (see also glossary II) 13, 22, 27, 273, 283, 290–1 narrative, narration vii, xi, 16, 21, 22, 24–5, 33, 38–74, 94, 106–7, 110, 113, 115, 123, 143–5, 158, 173, 190, 197, 216, 232, 239–40, 256–7, 262–3, 265–6, 273–4, 280, 283, 286 action structure 59, 62–4, 74, 169, 263 chaining, sequential 24, 43, 55–6, 58, 60, 66 coda 42, 45–7 connectivity 42, 44, 47, 53, 55, 58–60, 62–3, 65–6, 72, 197, 266

SUBJECT INDE X conventions (see convention(s), storytelling) descriptive(s) (see also description, describing, descriptive) 42, 45, 47, 64–5, 266 eventive(s) 45–6, 64–5, 72 exposition/introduction/introductory (setting) 42, 44–5, 47, 66–7, 73, 106–7, 109, 157, 167, 256 grammar (see grammar, grammatical, story grammar) interpretation (see also interpretation) 24, 41, 44, 45–8, 64–5, 67–8, 71–2, 158, 266 narrator(s) xi, xii, 16, 24, 40–6, 48–51, 53, 57–61, 65–7, 70–3, 207, 236 sequentiality 43, 59, 62, 69 story-external commentary 65, 68 timeline 21, 59 native speaker (see proficiency, native) nature/nurture 32, 260, 265 negation 27, 120, 123, 132–3, 137, 139, 145–7, 160 network(s), brain/neural (see also glossary I) 13–15, 22, 36, 40, 51, 54, 115, 123, 125, 128, 163–4, 167, 169–70, 183, 194, 220, 236, 249–51, 258, 266, 269, 272, 281–4, 290 bilateral 164, 167–8 canonical language 165, 266, 269, 286 central executive (see also glossary I) 125, 169, 281, 284 core (see also glossary I) 127, 163–4, 166, 170, 269, 279, 283–4, 286 default mode (DMN) (see also glossary I) 97, 112, 125, 127, 172, 186, 251, 279, 281–5 disruption 169 face (FN) (see also glossary I) 282, 284, 287 figurative (core) (see also glossary I) 150, 163, 166, 170, 269, 279–86 humor processing 166–7, 178 language (see also glossary I, see also network, perisylvian) 15, 36, 51, 164–5, 186, 282, 284, 287 perisylvian (see also Glossary I) 10, 12, 51, 53, 287 salience (see also glossary I) 125, 281–2, 284 neural (see also glossary II) activity (see activation, neural) connectivity (see also glossary II) 5, 10, 12, 14–16, 23, 34, 72, 169, 180, 258, 281–2, 284, 288–90 (de)coupling (see also glossary II) 125, 289 imaging, neuroimaging techniques (see also glossary II) 4, 8, 12, 14, 22, 28, 53, 99, 127, 164, 168, 177, 249–50, 288–92

347

fMRI (see also glossary II) 4, 14, 95–6, 127, 169, 185–6, 195, 250, 289–90 oscillation, neural 124, 281 PET scan (see also glossary II) 126, 289, 292 neurobiological basis, neurobiological foundations 79, 94–5, 97, 273 neuro-constructivism xiii, 3, 8–9, 18, 33 neuron(s) 10, 14–15, 17, 22–3, 34, 125, 249–50, 288, 289–93 new information (see information, new ~ old/given) non-literal (use of language) 131, 149–53, 162, 164–72, 182–5, 224, 269–70, 279 nominal abstractness 122, 134–5, 176, 203, 205, 210, 237, 239, 242 nominal realism 171 object 1, 6, 8, 14, 16, 26, 41, 44, 51, 68, 77, 86–7, 98, 114, 129, 147, 156, 171, 175, 177, 183, 198–9, 209–10, 249, 251, 272–3 of attention 194–5, 271 cultural x, 262 language 192–3, 270 perceptual, physical 31, 102, 152, 175, 239 of reflection viii, 189–90, 208, 270–1 object (grammar) 71, 146, 159, 192, 224 online/offline 53, 155, 191, 197, 207, 217, 219, 222, 231, 243 onomatopoeia 171, 201 orality 39, 79, 84–5, 144, 176, 190, 201, 220, 225–8, 239, 263, 271, 277 organs of speech 189, 199, 223 orthography, orthographic (see also script (=writing system), see also spelling, to spell, see also convention(s), orthogrpahic) 185, 187, 196, 201, 228, 253 oxytocin 54–5, 95, 266 package, packaging 43, 53, 60, 67, 238 clause packaging (CP) 60, 236, 237–8, 264 syntactic 43, 60, 233, 236, 263 parts of speech (=lexical categories) 94, 157, 206–7 adjective(s) xiv, 28, 50, 60–1, 70, 85, 92, 94, 107, 118–19, 143, 152, 157, 166, 185, 203–5, 207–8, 211, 224, 237, 239, 241 adverb(s), adverbial(s) 44, 57, 67, 94, 104, 118, 119, 136–7 article(s) 61, 197, 206–8, 224, 254

