Proposes an alternative model of language comprehension regarding how people understand idioms in which literal meanings are systematically used to constrain the use and variation of conventional idioms and to generate novel idiom variance. Presents three experiments on how people process variant idioms. (SR)

Discusses the importance, validity, and implications of the identity thesis that the P600 component of the scalp-recorded event-related potential is identical with the P3b, a domain-general component elicited by improbable task-related events. Explores epistemological complexities of the issue and discusses what the identity thesis does and does…

Describes 11 common dogmas of understanding (convictions that are impervious to evidence) that have led researchers to ignore or dismiss many features of everyday language. Discusses evidence against them, and some of the dangers they pose for the study of understanding. Argues that using language is fundamentally social, and that social features…

The Hallidayan notions of theme and rheme pose an interesting challenge to linguists in their attempts to pin them down more specifically. Argues that, because the thematic structure of the clause organizes itself as a message, a useful starting point in theme/rheme research is an understanding of how clausal messages are typically processed by…

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken…

Whereas most research in SLA assumes the relationship between the first language (L1) and the second language (L2) to be unidirectional, this study investigates the possibility of a bidirectional relationship. We examine the domain of manner of motion, in which monolingual Japanese and English speakers differ both in speech and gesture. Parallel…

Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded…

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic…

In this article we compare five groups of learners acquiring Dutch gender as marked on determiners and adjectival inflection. Groups of L1 (first language) children and L1-SLI (first-language specific-language-impairment) children are compared to three Turkish-Dutch L2 (second language) groups: adult L2, child L2 and child L2-SLI. Overall, our…

Recent psycholinguistic literature has developed differing interpretations of metaphoric sentences' comprehension. The inadequacies of the psycholinguistic theories of language processing which rest on the assumption according to which language is the expression of a relatively autonomous cognitive activity are highlighted in the interpretation of…

English, and presumably any natural language, contains a small group of expressions referring to species of things found in nature. These species are defined by their internal structure, determined by genetics in the case of living things and by chemical or physical properties in the case of others. The reference of these terms is determined by…

A distribution of the Italian definite articles "il" and "lo" is proposed that makes use of both Steriade's syllabification rules and a language-specific sonority hierarchy. The incorporation of these rules results in the generalization that the definite article "il" occurs before nouns or adjectives that begin with a consonant that is a member of…

A defense of functionalism in linguistics, and more specifically the competition model of linguistic performance, examines six misconceptions about the functionalist approach. Functionalism is defined as the belief that the forms of natural languages are created, governed, constrained, acquired, and used for communicative functions. Functionalism…

After reading stories written in either chronological or flashback sequence, subjects made a decision about the underlying order of occurrence of two events. Results indicate that subjects based their responses on a memory representation, which preserved the input sequence of events. (Author/EJS)

Two experiments investigated the representation of meaning and input language in bilingual memory. (Author/RM)