Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination.…

Purpose: Several studies have reported that "useful speech" at 5 years of age predicts outcomes in individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), but this skill has been vaguely defined. This study investigates which specific aspects of expressive language in children with ASD best predict adult language and communication outcomes.…

As a basic indicator of verbal ability, verbal fluency refers to the degree of fluency in the use of language to convey information. The different components of working memory play an important role in verbal fluency. The inhibiting control mechanism takes place during L2 production processing in bilinguals, which may affect their verbal fluency…

The present study examined the role of language capacities in explaining differences in social information processing (SIP) among three school-age groups: high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD, IQ > 75), children with specific learning disorder (SLD), and children with typical development (TD). Participants were 96 boys…

Numerous studies have shown that bilinguals presented with words in one of their languages spontaneously and automatically activate lexical representations from their other language. However, such effects, found in varied experimental contexts, both in behavioural and psychophysiological investigations, have been essentially limited to the…

The present study explored the relation between language control and nonverbal cognitive control in different bilingual populations. We compared monolinguals, Dutch-French unbalanced bilinguals, balanced bilinguals, and interpreters on the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967) and the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz,…

Two studies examined the relationship between word knowledge and reading comprehension. Subjects were college undergraduates with high and low verbal abilities as indicated by a standardized verbal aptitude test. The first study involved a multiple choice vocabulary test from which words that both groups defined correctly were selected. The…

This paper presents the case of a child who at age 3;3 showed a marked schism between two branches of language functioning; he had control of language as a system for expressing syntactic-semantic relations but not as a system of interpersonal communication. (CFM)