348

SUBJECT INDE X

parts of speech (=lexical categories) (Continued) connective(s), conjunction(s) 28–9, 58, 138, 147, 263–4 demonstrative(s) 61 determiner(s) 28, 44, 211, 237 noun(s) xi, xiv, 44–5, 50, 60–2, 70–1, 74, 85, 94, 107, 122, 134–5, 152, 157, 159, 166, 176, 185, 190–2, 197, 202–8, 210–13, 223–4, 237–42, 254, 262, 275 pronouns 16, 44–5, 50, 61–2, 68, 70–1, 74, 122, 146, 152, 160, 197, 206–7, 211, 224, 254 personal 122 verbs 29, 41–2, 44, 53, 56–8, 60–1, 67, 69–71, 74, 85, 92–4, 103–4, 107, 118–23, 132, 134–5, 137, 143–4, 146–7, 154, 157–60, 166, 173, 185, 192, 197, 202–8, 216, 221, 224, 239, 241–2, 275–7 auxiliary 53, 85, 92–3, 119 infinitive, non-finite 42, 85, 118–19, 132 participle, past 58, 113 participle, present 58, 85 phrasal 154 particle(s) 50, 53, 113, 146, 276 preposition(s) 28–9, 197, 206, 208, 210, 224, 237, 238, 254 papyrus, papyri 225, 226, 261 paradigm 118, 146, 224 paraphrase, paraphrasing 159–60, 172, 176, 185, 214, 217 passive (see voice, passive) pattern recognition 17, 208 pause(s), pausing 73, 187, 191, 207, 229, 257 peer(s) viii–ix, 31–2, 48–9, 74, 77, 79, 83, 91, 98, 101, 104, 131, 134, 158, 177–9, 200, 217, 220, 251, 266, 272 peer talk xi, 78, 99–103, 106, 111 perception, perceptual xi, 6, 11–12, 14, 17–20, 95–6, 116, 158, 175, 194, 223, 260, 273, 287 perfective (see aspect, perfective) performative (see speech acts) person (grammatical category) 61, 70, 74, 146 perspective(s) (see also narrative, see also decentering) agent oriented 40, 122 alternating 89, 108, 111, 114, 259 audience 43, 72, 79, 85, 91, 226, 237, 240, 246, 258, 267, 272 cognitive 144 individual xii, 32, 250 judgmental 134 nativist xiii, 265 objective iv, 48, 105–6, 134, 255, 271

personalized 123, 266, 268–9 perspective-taking 30, 48, 51, 61, 108–9, 163, 186, 250, 258–9, 272, 285–6 subjective (see subjectivity, subjective) top-down (see top-down ~ bottom-up (organization)) philosophy (see also pragmatic(al), standard) vii, ix, 37–8, 76–7, 87–8, 97, 112, 114, 116, 145, 148, 150, 153, 158, 189, 222, 225, 232, 241–2, 264, 269, 275 phoneme(s), phonemic 199–201, 208, 223–4, 228, 261 phonetics, phonetic 159, 202, 223, 243, 254, 261 phonology, phonological ix, x, xv, 14, 20, 35–6, 74, 152, 186, 195–6, 200–1, 206, 208, 217, 223–4, 280 awareness 178, 186, 189–90, 195–6, 198–201, 204–7, 219, 243, 270 sound(s) x, 1, 2, 7, 10, 15, 21, 26–7, 30, 159, 189, 198–200, 208, 220, 223, 225, 228, 253, 261, 265, 271 stress 74 syllable(s), syllabic 1, 74, 189, 194, 198–201, 208, 219–20, 223–4, 228, 239, 254 phrase(s) x, xiv, 27–9, 45, 61, 74, 121–2, 134–5, 192–3, 206, 213, 216, 220, 223, 237–8, 266 phrenology, phrenological approach (see also glossary II) 11, 292 Piaget, Piagetian xiii, 8, 18, 31, 55, 109, 141–2, 145, 174, 177, 197, 206–7, 231, 265 pictured mode (see mode(s)/modality2 , pictured) Pinocchio 20, 176, 179 plasticity 5, 11 brain ix, 4, 24 experience-dependent 13, 36 neurocognitive 4 neuroplasticity 23, 325 Plato 112, 225 politeness 83, 130–2, 142, 143 poverty of the stimulus, the vii pragmatic(s) 15, 35, 37, 53, 98, 99, 105, 109, 122, 131, 138, 142, 155, 158, 170, 172–3, 176, 182, 189–90, 220, 222–3, 244, 269–70 awareness 182, 193, 196, 199, 214, 216, 219, 222 sociopragmatic(s) 182, 215 standard 151, 153 predicate, predicating 29, 37, 45, 60, 66, 92–4, 107, 118–19, 122–3, 135–6, 142–3, 145, 210 predictive capacity, predictive mechanism(s) 11, 16, 77, 96, 111, 273

