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Modern Theories of Language

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

Synonyms

Embodied language processing; Emergentist approaches to language; Sociocultural theories of language; Usage-based linguistics

Definition

Modern theories of language represent efforts to account for the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language within an integrated framework. Such efforts acknowledge the relationship of language to sensorimotor experience, social interaction, and general cognitive constraints on information processing.

Introduction

The study of language is a diverse field that engages the applied interests of educators and speech pathologists as well as the academic interests of researchers working in wide range of disciplines including linguistics, speech and hearing sciences, psychology, biology, computer science, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology. Scholars in these different disciplines invariably conceptualize language in different ways, viewing it, e.g., as a biological attribute, a cultural trait, a set of communication skills, or a...

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Correspondence to Vera Kempe .

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Kempe, V., Brooks, P.J. (2021). Modern Theories of Language. In: Shackelford, T.K., Weekes-Shackelford, V.A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19650-3_3321

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