Three experiments test the theory that verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings in different semantic contexts, making a previously seen verb difficult to remember when it appears in a new semantic context. Experiment 1 revealed that changing the direct object noun in a transitive sentence reduced recognition of a previously seen verb,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to delineate differences between children with specific language impairment (SLI), typical age-matched (TAM) children, and typical younger (TY) children in learning and mastering an undisclosed artificial morphological rule (AMR) through exposure and usage. Method: Twenty-six participants (eight 10-year-old…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

The representational product of sentence comprehension is the result of the interplay between episodic and semantic memory and our knowledge of the grammatical devices of our language which guide how we retrieve information from these systems. Past participles, being a part of speech derived from verbs but used in a prenominal position (e.g. words…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

We aimed to determine whether semantic relatedness between an incoming word and its preceding context can override expectations based on two types of stored knowledge: real-world knowledge about the specific events and states conveyed by a verb, and the verb's broader selection restrictions on the animacy of its argument. We recorded event-related…

Across languages and event types (i.e., agentive and nonagentive motion, transfer, change of state, attach/detach), goal paths are privileged over source paths in the linguistic encoding of events. Furthermore, some linguistic analyses suggest that goal paths are more central than source paths in the semantic and syntactic structure of motion…

Despite many years of investigation into implicit learning in nonlinguistic domains, the potential for implicit learning to deliver the kinds of generalizations that underlie natural language competence remains unclear. In a series of experiments, we investigated implicit learning of the semantic preferences of novel verbs, specifically, whether…

An experiment compared the impact of more and less semantically connected sentence contexts on vocabulary learning. Third graders (N = 40) were taught the definitions and meanings of six unfamiliar verbs: "anticipate," "attain," "devise," "restrain," "wield," and "persist." The verbs were…

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…

The present study examined language production skills in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. A unique cued sentence generation task was created in order to reduce demands on memory and attention. Differences in sentence production abilities according to disease severity and cognitive impairments were assessed. Language samples were obtained from 20…

Although the hippocampus is not considered a key structure in semantic memory, patients with medial-temporal lobe epilepsy (mTLE) have deficits in semantic access on some word retrieval tasks. We hypothesized that these deficits reflect the negative impact of focal epilepsy on remote cerebral structures. Thus, we expected that the networks that…

In an event-related potentials (ERPs) study, we examined the comprehension of different types of Chinese (Mandarin) relative clauses (object vs. subject-extracted) to test the universality and language specificity of sentence comprehension processes. Because Chinese lacks morphosyntactic cues to sentence constituent relations, it allows a test of…

A group of 20 patients with probable Alzheimer disease (AD) and a control group were tested in a verb generation task, in a verb synonym task and several cognitive tests. Three types of verbs and novel verbs were presented in simple sentence frames, in two different conditions. In one condition participants were presented with the verb in the…

Conceptual knowledge of our world is represented in semantic memory in terms of concepts and semantic relations between concepts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the cortical regions underlying the processing of sequential and taxonomic relations. Participants were presented verbal cues and performed three tasks:…