English-speaking children exhibit difficulty in their comprehension of raising patterns, such as (1), in which the NP the boy is semantically linked to the VP in the embedded clause, but is syntactically realized as the subject of the matrix clause. (1) Raising pattern: [s "The boy" seems to the girl [s _ to be happy]]. This dissertation…

This study aimed to investigate the capacity of coordinating comprehension and production processes and the role of phonological working memory in simultaneous interpreting. To this end we evaluated the Articulatory Suppression (AS) effect in three groups of participants, monolingual controls, students of interpreting and professional…

The study aimed at investigating the role of nominal gender in animal categorization in preschoolers. Given the regularities characterizing gender system, at both syntactical and morphological level, Italian language is suitable to address this issue. In three experiments, participants were asked to classify pictures of animals as male or female.…

This study investigated the effect of semantic inconsistency of roots on morphological processing to explore the development of morphological representations within the mental lexicon. We examined masked priming of Hebrew words of changing semantic transparency at two reading levels. The results revealed a disparity in the performance of fourth…

The present study explores the relationship between basic auditory processing of sound rise time, frequency, duration and intensity, phonological skills (onset-rime and tone awareness, sound blending, RAN, and phonological memory) and reading disability in Chinese. A series of psychometric, literacy, phonological, auditory, and character…

This dissertation introduces and evaluates a new methodology for studying aspects of human language processing and the factors to which it is sensitive. It makes use of the phoneme restoration illusion (Warren, 1970). A small portion of a spoken sentence is replaced by a burst of noise. Listeners typically mentally restore the missing phoneme(s),…

This paper revisits the caused-motion construction from the point of view of the Lexical Constructional Model (LCM). Three main issues are addressed. First, one of Goldberg's semantic constraints on the use of the construction, i.e. the idea that no cognitive decision can mediate between the causing event and the entailed motion, is broadened to…

We expect that word knowledge accumulates gradually. This article draws on earlier approaches to assessing depth, but focuses on one dimension: richness of semantic knowledge. We present results from a study in which three distinct item types were developed at three levels of depth: knowledge of common usage patterns, knowledge of broad topical…

The Katzenberger Hebrew Language Assessment for Preschool Children (henceforth: the KHLA) is the first comprehensive, standardized language assessment tool developed in Hebrew specifically for older preschoolers (4;0-5;11 years). The KHLA is a norm-referenced, Hebrew specific assessment, based on well-established psycholinguistic principles, as…

Producing a sentence involves encoding a preverbal message into a grammatical structure by retrieving lexical items and integrating them into a functional (semantic-to-grammatical) structure. Individuals with agrammatism are impaired in this grammatical encoding process. However, it is unclear what aspect of grammatical encoding is impaired and…

Recognition judgments to the non-antecedents of a repeated-noun anaphor are slower and less accurate after than before the processing of the anaphor. Disagreement exists as to whether this pattern of performance reflects a bias shift carried out by a memory process associated with the recognition of a word that has previously occurred in the…

This study examined the semantic processing difference between decomposable idioms and novel predicative metaphors. It was hypothesized that idiom comprehension results from the retrieval of a figurative meaning stored in memory, that metaphor comprehension requires a sense creation process and that this process difference affects the processing…

Recent work in adult psycholinguistics has demonstrated that activation of semantic representations begins long before phonological processing is complete. This incremental propagation of information across multiple levels of analysis is a hallmark of adult language processing but how does this ability develop? In two experiments, we elicit…

Patients with apparently selective short-term memory (STM) deficits for semantic information have played an important role in developing multi-store theories of STM and challenge the idea that verbal STM is supported by maintaining activation in the language system. We propose that semantic STM deficits are not as selective as previously thought…

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by…