The purpose of this dissertation study is to investigate how Korean-English bilinguals process compound words in both English and Korean. The major research question is: when Korean-English bilinguals process Korean or English compound words, what information is used to segment compound words into their constituents and, in particular, does…

The question of whether or not linguistic sounds might convey inherent meaning has never conclusively been resolved. This is an empirical study weighing evidence for and against the existence of phonosemantics, also known as sound symbolism or iconism. Contrary to well established principles such as the arbitrary nature of the sign and the double…

Arguments concerning the relative role of semantic and grammatical factors in word formation have proven to be a wedge issue in current debates over the nature of linguistic representation and processing. In the present paper, we re-examine claims by Ramscar [Ramscar, M. (2002). The role of meaning in inflection: Why the past tense does not…

We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. "Andrew's picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself"). The experiments (two off-line studies and two visual-world eye-tracking experiments) investigate how syntactic and semantic factors guide the…

The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children can use syntax to infer the meanings of words. This paper presents experimental evidence that children are also able to use word inflections to infer word reference. Twenty-four- and 30-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Children were shown a pair of novel…

THIS DOCUMENT COMPRISES REPORTS ON TWO TECHNIQUES USED IN SIX EXPERIMENTS DESIGNED TO ASSESS THE SYNTACTIC AND SEMANTIC PROCESSING OF AUDITORY, LINGUISTIC INPUTS. PAST RESEARCH HAS DEVELOPED THE "PROBE-LATENCY TECHNIQUE," THE FIRST OF THE TWO TECHNIQUES USED IN THIS RESEARCH, FOR ASSESSING THE STRUCTURE OF LINGUISTIC INPUTS. RESULTS TO…

In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and…

Research supported by a United States Public Health Grant to Edward E. Smith. (VM)

Based on results reported in a doctoral dissertation completed at Yale University. (VM)

This paper reports three experiments that test the Presupposition-Denial account of complement set reference. According to the theory, complement set focus arises when focus is on the difference between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a large presupposed amount. We call this difference the shortfall. In this paper, what is…

Refers to the theory which distinguishes two poles in the organization of speech: the selection of units which can be interchanged in the sentence (paradigmatic pole) and the combination of units simultaneously present in the sentence (syntagmatic pole). (DD)

Research done while the first author was on a Science Scholarship from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC); research also supported by an NRC grant to the second author; forms part of Shannon Moeser's doctoral thesis submitted to McGill University. (VM)