SUBJECT INDE X presupposition 152–3 pretend play 129, 177 priming 2, 6, 10, 35–6, 52, 195, 213, 253 printing 30, 77, 99, 227 problem solving 6, 9, 30, 66, 197, 241, 245, 285 proceduralization 196, 275 processing 5, 11–17, 22, 33, 36, 44, 51, 53–4, 63, 96–7, 99, 124–5, 128, 140–1, 150, 153, 155, 163–70, 172–3, 175–6, 178, 181, 183, 189, 191, 194–5, 198, 204, 211, 213–14, 222, 227, 238, 247–9, 259, 263–4, 269, 273, 275, 279–88, 292 bottom-up 194, 236, 274 distributed 10, 34, 51, 163, 167, 196, 250 emotional 36, 251, 280, 283 parallel 3, 10, 14, 16, 273 production xi, 12, 13, 22, 27, 30, 65, 72, 29, 136, 170, 181–2, 191, 198, 206, 217, 223, 230, 233, 244–6, 249, 251–2, 254, 257, 271–2, 280, 286 proficiency, proficient genre-appropriate (see genre appropriateness: canonic/violation) linguistic ix, xii–xiii, 98, 111, 131, 198, 216, 260, 271–2, 275 literacy 99, 254, 262, 271 lying 179 narration 41 native xii, xiii, 3–4, 32, 49–50, 57, 64, 68, 70–1, 133, 135–6, 145, 147, 215, 227, 242, 260, 270, 272, 274 reading 247, 272 writing 16, 115, 144, 233, 236, 243, 245–6, 260, 272, 275 proposition(al) (see also attitude(s), propositional) 45, 64–5, 87, 90, 111, 116–19, 122–3, 135, 142–6, 155, 173, 192, 211, 214, 140, 255, 263, 267, 274 prosody, prosodic 167–8, 181 intonation 5, 30, 73, 105, 171, 201, 254 proverb(s) (see also figurative speech) 149–50, 154–6, 170–1, 173, 183–4, 186, 269–70 pruning (see also glossary II) 23, 34, 36, 250, 292 punctuation 79, 225–7, 228–50, 254–5, 261, 272 quote, quotation(s) 154, 188, 192, 221–2, 229, 234, 254 read(ing) comprehension 21, 198, 230, 247–50, 255, 258–9, 263, 271–2, 274 critical 272 decoding (see decoding) deep 231, 243, 247–8, 259, 271, 275

