In this paper, we compare responses of deaf signers and hearing non-signers engaged in a categorization task of signs and non-linguistic human actions. We examine the time it takes to make such categorizations under conditions of 180 degrees stimulus inversion and as a function of repetition priming, in an effort to understand whether the…

Recent studies suggest that basic effects which are markers of visual word recognition in Indo-European languages cannot be obtained in Hebrew or in Arabic. Although Hebrew has an alphabetic writing system, just like English, French, or Spanish, a series of studies consistently suggested that simple form-orthographic priming, or…

There is a growing body of evidence showing that conversational implicatures are rapidly accessed in incremental utterance interpretation. To date, studies showing incremental access have focussed on implicatures related to linguistic triggers, such as "some" and "or". We discuss three kinds of on-line model that can account for this data. A model…

We ask whether bilingualism aids cognitive control over the inadvertent guidance of visual attention from working memory and from bottom-up cueing. We compare highly-proficient Catalan-Spanish bilinguals with Spanish monolinguals in three visual search conditions. In the working memory (WM) condition, attention was driven in a top-down fashion by…

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones…

To learn relational terms such as verbs and prepositions, children must first dissect and process dynamic event components. This paper investigates the way in which 8- to 14-month-old English-reared infants notice the event components, "figure" (i.e., the moving entity) and "ground" (i.e., stationary setting), in both dynamic…

What abilities are entailed in being numerate? Certainly, one is the ability to hold the exact quantity of a set in mind, even as it changes, and even after its members can no longer be perceived. Is counting language necessary to track and reproduce exact quantities? Previous work with speakers of languages that lack number words involved…

Influential theories have claimed that the ability for recursion forms the computational core of human language faculty distinguishing our communication system from that of other animals (Hauser, Chomsky, & Fitch, 2002). In the present study, we consider an alternative view on recursion by studying the contribution of associative and working…

Commenting on perceptual similarities between objects stands out as an important linguistic achievement, one that may pave the way towards noticing and commenting on more abstract relational commonalities between objects. To explore whether having a conventional linguistic system is necessary for children to comment on different types of…

Abstract concepts are traditionally thought to differ from concrete concepts by their lack of perceptual information, which causes them to be processed more slowly and less accurately than perceptually-based concrete concepts. In two studies, we examined this assumption by comparing concreteness and imageability ratings to a set of perceptual…

Mathematics shares with language an essential reliance on the human capacity for recursion, permitting the generation of an infinite range of embedded expressions from a finite set of symbols. We studied the role of syntax in arithmetic thinking, a neglected component of numerical cognition, by examining eye movement sequences during the…

In a syntactic priming paradigm, three- and four-year-old children and adults described transitive events after hearing thematically and lexically unrelated active and short passive prime descriptions. Both groups were more likely to produce full passive descriptions ("the king is being scratched by the tiger") following short passive primes ("the…

There is a surprising degree of overlapping structure evident across the languages of the world. One factor leading to cross-linguistic similarities may be constraints on human learning abilities. Linguistic structures that are easier for infants to learn should predominate in human languages. If correct, then (a) human infants should more readily…

When we describe time, we often use the language of space ("The movie was long"; "The deadline is approaching"). Experiments 1-3 asked whether--as patterns in language suggest--a structural similarity between representations of spatial length and temporal duration is easier to access than one between length and other dimensions of experience, such…

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926-1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. "Journal of Memory and Language," 35, 606-621.] have shown that adults…