The process of reading aloud bare nouns in alphabetic languages is immune to semantic context effects from pictures. This is accounted for by assuming that words in alphabetic languages can be read aloud relatively fast through a sub-lexical grapheme-phoneme conversion (GPC) route or by a direct route from orthography to word form. We examined…

Since the experiments of Saffran et al. [Saffran, J., Aslin, R., & Newport, E. (1996). Statistical learning in 8-month-old infants. "Science," 274, 1926-1928], there has been a great deal of interest in the question of how statistical regularities in the speech stream might be used by infants to begin to identify individual words. In this work, we…

Sentences that refer to categories--generic sentences (e.g., "Dogs are friendly")--are frequent in speech addressed to young children and constitute an important means of knowledge transmission. However, detecting generic meaning may be challenging for young children, since it requires attention to a multitude of morphosyntactic, semantic, and…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…