In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously…

The debate over the extent to which individual letters are perceived by proficient readers continues to play a dominant role in the ongoing "reading wars." One view holds that virtually all letters are processed, the other view that only some letters are perceived, supplemented by context and background knowledge. There is little research,…

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic…

The working memory model for Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) predicts that processing differences between language modalities emerge when cognitive demands are explicit. This prediction was tested in three working memory experiments with participants who were Deaf Signers (DS), Hearing Signers (HS), or Hearing Nonsigners (HN). Easily nameable…

We describe an fMRI experiment examining the functional connectivity (FC) between regions of the brain associated with semantic and phonological processing. We wished to explore whether L-Dopa administration affects the interaction between language network components in semantic and phonological categorization tasks, as revealed by FC. We…

This essay mainly discusses the following issue: Do people from different cultures store English words in their minds in different ways; and what elements determine people's mental lexicon? The findings from my experiment showed that cultural factors only play a minor role on this stage. The leading dominants in this light are the linguistic…

Previous studies haves shown that under masked priming conditions, CORNER primes CORN as strongly as TEACHER primes TEACH and more strongly than BROTHEL primes BROTH. This result has been taken as evidence of a purely structural level of representation at which words are decomposed into morphological constituents in a manner that is independent of…

This article analyses the role of educational opportunity in a time of globalisation, a new economy and life in a multicultural society, and gives an epistemological and semantic account of the concept "intercultural education", distinguishing it from multicultural and transcultural education. Starting with a historic overview of various…

Background & Aims: Preschool and early school-aged children with specific language impairment not only have spoken language difficulties, but also are at risk of future literacy problems. Effective interventions targeting both spoken language and emergent literacy skills for this population are limited. This paper reports a feasibility study…

Recent neurophysiological and brain imaging studies have shown that the motor system is involved in language processing. However, it is an open question whether this involvement is a necessary requisite to understand language or rather a side effect of distinct cognitive processes underlying it. In order to clarify this issue we carried out three…

The double dissociation between noun and verb processing, well documented in the neuropsychological literature, has not been supported in imaging studies. Recent imaging studies, in fact, suggest that once confounding with semantics is eliminated, grammatical class effects only emerge as a consequence of building frames. Here we assess this…

Argues that concentrating upon the intent of a speaker is more important than upon the precision with which prescribed terminology is utilized. (JK)

Outlines a mode of speech that practices simplification of language through the use of short words. (MD)

Syntactic attempts to account for preferred adjective order are rejected in favor of hypotheses integrating semantic and syntactic aspects of the phenomenon in a psycholinguistic framework. (Author/FWB)

The results of the experiment reported here indicate that changes in meaning are more often recognized than changes in wording in concrete sentences but that the reverse is true in the case of abstract sentences. (Author/FWB)