Individuals with the rare genetic disorder, Williams syndrome, have an unusual cognitive profile with relatively good language abilities but poor non-verbal and spatial skills. This study explored the interaction between linguistic and spatial functioning in Williams syndrome by investigating individuals' comprehension of spatial language. A group…

The communicative approach to translation seeks to bring a text to a new audience, to be assimilated in its new environment. The semantic approach views the text as a cultural artifact, borrowed from its original environment, to be displayed or studied. Translations are usually semantic, not communicative, because few translators are truly…

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…

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

Discusses two experiments into a subject's "Different" reaction time in judging whether two test instances are members of the same semantic category. (Author/RM)

An experiment is reported that uses cross-modal priming to look at the resolution of anaphoric reference. Subjects given a visual lexical decision test simultaneously with an auditorily presented sentence showed selective semantic activation of the pronoun's referent on the basis of the pronoun's lexical properties. This finding is discussed in…

Presents several types of synophones, words similar in sound but different in meaning, including those differing in one phoneme only, more than one phoneme which can have an identical Latin root, and several phonemes which defy exact definition. Suggests validity of context as aid to comprehension of unknown words should not be overestimated.…

The effect of presupposition on memory depends upon a restricted class of pragmatic conditions. If certain intended misleaders are introduced, presupposition does not enter into memory. This was shown with two experiments in which subjects "remembered" an accident differently, depending upon whether misleading facts were introduced.…

Presents a computational study of children's acquisition of word-to-meaning mappings, approximates this task as a mathematical problem, and presents an algorithm for solving the problem, illustrating the algorithm's operation on a small example. Notes that computational simulations demonstrated the robustness of the algorithm and illustrated how…

Three studies are reported that addressed methodological problems in Stowe's (1989) study, which reported that semantic information eliminates garden paths in sentences with direct object versus subject ambiguity, such as in "Even before the police stopped the driver was frightened." Findings support a sentence processing system relying on…

Describes the work by Silvio Ceccato regarding machine translation systems and procedures, exploring such aspects of his work as functional philosophical approaches to machine translation, notional spheres, correlational analysis, and type classifications. Ceccato envisioned many of the methods that are now being applied in machine translation…

Four word-learning studies exposed 2-year olds to novel verbs and nouns. Found that knowledge of what action or object was impending was not necessary for learning the words; children learned a novel verb for an intentional but not an accidental action; and children learned a novel noun for an object being sought, but not ones rejected while…

A cognitive systems approach of linguistic knowledge is outlined. According to this view, linguistic knowledge or cognitive grammar is part of the coherent structure and function of a cognitive system that is able to process language. (97 references) (JL)

Three primed naming experiments were conducted to investigate development of sublexical processing in reading Chinese. Target characters were either homophonic to or semantically related to phonetic radicals embedded in irregular complex characters, but not to the complex characters themselves. (Author/VWL)

Patient WBN has a lexical-semantic deficit resulting in impaired performance on language comprehension tasks that require access to verb meanings in both single-word and sentence contexts. However, WBN shows no such comprehension impairment with respect to lexical syntax. Specifically, he performs without error on comprehension tasks that rely on…