349

invented 30, 253 silent 226, 229, 258 simple view 259 reasoning (see function(s), discourse ~ communicative, reasoning) Register(ed) (=records in the neural system) see also Glossary II 11, 17, 26, 27, 77, 194, 274 refer(ence), referring, referential 1, 16, 28–9, 43–5, 50, 53, 55, 60–3, 65–6, 68–72, 74, 80–2, 85, 87, 94, 113, 115, 123, 135–6, 151, 185, 188,–9, 193, 195, 197, 206–7, 209–10, 214, 224, 231, 239, 265–6, 271–2, 274 anaphora, anaphoric (see also: parts of speech, pronoun(s)) 44, 61–3, 197 content/meaning 116, 118 deixis, deictic 44, 61, 63, 74, 146, 152, 197, 210 entity, entities (actual ~ abstract/conceptual) viii, 18, 43, 45, 55, 60–1, 71, 77, 85–7, 90, 92, 94, 97, 101, 106–8, 110–11, 114–15, 123, 134, 171, 173–5, 183, 185, 188, 197, 206, 209, 214, 221, 226, 239, 266–7, 269, 274, 282, 291 generic 122–3, 239 joke(s) 159–60, 177–8 regions, brain (see brain sites) register(s) (=levels of language use) 33, 78, 83, 91–2, 98–9, 107, 131, 136, 146, 173, 215–16, 232–3, 239–40, 264, 267 colloquial (everyday) 78, 82, 91, 104–5, 113, 146–7, 215–16, 240, 267, 272 formal (elevated) 78, 83, 91, 136, 146, 216, 272 repair(s) 7, 74, 190–2, 194, 198, 219, 222, 270 representation 8–9, 12, 20, 22, 39, 46, 51–2, 63, 73, 91, 96–7, 136, 156, 162, 197, 207, 213, 222, 234, 236, 253, 263, 266, 271, 273–5, 282–3, 290 representational redescription (RR) 197–8, 214, 220 repurposing, repurpose 13–4, 34, 249, 273 response time (test) 35, 213 resting state (see network(s), brain/neural, default mode (DMN)) retrieval, retrieve 6, 14, 16, 39, 51–3, 73–4, 95, 124–6, 165, 185, 251, 256, 271, 274, 281–2, 285 reward 17, 33, 166–7, 178, 282–3 rhetoric tradition(s) (see also convention(s), rhetorical) xii, 160, 227, 229, 240–2, 258 Anglo-American xii, 241–2

350

SUBJECT INDE X

rhetoric tradition(s) (see also convention(s), rhetorical) (Continued) continental xii, 241 contrastive rhetoric 240 Latin-American 242 rhetorical moves 256–7 rhyme 178, 200–1, 207, 219 root (consonantal) 176, 203–5, 218, 223, 270, 277 salience, salient xiii, 153–4, 157, 165, 171, 175, 185, 205, 269 graded 153 network (see network(s), brain/neural, salience, see glossary I) say/mean distinction (see intended sense, see figurative language) scaffolding 61, 73, 100 schema(s) ~ schemata 17, 18, 36, 47, 52, 106, 157, 197, 233, 245, 263 narrative 21, 39, 53, 63, 66, 73, 236, 263, 266 sensorimotor 11, 30, 34, 41 writing 115, 233, 235, 243, 245–6 segment(s), segmentation 27, 59, 73, 200–1, 203, 205, 207–8, 220, 254–6, 261, 263 setting (see narrative, exposition) shifting 47, 67, 131, 134, 158–9, 175, 188, 239, 252, 257, 281–2, 284 reference 43, 61, 63 tense 40, 42, 56, 66–7, 72 school-age (see age/schooling levels) schoolchild(ren) (see age/schooling levels) schooling (formal instruction, education, pedagogy) vii, 1, 4, 25, 28, 30–2, 33, 55–6, 60–1, 63, 65, 72, 77–9, 99–100, 108, 131–2, 141–4, 185, 207, 216, 227, 230–2, 237, 239, 255–7, 259–60, 262, 266, 270, 272 academic xii, 141, 215, 232, 259 compulsory 227, 230 formal instruction 7, 30, 32, 136, 253 parental 232 script (=event complex) 39, 43, 46, 48–9, 52, 67, 158, 218, 256 script (=writing system) (see also literacy, script)225, 262 alphabetic 200–1, 225, 228–9, 243, 253–5, 261, 271 Arabic 228–9 consonantal (abjad) 223, 228 cuneiform 249 Cyrillic 228–9 logographic 228, 271 Roman(=Latin) 228–9

