Does language have a role to play in conceptual development, and if so, what is that role? Understanding the contents of another person's mind parallels the development in early childhood of mental state language. Does the conceptual understanding get reflected in and drive the language development, or does the language allow the representation of…

Cognitive linguists claim that verb-particle constructions are compositional and analyzable, and that the particles contribute to the overall meaning in the form of image schemas. This article examined this claim with a behavioral experiment, in which participants were asked to judge the sensibility of short sentences primed by image-schematic…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…

The word length effect has been a central feature of theorising about immediate memory. The notion that short-term memory traces rapidly decay unless refreshed by rehearsal is based primarily upon the finding that serial recall for short words is better than that for long words. The decay account of the word length effect has come under pressure…

Reviews theories on discourse and sentential anaphora. Levinson's general, extralinguistic pragmatic theory contrasts with the author's specifically linguistic, cognitive theory. Levinson cannot account for many anaphoric patterns actually found in natural discourse, whereas the author's accessibility theory accounts for both types of problematic…

In two experiments, subjects were interrupted while listening to a two-clause sentence just before the last word of either the initial clause or the final clause. The two experiments together suggest that interclause semantic relations affect the immediate processing of clauses. (Author/EJS)

An experiment investigated the retrieval processes involving a noun with an adjective. Results suggest that a noun's meaning is retrieved in conjunction with an adjective when the phrase describes a familiar concept. (Author/AM)

Three experiments were conducted to test the psychological relevance of objectively quantified word collocations. The first experiment showed that perceived frequency of word combinations roughly followed the objective count. Another recurrent quality of words, constructional tendency, was supplemented as independent variable in the two following…

This monograph investigates aspects of language processing that are not specialized in the left hemisphere, and claims that there are "levels" (such as pitch functions) and "subsets" (such as phrase structuring) which are different in essential ways from each other, and from the aspects of speech and language which are typically lateralized.…

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…