Previous studies have shown that directing learners’ attention during perceptual training facilitates detection and learning of unfamiliar consonant categories (Guion & Pederson, 2007; Pederson & Guion, 2010). The current study asks whether this attentional directing can also facilitate other types of phonetic learning. Monolingual Mandarin speakers were divided into two groups directed to learn either 1) the consonants or 2) the tones in an identification training task with the same set of Southern Min monosyllabic words containing the consonants /pʰ, p, b, kh, k, ɡ, tɕʰ, tɕ, ɕ/ and the tones (55, 33, 22, 24, 41). All subjects were also tested with an AXB discrimination task (with a distinct set of Southern Min words) before and after the training. Unsurprisingly, both groups improved accuracy in the sound type to which they attended. However, the consonant-attending group did not improve in discriminating tones after training and neither did the tone-attending group in discriminating consonants -- despite both groups having equal exposure to the same training stimuli. When combined with previous results for consonant and vowel training, these results suggest that explicitly directing learners’ attention has a broadly facilitative effect on phonetic learning including of tonal contrasts.

Introduction

Motion events play a central role in people's representation of the world. Not only is our perception of motion events crucial for safely navigating through the world and key to our survival; our conceptual understanding of motion events is necessary for interpreting other people's behavior, and for accurately communicating important aspects of an event to others. Despite the importance of event cognition in people's everyday functioning, most research on motion and event processing to date has been restricted to low-level phenomena associated with simple perception of motion, while studies investigating higher-level conceptual phenomena are few and far between. In recent years, however, there has been a growing body of interdisciplinary research on people's understanding of events (as we hope this volume has made apparent). Growing evidence indicates that we possess a very powerful system for processing events, especially for events involving acts of human motion (Baldwin 2005). Our conception of events appears crucial to our understanding of social behavior in two ways: the first, that we utilize our event processing system to understand people's intentions and goals, and the second, that we communicate the details of events to others using language.

Given the importance of motion events in social functioning, it is no wonder that language systems around the world provide speakers with a rich set of lexical items with which to describe many of the details present in the complex stream of motion.

This volume presents a collection of essays reporting on new research into the relationship between event representations in language and mind. In recent decades, linguists have increasingly invoked the notion of ‘events’ – under this and other labels – in modeling the meanings of natural language expressions. Indeed, numerous aspects of the structure of human languages are now commonly seen across theories and frameworks as geared towards the task of expressing event descriptions.

Like many of the constructs of semantic analysis and theory, the concept of ‘event’ has been influenced by the work of philosophers and natural scientists, usually with no more than a passing acknowledgment of the puzzles and controversies besetting its philosophical treatment (see Pianesi and Varzi 2000 for an overview). Philosophers have referenced the concept since antiquity, especially in treatments of causality (the subordinate notion of ‘actions’ has been used even longer in moral philosophy). However, events and their properties do not appear to have become topics of ontological research before the twentieth century, and their status must at present be considered far from settled. Even more glaring is the contrast between the rich and imposing architecture of event representations in language envisioned by many semanticists and the limited and scattered research on the status, nature, and role of event representations in the cognitive processing of perception and action by psychologists.

Tamil and Tamils

The Dravidian language family is one of the world's major language families with perhaps 200 million speakers speaking approximately twenty-five mutually unintelligible languages. There are four major literary Dravidian languages all of which are indigenous to South India. Three of these major Dravidian languages are in the South Dravidian branch: Tamil, Kannada and Malayalam.

Following the 1991 Indian Census data (http://www.censusindia.net/), native Tamil speakers make up about 6.3 per cent of the total Indian population. The majority of these speakers (48,434,744) live in the state of Tamil Nadu where they constitute 86.7 per cent of that state's population. They make up the largest minority language population in Kerala, with 616,010 native speakers (2.1 per cent) and there are perhaps another 2 million native speakers elsewhere in India. Including the Indian population, there are perhaps 70 million speakers worldwide with substantial minority populations in Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

Tamil has a continuous written history with records dating back approximately 2,000 years. There has also been a long tradition of mutual influence with Sanskrit and other ancient Indian languages and literatures. The classical Tamil period dates to perhaps as early as 300 BCE, a period in which the Tolkaappiyam was produced, a grammar apparently modelled on Pannini's Sanskrit grammar. Because of the age and probable linguistic conservatism of these writings, classical Tamil forms often resemble what is reconstructed for Proto-Dravidian spoken over 3,000 years ago.

A state of the art

This volume presents ten chapters which all address – from different angles and in different ways – one and the same core question, viz. What is the relationship between linguistic and conceptual representation? Hereafter we will call this core question simply ‘the relationship question’.

Although this question is scarcely a new one (see below), it remains one of the most intriguing, but also one of the most problematic, in present-day cognitive science. This is already apparent if one makes an attempt to clarify the issue as such. It is quite easy to characterize it in a very general way. Clearly, since people are able to speak and understand a language or languages, they must have an internal ‘representation of linguistic knowledge’ allowing them to perform this behaviour. Equally clearly, people acquire, store, and transmit – through language, but also through other forms of behaviour – information about the world, information they can obviously also use in planning, in reasoning, in problem-solving, and in performing many different types of (intentional) actions in a fairly systematic and relatively well-adjusted way in many different environments. Accordingly, they must have an internal ‘representation of knowledge about the world’, i.e. ‘conceptual knowledge’ (whereby the notion of the ‘world’ includes not only the physical world – ‘external reality’ – but also the social and the psychological world).