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Books in Arts and humanities

Elsevier's Arts and Humanities titles encompass a rich spectrum of scholarship that explores human culture, history, philosophy, and creative expression. These works offer deep insights into language, literature, visual arts, and critical theory, supporting the academic community in understanding diverse perspectives and cultural legacies. Designed for scholars, educators, and students, this collection bridges classic studies with contemporary issues, fostering a deeper appreciation and knowledge of the human experience.

  • Genie

    A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child
    • 1st Edition
    • Susan Curtiss
    • Harry A Whitaker
    • English
    Genie: A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day “Wild Child” reports on the linguistic research carried out through studying and working with Genie, a deprived and isolated, to an unprecedented degree, girl who was not discovered until she was an adolescent. An inhuman childhood had prevented Genie from learning language, and she knew little about the world in any respect save abuse, neglect, isolation, and deprivation. This book is organized into three parts encompassing 11 chapters. Part I provides a case history and background material on Genie's personality and language behavior. This part describes the interaction between the authors and this remarkable girl. Part II details Genie's linguistic development and overall language abilities, specifically her phonological development, as well as receptive knowledge and productive grammatical abilities of syntax, morphology, and semantics. This part also provides a comparison between her linguistic development and the language acquisition of other children. Part III presents a full description of the neurolinguistic work carried out on Genie and discusses the implications of this aspect of the case. This book will prove useful to neurolinguistics and pyscholinguistics.
  • Reinforcement

    Behavioral Analyses
    • 1st Edition
    • R. M. Gilbert + 1 more
    • English
    Reinforcement: Behavioral Analyses covers the proceedings of the 1970 Symposium on Schedule-induced and Schedule-Dependent Phenomena, held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. This symposium highlights theoretically inclined papers on reinforcement processes. This text contains 10 chapters and begins with a description of how behavior is induced by various environmental events, especially reinforcing events, as well as the relationship between control by inducing stimuli and reinforceability. The subsequent chapters deal with reinforcement phenomena in terms of preference relations and the conditioned emotional responses in terms of opposing motivational processes. These topics are followed by reviews of schedule-dependent effects of preaversive stimuli and the maintenance of behavior by apparent reinforcers that might be expected to punish, as well as the identification of critical variable that underlie the phenomenon. Other chapters examine the interactions between operant and responded conditioning processes. The final chapters outline the experiments on behavior stream whose hallmark is reinforcement if the absence of specified behavior. These chapters emphasize the analogy between the evolution of species and the modification of behavior. This book will be of value to behaviorists and psychologists.
  • The Quaternary of Israel

    • 1st Edition
    • Aharon Horowitz
    • English
    The Quaternary of Israel presents the ensuing synthesis of the development of Israel during the Quaternary, with its implication with human life and paleoenvironments. This book discusses Israel as the key area for the connection of the African and European Quaternary sequences, which bear prime significance for the problems of human evolution, settlement, and migration. Organized into nine chapters, this book begins with an overview of the environments, the pre-Quaternary geology, and the structural evolution of the region. This text then examines the sedimentary sequence and erosional processes that influenced Israel during the Quaternary. Other chapters consider the pollen spectra of Israel as representative of vegetation, climatic conditions, and processes of transport and deposition. This book discusses as well the major descriptive reports to anthropological material uncovered in Israel and explores the significance of these discoveries. The final chapter deals with the paleoclimatic, paleogeographic, and environmental development of Israel in connection with human settlement. This book is a valuable resource for anthropologists and geologists.
  • Imagery

    Current Cognitive Approaches
    • 1st Edition
    • Sydney Joelson Segal
    • English
    Imagery: Current Cognitive Approaches focuses on cognitive approaches to the study of imagery. Topics range from the brief image or icon, which serves as the source of storage in short-term memory, to global behavior changes, including hallucinatory imagery under the influence of drugs and hypnotic states. The role of the image in verbal learning and the relationship of the image to both sensory and cognitive aspects of perception are also considered. Comprised of six chapters, this book begins with a discussion on the relationship between imagery and language and a review of some specific evidence pertaining to the psycholinguistic problems of meaning, comprehension, and the learning and retention of verbal material. Subsequent chapters deal with visual perception and the function of iconic storage; different theoretical views on the definition of image; and processing of the stimulus in imagery and perception. The book concludes by analyzing how vivid imagery, "hallucinations", and other alterations in visual perception are produced by LSD and also by suggestions given under hypnosis. This monograph will be of interest to graduate students, teachers, and researchers of cognitive psychology, as well as to clinical psychologists and psychiatrists.
  • Prehistoric Man and His Environments

    A Case Study in the Ozark Highland
    • 1st Edition
    • W. Raymond Wood + 1 more
    • English
    Prehistoric Man and His Environments: A Case Study in the Ozark Highland offers a preliminary model for the paleoecology of the western Ozark Highland in Missouri for the last 35,000 years and an interpretation of how humans have adapted to and exploited the area for the 10,500 years they are known to have lived there. The model, a set of hypotheses that includes a putative explanatory framework for the observations made at Ozark, is based on more than a decade of interdisciplinary fieldwork. Comprised of 14 chapters, this volume begins with a background on the interdisciplinary studies undertaken in the Pomme de Terre River Valley. The research has centered on the post-glacial deposits at the Rodgers Shelter and on five nearby spring bogs, each of which contained the bones of extinct mammals, pollen, and other material dating from late Pleistocene and early Holocene times. The archaeological investigations and subsequent analyses of these sites are discussed in detail. Sedimentary processes, changing subsistence patterns, material culture, and human burials at Rodgers Shelter are then analyzed. The final chapter describes the direction of research in the Ozark Highland, including plans to test aspects of the proposed model. This book will be of interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers, geologists, and botanists.
  • Language Learning by a Chimpanzee

