Time to Speak: Cognitive and Neural Prerequisites for Time in Language

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action.

All languages have developed rich means to express various facets of time, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, or their duration. This volume explores what we know about the neural and cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on in language.

• Considers the role time plays as an essential element of human cognition and action, providing important insights to inform and extend current studies of time in language and in language acquisition
• Examines the main devices used to encode time in natural language, such as lexical elements, tense, and aspect, and draws on the latest psychological and neurobiological findings<
• Addresses a range of issues, including: the relationship between temporal language, culture, and thought; the relationship between verb aspect and mental simulations of events; the development of temporal concepts; time perception; the storage and retrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory; and neural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning

Peter Indefrey is Principal Investigator at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Nijmegen and a Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. He has a M.D. and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf. His research is on first and second language processing and its neural correlates with a particular focus on syntactic and morphological processing, word production, reading, and the development of language processing in L2 learners.

Marianne Gullberg is a staff member at Radboud University Nijmegen and Research Associate at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She holds a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Lund University, Sweden. Her research focuses on the earliest stages of adult second language acquisition and on the advanced or bilingual stage, lexical semantics, cross-linguistic (bi-directional) influences, code-switching, and the production and comprehension of gestures.