The Neurobiology of Affect in Language Learning

This book presents a theory of how the psychology and neurobiology of stimulus appraisal influences the variability in second language acquisition. It then extends the notion of affect developed for second language acquisition to primary language acquisition and to cognition in general. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, this book is an important research tool for students and professors of language studies and linguistics.

Series Editor’s Foreword. Acknowledgments. Introduction. The Theory. The Neural Mechanism. Some Data: Questionnaires. Some More Data: Diary Studies and Autobiographies. Implications. The Role of Affect in First Language Acquisition. The Role of Affect in Cognition. References. Appendix. Index. Credits.

John H. Schumann is Professor in the Department of Applied Linguistics and TESL at the University of California Los Angeles, where he served as chair for 16 years, and a member of the Center for Behavior Evolution and Culture and the Center for Culture, Brain and Development, both also at UCLA. He has published widely in the areas of second language acquisition, neurobiology of language, and language evolution. He is the general editor of The Language Learning–Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics Cognitive Neuroscience Series.