    The Lana Project
    • 1st Edition
    • Duane M Rumbaugh
    • English
    Language Learning by a Chimpanzee: The Lana Project brings together several disciplinary endeavors, such as primatology, experimental psychology, cognitive psychology, computer and information sciences, and neurosciences. This book is composed of two sets of data—one relates to language learning in the chimpanzee, while the other deals with language construction by Homo sapiens. The fundamental issue of mind-brain dualism and difference between man and beast are also covered. This text mainly describes the LANA project that aims to develop a computer-based language training system for investigation into the possibility that chimpanzees may have the capacity to acquire human-type language. This publication is recommended for biologists, specialists, and researchers conducting work on language learning in nonhuman primates.
  • The Functions of Language and Cognition

    • 1st Edition
    • Grover J. Whitehurst + 1 more
    • English
    The Functions of Language and Cognition provides a forum for articulating a functional approach to language and cognition. This book discusses the influence of structural approaches to language and thought. Organized into 10 chapters, this book begins with an overview of a comprehensive alternative treatment of cognitive and linguistic functioning from a social, functional perspective. This text then discusses some considerations for a theory of skills and of cognitive development in general. Other chapters focus on acquisition of perceptual concepts rather than logical, verbal, or mathematical concepts. This book examines as well each of the possible limits in terms of their potential effects on cognitive development and in terms of the evidence regarding their actual effects. The final chapter deals with the influence of personal standards and strategies on therapy outcomes. This book is a valuable resource for graduate and upper-level undergraduate students in developmental psychology, clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, education, and rehabilitation.
  • The Coercive Social Worker

    British Lessons for American Social Services
    • 1st Edition
    • Joel F. Handler
    • English
    The Coercive Social Worker: British Lessons for American Social Services focuses on the role of social services in public departments of welfare, with emphasis on the enormous power of the social worker to impose the casework plan on the client. It explains how traditional social work theory combines with the delivery of "hard" services in the integrated, comprehensive family service to produce social workers with such power. Some of the lessons that can be learned by American social service agencies from the British experience are discussed. Comprised of seven chapters, this volume begins with a historical background on Britain's public social service program, launched in 1970 to provide a comprehensive, integrated family service at the local government level. The significance of the British experience to American social services is considered, with particular reference to the relationship between social work theory and social service policy and administration. The foundations of the modern welfare state are also discussed, along with social services in America in an income maintenance setting. The final chapter examines the problems facing the consumer of a comprehensive, integrated family service; the creation and implementation of administrative discretion in the social service context; legal rights of consumers; and alternative systems for the delivery of social services. This book is intended for social work professionals, administrators, policymakers, and advocates of the rights of people who deal with social welfare agencies.
  • Learning Strategies

    • 1st Edition
    • Harold F. O'Neil
    • English
    Learning Strategies describes a program of research in learning strategies initiated by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in 1976. The goal of the program is to improve learning, decrease training time, and reduce training costs by developing and evaluating instructional materials designed to teach basic intellectual and affective skills. This book records the program's progress and suggests further avenues for research. Comprised of eight chapters, this book begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of the teaching and learning approaches to the improvement of education, followed by a discussion on DARPA's preliminary work on an empirically based learning-strategy training program as well as its efforts to expand and modify the program. In order to provide an intellectual foundation for this program, several fields are surveyed for potential learning strategies, namely, cognitive psychology, artificial intelligence, behavioral modification, and motor learning. An instructional systems development approach for learning strategies is also proposed. The final chapter deals with models of evaluation extant in education and training and discusses the specific application of transactional evaluation to the DARPA Learning Strategies Research Program. This monograph should be of interest to students, teachers, and educational psychologists.
  • Topics in Phonological Theory

    • 1st Edition
    • Michael Kenstowicz + 1 more
    • English
    Topics in Phonological Theory is a six-chapter text that provides an explication of some of the most important problems in phonological theory, with a few, necessarily tentative, solutions. The first chapter deals with the problem of abstractness in terms of a series of successively weaker constraints that might be placed on the relationship between the underlying and phonetic representations of a morpheme. The second chapter begins with a discussion of the various ways in which the phonetic basis of a rule may be lost in the course of historical change, which lays the groundwork for a lengthy survey of the types of grammatical and lexical conditions that may control the application of a phonological rule. The third chapter describes the constraints and conditions on phonological representations, particularly the domain of these constraints, the level at which they hold, and their duplication of phonological rules. The fourth chapter examines the problem of natural rule interactions, focusing on Kiparsky’s theories of maximal utilization and opacity-transparency and their deficiencies. The fifth chapter deals with Chomsky and Halle’s simultaneous application principle as well as with more recent proposals The sixth chapter compares the relative merits of global rules versus rule ordering for the description of opaque rule interactions. This book is intended primarily for linguistics.