This study investigated the noun definitions given by Cantonese speakers at different ages. Definitional responses on six concrete nouns from 1075 children aged 4;10 to 12;01 and 15 adults were analyzed with reference to the semantic content and the syntactic form. Results showed that conventional definitions produced by Cantonese adult speakers…

Perception is a product of the interaction between bottom-up sensory processing and top-down higher order cognitive activity. For example, when the initial phoneme of a word is obliterated and replaced with noise, listeners hear it as intact provided there is semantic context. We modified this phonemic restoration paradigm by masking (not…

Prosody plays a variety of roles in infants' communicative development, aiding in attention modulation, speech segmentation, and syntax acquisition. This study investigates the extent to which parents also spontaneously modulate prosodic aspects of infant directed speech in ways that distinguish semantic aspects of language. Fourteen mothers of…

The influence of sentence context on the recognition of naturally spoken vowels degraded by reverberation and Gaussian noise was investigated. Target words were paired to have similar consonant sounds but different vowels (e.g., map/mop) and were embedded early in sentences which provided three types of semantic context. Fifty-eight…

Spoken languages are characterized by flexible, multivariate prosodic systems. As a natural language, American Sign Language (ASL), and other sign languages (SLs), are also expected to be characterized in the same way. Artificially created signing systems for classroom use, such as signed English, serve as a contrast to natural sign languages. The…

The eyebrows are used as conversational signals in face-to-face spoken interaction (Ekman, 1979). In Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT), the eyebrows are typically furrowed in content questions, and raised in polar questions (Coerts, 1992). On the other hand, these eyebrow positions are also associated with anger and surprise, respectively, in…

A variant of the picture--word interference paradigm was used in three experiments to investigate the horizontal information flow of semantic and phonological information between nouns in spoken Mandarin Chinese sentences. Experiment 1 demonstrated that there is a semantic interference effect when the word in the second phrase (N3) and the first…

This study examines the role of abstractness during the activation of a lexical representation. Abstractness and conflict are directly modeled in our approach by invoking lexical representations in terms of contrastive phonological features. In two priming experiments with English nouns differing only in vowel height of their stem vowels (e.g.,…

A visual semantic categorization task in English was performed by native English speakers (Experiment 1) and late bilinguals whose first language was Japanese (Experiment 2) or Spanish (Experiment 3). In the critical conditions, the target word was a homophone of a correct category exemplar (e.g., A BODY OF WATER-SEE; cf. SEA) or a word that…

A picture-word interference paradigm with visually presented distractors was used to investigate the independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on Mandarin monosyllabic word production. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship along different lexical dimensions were varied. We observed a…

The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children can use syntax to infer the meanings of words. This paper presents experimental evidence that children are also able to use word inflections to infer word reference. Twenty-four- and 30-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Children were shown a pair of novel…

Child and adult speakers of English have different ideas of what "or" means in ordinary statements of the form "A or B". Even more far-reaching differences between children and adults are found in other languages. This tells us that young children do not learn what "or" means by watching how adults use "or". An alternative is to suppose that…

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or…