This thesis contributes to the growing field of ethnophysiography, a new subfield of cognitive anthropology that aims to determine the universals and variation in the categorization of landscape objects across cultures. More specifically, this work looks at the case of the Seri people of Sonora, Mexico to investigate the way they categorize…

Interest in research on Estonian Sign Language, or eesti viipekeel (EVK), has been increasing. Studies have been conducted on different aspects of EVK, such as ways of expressing time (Trukmann 2006) and color terms (Hollman and Sutrop 2007, Hollman 2008). Moreover, EVK has lately received more attention in legislation. The language obtained an…

Social cognition is the scientific study of the cognitive events underlying social thought and attitudes. Currently, the field's prevailing theoretical perspectives are the traditional schema view and embodied cognition theories. Despite important differences, these perspectives share the seemingly uncontroversial notion that people interpret and…

Recently, irony researchers have emphasized that irony interpretation involves metarepresentational inferencing in order that the perceiver can determine whether the speaker's attitude is counterfactual to their statement. This research investigated whether the perception of irony also depends on the extent to which an ironic statement is suitably…

The authors argue that some diagrams in biology textbooks and the popular press presented as depicting evolutionary relationships suggest an inappropriate (anagenic) conception of evolutionary history. The goal of this research was to provide baseline data that begin to document how college students conceptualize the evolutionary relationships…

The paradigm of forms of address in Modern Spanish is subject to dialectal variation. Many Latin American varieties of Spanish, i.e. Costa Rican, Argentinean, Chilean, among others, display a tripartite system of second person pronouns comprised of "tú," "usted" and "vos." The case of Colombian Spanish is particularly…

This paper examines two sociolinguistic lexical variables, "work" and "to dwell," in the spoken French of former immersion students in their first or fourth year at a bilingual university in Ontario, Canada. Their patterns of use are compared to those of non-immersion graduates in the same institution, to Ontario high school…

This article describes the classroom interactions surrounding teacher read-alouds of nonfiction texts in the classroom of a teacher who strived for cultural relevancy. Participants in this study were one European American teacher and her upper-elementary students who lived in the surrounding working-class neighborhood; all but two students…

Prompted by calls for research on technology-focused professional development, this ethnographic case study investigates how teachers' participation in learning communities may influence technology integration within the secondary English curriculum. In this article, I draw on educational psychology, cognitive anthropology, and sociolinguistics to…

This study investigated how a child with early cochlear implantation interacted with peers in his inclusive preschool setting. A qualitative case-study framed in a socio-linguistic framework guided the data collection and analysis. Data collection included detailed field notes, classroom free play observations, informal student interviews, teacher…

I focus on three critical autobiographies in the field of composition studies: Mike Rose's "Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America's Educationally Underprepared," Keith Gilyard's "Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence," and Victor Villanueva, Jr.'s "Bootstraps: From an American Academic of…

(Purpose) The purpose of this article is to provide a detailed description of the pronouns in Akebu. Akebu is a language spoken in South-West Togo and in the neighboring towns in Ghana. Akebu belongs to a group of languages formerly called "Togo Remnant Languages", now (Ghana Togo Mountains, GTM). The native Akebu speakers call their…

A sociolinguistic survey of the sign language used by the deaf communities of Peru was conducted in November and December of 2007. For eight weeks, our survey team visited six deaf communities in the cities of Lima, Arequipa, Cusco, Trujillo, Chiclayo, and Iquitos. Using sociolinguistic questionnaires and recorded text testing (RTT) tools, we…

Previous studies have shown that past and future temporal concepts are spatially represented (past being located to the left and future to the right in a mental time line). This study aims at further investigating the nature of this space-time conceptual metaphor, by testing whether the temporal reference of words orient spatial attention or…

The purpose of this paper is to synthesize findings from three studies that have addressed the conceptualization and application of the metaphor construct to the study of teachers and teaching. With respect to the perspectives of elementary and secondary preservice teachers, we specifically examined how the particular metaphors they used indicated…