This study investigates how L2 learners of German (English L1) process structural and semantic information when reading German sentences. In a timed comprehension task, intermediate and advanced L2 learners of German read sentences that varied according to word order (subject-first versus object-first) and subject animacy (inanimate subject versus…

McCormack and Hoerl's state of the art review of the development of temporal concepts from the end of infancy to the end of the fifth year shows that young children's conception of time is quite different from that of adults. Adults and 5-year-old children can construe an event from a range of temporal perspectives and can describe it from a…

According to gerontological thought, an important part of senior citizens' disabilities are products of their social exclusion rather than factors associated with their physical or mental health. How these exclusions come about was the purpose of the research reported in this article. The study was conducted among 682 Chilean university students…

This study examined two issues: (a) whether there are gains in accurate and speedy comprehension of second language (L2) pragmatic meaning over time and (b) whether the gains are associated with cognitive processing ability and the amount of language contact in an L2 environment. Forty-four college students in a US institution completed three…

Calculus is one of those topics in mathematics where the algorithmic manipulation of symbols is easier than understanding the underlying concepts. Around 1680 Leibniz invented a symbol system for calculus that codifies and simplifies the essential elements of reasoning. The calculus of Leibniz brings within the reach of an ordinary student…

"Competencies in Organizational E-Learning: Concepts and Tools" provides a comprehensive view of the way competencies can be used to drive organizational e-learning, including the main conceptual elements, competency gap analysis, advanced related computing topics, the application of semantic Web technologies, and the integration of competencies…

We used a cross-modal priming procedure to explore the processing of irregular and regular English verb forms in both monolinguals and bilinguals (Serbian-English, Chinese-English). Materials included irregular nested stem (drawn-DRAW), irregular change stem (ran-RUN), and regular past tense-present tense verb pairs that were either low…

When two visual targets, Target 1 (T1) and Target 2 (T2), are presented among a rapid sequence of distractors, processing of T1 produces an attentional blink. Typically, processing of T2 is markedly impaired, except when T1 and T2 are adjacent (Lag 1 sparing). However, if a shift of task set--a change in task requirements from T1 to T2--occurs,…

The family size of the constituents of compound words, or the number of compounds sharing the constituents, affects English-speaking children's compound segmentation. This finding is consistent with a usage-based theory of language acquisition, whereby children learn abstract underlying linguistic structure through their experience with particular…

The present longitudinal multi-cohort study examines whether interindividual variability in cognitive performance and change increases in old age, and whether associations among developments of different cognitive functions increase with adult age. Multivariate multiple-group latent growth modeling was applied to data from narrow cohorts separated…

Rappaport Hovav and Levin [Rappaport Hovav, M., Levin, B., 1998. "Building verb meanings." In: Butt, M., Geuder, W. (Eds.), "The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors." CSLI Publications, Stanford, pp. 97-134] contend that result verbs disallow object deletion because of their lexical semantic properties. Their point is that…

Most linguistic studies of subject-verb agreement have thus far attempted to account for this phenomenon in terms of either syntax or semantics. Kim (2004) [Kim, J., 2004. Hybrid agreement in English. Linguistics 42 (6), 1105-1128] proposes a "hybrid analysis", which allows for a morphosyntactic agreement and a semantic agreement within the same…

In 2 experiments, participants completed both an attentional control battery (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop tasks) and a modified semantic priming task. The priming task measured relatedness proportion (RP) effects within subjects, with the color of the prime indicating the probability that the to-be-named target would be related. In Experiment…

Semantic integrity constraints are business-specific rules that limit the permissible values in a database. For example, a university rule dictating that an "incomplete" grade cannot be changed to an A constrains the possible states of the database. To maintain database integrity, business rules should be identified in the course of database…

The lexical quality hypothesis (LQH) claims that variation in the quality of word representations has consequences for reading skill, including comprehension. High lexical quality includes well-specified and partly redundant representations of form (orthography and phonology) and flexible representations of meaning, allowing for rapid and reliable…