syllabary 228, 271 second language (=L2) 3–5, 27, 49, 57, 71, 100, 131, 136, 198, 205, 213, 277 second order belief/intention/knowledge (=meta-representations) 161–3, 181 self-repair (see repair) semantic role(s) agent(s) 40, 50, 122–3, 134, 192, 203–4, 275 instrument 203–4 patient(s) (undergoer) 123 semantics, semantic (see also memory, semantic) ix, 14, 36, 45, 54, 107, 113, 117, 120, 123, 125, 141, 143, 146, 155, 157, 164–6, 170–1, 173, 180, 183, 185, 192, 196, 203–5, 207–10, 213, 215, 224, 237–40, 251, 263, 267–9 awareness 199, 205, 207–8, 212, 222 sense 150–6, 159, 161, 172, 174–5, 177, 183, 185, 212–13, 224 sensorimotor 8, 16–9, 26, 51, 54, 156, 195 experience 243 region(s) 27, 279 schemas (see schema(s) ~ schemata, sensorimotor) sentence(s) (see also clause(s), proposition(s)) vii, x, xii, xiv, 7, 16, 45, 115, 120, 128–9, 137–8, 140, 142, 145, 152, 154, 163–4, 167–8, 176, 184–5, 188–9, 195, 206–7, 211–14, 219–23, 230, 233, 236–7, 246–7, 252, 254–5, 258, 262–5, 282 social learning (see learning, social) socialization 82, 98–9, 102, 193, 267 socio-economical background (SES) vii, 49, 99, 106, 230 sociolinguistic(s) xiv, 130–1, 136, 216, 239 sounds (see phonology, phonological, sound(s)) spatial 19, 68, 96, 113, 166, 194, 276, 283, 285–6 speak(ing) (see mode(s)/modality2 , spoken) specialization x, 3, 5, 9–13, 16, 26, 34, 90, 168, 170, 270, 273, 291–2 speech act 120, 138, 153, 182, 193, 255 apology 153 indirect vii, 34, 131, 142, 153 promise(s) 137–8, 153, 255 request(s) 27, 82, 98, 130–2, 142, 147, 211, 255, 267, 270 threat(s) 137 spelling, to spell (see also orthography) xi, xiv, 6, 16, 115, 187, 198, 208, 217, 220, 223–4, 228–9, 243, 246–7, 253, 271 error(s)/mistake(s) 115, 188 invented 30–1, 243 spoken (see mode(s)/modality2 , spoken) stance 108

SUBJECT INDE X discourse 83 mentalistic 53–4 story, stories, storytelling (see narrative, narration) story grammar (see grammar, grammatical, story grammar) stress 95, 157, 166, 169, 177, 179, 279, 292 phonological (see phonology, phonological, stress) toxic 28 structuralism vii, 223 style 71–2, 84–5, 91–2, 94, 98, 105–6, 111, 187, 216–17, 227, 232, 240–2, 246, 252, 264, 266, 272 subject (grammatical) 29, 50, 61–2, 70, 84–5, 119, 122–3, 134–5, 142, 192–3, 213, 216 elision 44, 70 subjectivity, subjective 48, 68, 84, 96, 104, 109, 117, 123, 130, 194, 211, 222, 247, 274 subjunctive (see mood, subjunctive) syllable(s) (see phonology, phonological, syllable(s)) synapse(s) (see also pruning, see also glossary II) 9, 13, 22, 23, 250, 288, 292–3 synaptogenesis (see also glossary II) 22–3, 26–7, 34, 293 syntax, syntactic x–xi, xv, 5, 13–14, 27–8, 33, 35–7, 43–5, 55, 60–1, 118, 121, 146, 152–3, 155, 159, 171, 177, 182–3, 185–6, 195, 206, 211–15, 221–3, 231–2, 240, 253–4, 260, 263, 277, 285 awareness 189–90, 199, 207–8, 211–14, 217, 219 complex xi, 120, 122–3, 137, 142, 236, 238, 263, 282 connectivity 60, 189, 233, 263, 274 density 60, 236–7 dialogic 103–4 morpho-syntax (see also morphology, morphological, morph-syntax) ix packaging (see package, packaging) talking (see mode(s)/modality2 , spoken, see mode(s)/modality2 , verbal) teen(ager)s (see age groups, adolescence) telic(ity) (see also aspect) 56, 93 temporal texture 42, 56–7 temporality (see tense) tense 27, 33, 41–2, 56, 68, 73, 92–3, 113, 116, 118–19, 122, 146, 197, 242, 265–6, 276–7 future 119, 134, 137, 146–7 long form 119, 146 synthetic 119 past 29, 55–8, 70, 72, 74, 131, 137, 203–5, 216, 220–1, 255, 274

