Native languages (L1s) are tacitly assumed to be complete and stable in adults. Here we report an unexpected individual variation in judgment of L1 regarding Japanese sentences including honorification, and further clarify its neural basis with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). By contrasting an honorification judgment task with a…

There is abundant evidence from behavioral and neurophysiological experiments for the distinction of natural versus artifactual categories and a gender-specific difference: women's performances in cognitive tasks increase when natural categories are used, whereas men's performances increase with artifactual categories. Here, we used the semantic…

We investigated how children solve the interpretive problem of verbal irony. Children 5 to 8 years of age and a group of adults were presented with ironic and literal remarks in the context of short puppet shows. The speaker puppet's personality was manipulated as a cue to intent; that is, speakers were described as funny or serious. We measured…

Lexical access is concerned with how the spoken or visual input of language is projected onto the mental representations of lexical forms. To date, most theories of lexical access have been based almost exclusively on studies of spoken languages and/or orthographic representations of spoken languages. Relatively few studies have examined how…

Fundamental questions in cognitive science concern the origins and nature of the units that compose visual experience. Here, we investigate the capacity to individuate and store information about non-solid portions, asking in particular whether free-ranging rhesus monkeys ("Macaca mulatta") quantify portions of a non-solid substance presented in…

Gradable adjectives denote a function that takes an object and returns a measure of the degree to which the object possesses some gradable property [Kennedy, C. (1999). Projecting the adjective: The syntax and semantics of gradability and comparison. New York: Garland]. Scales, ordered sets of degrees, have begun to be studied systematically in…

The present studies examined whether the retrieval of an old "reactivated" memory could be brought under the control of new contextual cues. In Experiment 1 rats trained in one context were exposed to different contextual cues either immediately, 60 or 120 min after a cued reactivation of the training memory. When tested in the shifted context,…

Previous studies suggest that different neural and functional mechanisms are involved in the analysis of irregular ("caught") and regular ("filled") past tense forms in English. In particular, the comprehension and production of regular forms is argued to require processes of morpho-phonological assembly and disassembly, analysing these forms into…

Because higher level cognitive processes generally involve the use of world knowledge, computational models of these processes require the implementation of a knowledge base. This article identifies and discusses 4 strategies for dealing with world knowledge in computational models: disregarding world knowledge, "ad hoc" selection, extraction from…

This article investigates how linguistic expressions of time--in particular, temporal adverbs and verb tense morphemes--are used to establish temporal reference at the level of brain physiology. First, a formal semantic analysis of tense and temporal adverbs is outlined. It is argued that computing temporal reference amounts to solving a…

A key question in bilingual language production research is how bilingual individuals control the use of their two languages. The psycholinguistic literature concerning language control is unresolved. It is a matter of controversy whether (a) issues to do with control are central to understanding bilingual language processing; and (b) if they are,…

The present study examined the manner in which both hemispheres utilize prior semantic context and relative meaning frequency during the processing of homographs. Participants read sentences biased toward the dominant or the subordinate meaning of their final homograph, or unbiased neutral sentences, and performed a lexical decision task on…

This article examines the creation of novel words by two English-speaking male siblings, ages five- and six-years-old, during a fourteen-month period of weekly play sessions. The questions the article addresses are: Did the boys produce novel words? What types of words? Why were these words created? and Did they become a permanent part of the…

Tokowicz and Kroll (2007) originally reported that the number of translations a word has across languages influences the speed with which bilinguals translate concrete and abstract words from one language to another. The current work examines how the number of translations that characterize a word influences bilingual lexical organization and the…

This quantitative study examined the effects of planning time and high and low language levels on the task-based language performance of 51 first and second grade English language learners. Language performance during the task was assessed in terms of accuracy, complexity, and fluency. Quantitative analysis made use of four 2 x 2 factorial ANOVAs…