Purpose: The aim of this review is to illuminate the connection between inferential skills and spoken language idiom comprehension (SLIC) with a focus on autism. Idioms are frequently occurring figurative expressions, such as feeling blue, on cloud nine, and all tied up, that have literal and nonliteral meanings. Method: In this review article, an…

Purpose: Investigations into the nature of communication disorders in autistic individuals increasingly evaluate neural responses to speech stimuli. This integrative review aimed to consolidate the available data related to speech and language processing across levels of stimulus complexity (from single speech sounds to sentences) and to relate it…

Focusing primarily on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), this article reviews evidence regarding the roles of subregions of the medial temporal lobes, prefrontal cortex, posterior representational areas, and parietal cortex in source memory. In addition to evidence from standard episodic memory tasks assessing accuracy for neutral…

Causal statements from adults with learning disabilities and normally achieving adults were analyzed and organized within a linguistic taxonomy of causal semantic relations, and a relationship between Piagetian cognitive stages and verbal expressions of causality were identified. Piagetian principles were used to design assessment and intervention…

Describes an alternate lexico-semantic view of native language acquisition and adult second language learning that proposes that humans acquire and learn words, names, titles, expressions, sayings, and formulas as undifferentiated lexical items first and then develop systems to store and retrieve the lexemes and combine them into phrases and…

An overview is given of semantic research in adult Second Language Acquisition (SLA), focusing particular attention on undirected SLA. Several studies on child SLA are mentioned, and suggestions for further research on SLA semantics are offered. (35 references) (GLR)

This article reviews competing theories of semantic organization in the brain, including modular models, unitary models, and the matrix theory, and provides supporting and refuting evidence for each, incorporating examples from the imaging literature. The literature does provide some support for distinct neural substrates that process specific…

A study of eight adult chronic aphasic patients' comprehension of sentences and pictures in which comparisons of time and space were crucial was designed to assess A. R. Luria's approach to designing comprehension test tasks. The investigation required patients, with lesions of varying size and location, to determine whether a sentence expressing…

The search for syntactical rules which govern nonverbal communication and cues in humans has often been considered a problem separate from determining semantic rules. Departing from such a traditional approach was accomplished by employing the meaning of various nonverbal channels to study their interrelationship. It was proposed that the…

An investigation is conducted into the hypothesized notion of the interlanguage system and its effect on language transfer. The interlanguage system is composed of: internal factors (syntax, semantics, and phonology); external factors (sociological and psychological); and the typology of the native language. The investigation looks into: (1)…

The papers in this collection represent a wide spectrum of approaches, philosophies, viewpoints, and techniques of scholarly endeavor in their treatment of the reading process. The 55 papers, which were presented at the 1978 meeting of the National Reading Conference, are arranged according to the following categories: (1) reading readiness, (2)…