Dorit Diskin Ravid – författare

Perspectives on Language and Language Development brings together new perspectives on language, discourse and language development in 31 chapters by leading scholars from several countries with diverging backgrounds and disciplines. It is a comprehensive overview of language as a rich, multifaceted system, inspired by the lifework of Ruth A. Berman. Edited by Dorit Ravid and Hava Bat-Zeev Shyldkrot, both from Tel Aviv University, Israel, the book offers state-of-the-art portrayals of linguistic and psycholinguistic phenomena with new insights on the interrelations of language structure, discourse theory, and the development of language and literacy. The volume presents innovative investigations on the interface of language and narrative in a broad range of languages, with a section devoted to linguistic studies of Modern Hebrew. It traces the development of language and literacy from early childhood through adolescence to maturity in spoken and written contexts, and in monolingual as well as multilingual perspectives.

Linguists, psycholinguists, discourse scholars, cognitive psychologists, language teachers, education experts, and clinicians working in the field of language and discourse will find this book extremely useful both as a textbook and as a source of information.

Modern Hebrew is a highly synthetic Semitic language—its lexicon is rich in morphemes. This volume supplies the first in-depth psycholinguistic analysis of the interaction between morphological knowledge and spelling in Hebrew. It also examines how far this model can be applied to other languages. Anchored to a connectionist, cognitive, cross-linguistic and typological framework, the study accords with today’s perception of spelling as being much more than a mere technical skill. Contemporary psycholinguistic literature views spelling as a window on what people know about words and their structure. The strong correlation between orthographies and morphological units makes linking consistent grammatical and lexical representation and spelling units in speaker-writers a key research goal. Hebrew’s wealth of morphological structures, reflected in its written form, promotes morphological perception and strategies in those who speak and write it, adding vitality and relevance to this work.