351

simple 56, 58, 66, 128, 216 present 57, 70, 85, 92, 103–4, 137, 146–7, 155, 203, 255, 274, 276 perfect 58, 113, 136 progressive 93, 104 simple 58, 66–7 text composing 24, 109, 227, 231, 233, 244–5, 257, 271 structure 16, 106, 109, 227, 233, 235–6, 246, 255–6, 261, 263 quality 232–3, 239–30, 245–6 texting (see mode(s)/modality2 , digital) theme(s), thematic content 16, 45, 47–9, 55, 58, 60, 66–8, 72–3, 102, 108, 233, 236, 239, 263–4 theory of mind (ToM) (see also mentalization) 30, 37, 44 thinking (see also reasoning) viii, xiv, 16, 33, 67, 72, 95–7, 112, 114–15, 122, 124–5, 128, 142, 147, 231, 241, 243, 245, 250, 257, 265, 269, 271 abstract 31, 33 analytical 98, 232, 267 associative 124–5 brainstorming 251–2 counterfactual 126–7, 129, 140, 284 creative 124–6 deductive 123 divergent 25, 33, 72, 109–10, 114, 124, 141, 147, 267 episodic future 126–9, 279, 283–6 for speaking 50, 53 for writing 144 hypothetical 33, 97, 123, 126 inferential 123 intuitive 125 language and thought 1, 50, 53, 145, 222 logical 31, 88, 97 reflective 126, 222 TMA (see also aspect, see also mood, see also tense) 73, 92, 116, 276 top-down ~ bottom-up (organization) 11, 17, 20–2, 24, 34, 47, 59–60, 63, 66, 90, 108, 111, 115, 140, 153, 162, 170, 189, 190–1, 194, 196–7, 214, 220, 233, 235–6, 247, 269, 273–4, 285 topic xi, 30, 48, 70, 72–3, 78, 80, 89, 91, 98, 100, 101, 103, 108–9, 111, 123, 135, 141, 182, 189, 192, 232, 234–7, 240–2, 247, 263 truth (see also reasoning) 117, 120, 129, 139, 145, 158, 162–3, 169, 180 condition 121 table 139, 147–8

352

SUBJECT INDE X

truth see also reasoning) (Continued) value 115–16, 121, 139, 185, 188, 222 turn(s), conversational 31, 79, 83, 99, 103, 161 typology, typological xiii, 51, 53, 70, 74, 121, 147, 223, 274, 276 U-shaped behavior 124, 179 usage patterns (see genre(s)) utterance(s) 2, 12, 15, 21, 24, 28–9, 35, 37, 55, 58, 63, 73, 97, 103, 105, 115, 117, 127, 150, 152–3, 160, 165, 168, 172, 181–2, 184, 188–90, 196–7, 202, 208, 211–12, 214, 217, 220, 222–3, 226, 228, 231, 237, 243, 263, 270–1, 273, 280, 285 variation (see flexibility) verbal (see verbs, see mode(s)/modality2 , verbal) visual mode (see mode(s)/modality2 , visual) vocabulary (see also lexicon) viii, x–xi, 27–8, 71, 85, 99, 102, 105, 144, 159, 171, 173, 188, 203, 205, 216, 221, 238, 240, 253, 258–60 active 206 depth 209 initial 4 potential 206 size (breadth) 28, 144, 205, 208–9, 265 spurt 27 voice 276 passive 216 Wernicke, Carl 11, 12 Wernicke, area (see brain sites) workspace 195 white matter (WM) (see also glossary I) 22, 278, 283

word(s) vii–viii, x–xii, xiv, 1–2, 5–7, 10, 14–17, 19–21, 26–8, 30, 35, 55, 63, 69, 76, 92, 99, 115, 126, 149–51, 154, 155–6, 166, 170, 172–5, 177–8, 183, 185–90, 192, 194–212, 214–15, 218–21, 223–6, 228–9, 233, 236–40, 243, 247, 249, 251, 253–5, 258–9, 264–6, 269–71, 273, 277, 280, 286 closed class (=function words) 206–8, 224 length 239–40 open class (=content words) 207, 211, 214, 223–4, 239 primary/strict sense (see meaning, basic) pseudo (=nonce words) 76, 208, 249, 258 word form 183, 187, 215 word meaning (see meaning) word play (see also pun(s)) 158–9, 177 writing (see also literacy, see also mode(s)/modality2 , digital) copying 12, 225–6, 251 creative 251, 272 handwriting 247, 249, 257 model(s) 244–6 processes editing 192, 230–2, 243, 245, 257, 264, 270, 272 generating 245–6, 256 goal-setting 245–6, 256, 272 planning 35, 230–1, 233, 235, 245–6, 251, 256–8, 272 revising 230–1, 233, 243, 246, 257, 264, 272 self-regulation 244, 258, 272 strategy: knowledge-telling, knowledgetransforming 245–6, 252, 254, 256–8, 272 system (see script (=writing system)) transcription skills 246–7