Effective usage of nonverbal and verbal communication in Japanese such as gestures, mimics, silence and employing grammatical or lexical honorifics plays a significant role in determining the success of foreign language learners in obtaining their intended employment. This study examines the second language (L2) learning of politeness and social…

Word learning can build the high-quality word representations that support skilled reading and language comprehension. According to the partial knowledge hypothesis, words that are partially known, a.k.a. "frontier words" (Durso & Shore, 1991), may be good targets for instruction precisely because they are already familiar. However,…

This dissertation examines the potential of vocal iconicity to be a "starting point" in spoken languages. Previous work has shown that iconic manual gestures play such a role in the generation and ongoing development of signed languages, serving to motivate the generation and modification of linguistic forms. Yet vocal iconicity is largely assumed…

This paper is concerned with the reversal in meaning of the word "positivism", which has come to mean "theory which assumes the existence of a world beyond our ideas" whereas once it meant "theory which is agnostic about the existence of a world beyond our ideas", and with educational writers' persistent mistakes in using quotation marks, as a…

Semantic priming, a well-established technique to study conceptual representation, has thus far produced variable fMRI results, both regarding the type of priming effects and their correlation with brain activation. The aims of the current study were (a) to investigate two types of semantic relations--categorical versus associative--under…

When relearning words, patients with semantic dementia (SD) exhibit a characteristic rigidity, including a failure to generalise names to untrained exemplars of trained concepts. This has been attributed to an over-reliance on the medial temporal region which captures information in sparse, non-overlapping and therefore rigid representations. The…

Aphasia recovery after stroke has been the subject of several studies, but in none the deficits on the various linguistic levels were examined, even though in the diagnosis and treatment of aphasia the emphasis lays more and more on these linguistic level disorders. In this observational prospective follow-up study, we explored whether it is…

Unlike "homophonous" meanings, which are semantically unrelated (e.g., the use of "bat" to refer to a baseball bat and a flying rodent), "polysemous" meanings are systematically related to one another (e.g., the use of "book", "CD", and "video" to refer to physical objects, as in "the leather book", or to the intellectual content they contain, as…

Empirically derived semantic feature norms categorized into different types of knowledge (e.g., visual, functional, auditory) can be summed to create number-of-feature counts per knowledge type. Initial evidence suggests several such knowledge types may be recruited during language comprehension. The present study provides a more detailed…

The petition for language translation has strikingly augmented recently due to cross-cultural communication and exchange of information. In order to communicate well, text should be translated correctly and completely in each field such as legal documents, technical texts, scientific texts, publicity leaflets, and instructional materials. In this…

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

We examined language-switching effects in French-English bilinguals using a paradigm where pictures are always named in the same language (either French or English) within a block of trials, and on each trial, the picture is preceded by a printed word from the same language or from the other language. Participants had to either make a language…

Children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) often struggle with spelling, which can have a negative effect on their written expression. Recent research has shown that linguistic analyses of spelling errors can be used to identify areas of need and guide remediation for spelling success. However, this research has not been conducted with…

Humour is a universal phenomenon and has been studied in many fields of research such as literature, linguistics, psychology, sociology and philosophy. Humour is often expressed through language and it is little wonder that failure to understand humorous language causes breakdowns in communication. What is humorous might be culturally defined, and…