Some models of semantic memory claim that items from living and nonliving domains have different feature-type profiles. Data from feature generation and perceptual modality rating tasks were compared to evaluate this claim. Results from two living (animals, fruits/vegetables) and two nonliving (tools, vehicles) categories showed that…

Sixteen children (17 age mates, 17 vocabulary mates) with specific language impairment (SLI) participated in two studies. In the first, they named fantasy objects. All groups coined novel noun-noun compounds on a majority of trials but only the SLI group had difficulty ordering the nouns as dictated by semantic context. In the second study, the…

The foreign language vocabulary learning research literature often attributes strong mnemonic potency to the cognitive processing of meaning when learning words. Routinely cited as support for this idea are experiments by Craik and Tulving (C&T) demonstrating superior recognition and recall of studied words following semantic tasks ("deep"…

We compare translations of single words, made by bilingual speakers in a laboratory setting, with contextualized translation choices of the same items, made by professional translators and extracted from parallel language corpora. The translation choices in both cases show moderate convergence, demonstrating that decontextualized translation…

This study examined differences in performance between 20 shy and 20 matched nonshy children on a narrative task and in the way parents scaffolded their narrative performance when reading the wordless book "Frog, Where Are You", by Mercer Mayer. Consistent with previous research, results demonstrated that shy children spoke less than their nonshy…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

The relation between similarity and dissimilarity of context was analyzed for synonymous nouns. New semantic similarity and dissimilarity rating tests with an empirically determined series of linguistic anchors and conventional, arbitrarily anchored semantic similarity ratings were compared. Contextual similarity was elicited by a sorting test…

Examines the communicative functions served by the lexical usage of normal and language impaired children whose speech was limited to single word utterances. (EKN)

Because the relationship of gesticulation to sign language has not received much research attention, this study considers gesture and sign among users of signed and oral languages. Results suggest that gestures produced by deaf individuals can be distinguished from the sign language in which they are embedded, including their semantic and…

The core idea that we argued for in the target article was that grammatical processing in a second language (L2) is fundamentally different from grammatical processing in one's native (first) language (L1). Our major source of evidence for this claim comes from experimental psycholinguistic studies investigating morphological and syntactic…

Comparison of language-impaired two- to three-year-olds (N=10) and normal one-year-olds (N=15) matched for expressive language revealed that the language-impaired subjects acquired a greater number of object concepts presented in a no-action condition than the normal children, although language-impaired subjects' extensions of the names to new…

Study of native speakers of Yoruba who spoke English as a second language found that transfer of learning from one language to the other decreased with increasing proficiency in English. Transfer from Yoruba to English was higher than from English to Yoruba at lower levels of proficiency in English. (Author/CB)