Though efforts have been made for centuries, how concepts are represented in the brain is still elusive. The embodiment view claims that the sensory, motor and other brain areas through which people acquire concept information during life experiences represent this information during concept retrieval. Some compelling neurobiological evidence…

Language proficiency diagnosis is essential to extract fine-grained information about the linguistic knowledge states and skill mastery levels of test takers based on their performance on language tests. Different from comprehensive standardized tests, many language learning apps often revolve around word-level questions. Therefore, knowledge…

We used ERP methodology to investigate how readers validate discourse concepts and update situation models when those concepts followed factive (e.g., knew) and nonfactive (e.g., "guessed") verbs, and also when they were true, false, or indeterminate with reference to previous discourse. Following factive verbs, early (P2) and later brain…

This work covers topics in event coreference and event classification from spoken conversation. Event coreference is the process of identifying descriptions of the same event across sentences, documents, or structured databases. Existing event coreference work focuses on sentence similarity models or feature based similarity models requiring slot…

This study shows that sensory priming facilitates reports of same-modality concepts in an attentional blink paradigm. Participants had to detect and report two target words (T1 and T2) presented for 53 ms each among a series of nonwords distractors at a frequency of up to 19 items per second. SOA between target words was set to 53 ms or 213 ms,…

Historically, accounts of object representation and perceived similarity have focused on intrinsic features. Although more recent accounts have explored how objects, scenes, and situations containing common relational structures come to be perceived as similar, less is known about how the perceived similarity of parts or objects embedded within…

The "property-set model" is proposed for concept learning and subsequent recognition and classification of old and new exemplars. In an experimental evaluation of alternative models, the property-set model was the best predictor of both recognition and classification performance. (Author/RM)

Presents a computer simulation testing semantic networks and spreading activation models of human memory. Describes how a sentence is encoded by building a working memory structure from its words and from semantic memory concepts related to its meaning. Retrieval processes use cue words or sentences to locate working memory structures. (Author/MES)

A lexicalist, or direct-mapping, view of the relationship between syntactic functions and surface syntactic relations and a link between semantic features and the assignment of arguments to syntactic functions are advocated. An experiment with 192 undergraduate students examines the issues as problems of language production. (SLD)

The second of three articles on the ways in which people formulate their observations, this paper begins with a discussion of the assumptions underlying analytical and class-based models of cognition. The analytical approach to the measurement of cognition is found to be inappropriate because human cognition, and consequently language processing…

This third of three articles on the ways in which people formulate their observations presents an analysis of the perspective or attitude dominating the discourse of an interview. The analysis is conducted according to a paradigm that views the speaker as the controller of discourse perspective. The relationships found in the analysis are…

Suggests that thematic roles might best be viewed as verb-specific concepts and that this conceptual/world knowledge is computed and used immediately in online language processing. Discusses results in relation to other recent treatments of thematic roles as well as constraint-based and garden path models. (68 references) (Author/CK)

Acknowledging a growing national awareness of the need for direct instruction in higher order thinking skills within public education, this paper describes an instructional model for reinforcing thinking skills in the classroom, kindergarten through grade 12. Following an introduction justifying the model's reliance on the processing of…

Two experiments explored whether the facilitatory effect of context on lexical decisions is limited to words subjects generated when given the context as a prompt in a production task, or if the effect is wider in scope. The first experiment provided evidence of a wide scope of facilitation from single word contexts. In the second experiment, the…

Argues that cross-morpheme and cross-word syllabification in the WEAVER model of speech production point to the need to deal with flexibility of syllable membership and pose difficulty to a memory-based approach but not to WEAVER. The study reviews empirical support for the form of syllabification in WEAVER and reports an experiment on…