The cerebral hemispheres have been shown to be differentially sensitive to sentence-level information; in particular, it has been suggested that only the left hemisphere (LH) makes predictions about upcoming items, whereas the right (RH) processes words in a more integrative fashion. The current study used event-related potentials to jointly…

Although autism is associated with impaired language functions, the nature of semantic processing in high-functioning pervasive developmental disorders (HFPDD) without a history of early language delay has been debated. In this study, we aimed to examine whether the automatic lexical/semantic aspect of language is impaired or intact in these…

Objects and substances bear fundamentally different ontologies. In this article, we examine the relations between language, the ontological distinction with respect to individuation, and the world. Specifically, in cross-linguistic developmental studies that follow Imai and Gentner (1997), we examine the question of whether language influences our…

The ambiguity disadvantage (slower processing of ambiguous words relative to unambiguous words) has been taken as evidence for a distributed semantic representational system like that embodied in parallel distributed processing (PDP) models. In the present study, we investigated whether semantic ambiguity slows meaning activation, as PDP models…

Misperception of nonwords created by adjacent letter transpositions (TL anagrams) indicates that word recognition is based on an orthographic matching process that is tolerant of minor positional errors in the letter sequence. We report five experiments that investigate the extent to which the misperception of TL anagrams is influenced by…

The following tested Kintsch's [Kintsch, W. (2000). "Metaphor comprehension: a computational theory." "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review," 7, 257-266 and Kintsch, W. (2001). "Predication." "Cognitive Science," 25, 173-202] Predication Model, which predicts that working memory capacity is an important factor in metaphor processing. In support of his…

Across 3 different word recognition tasks, distributional analyses were used to examine the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on underlying response time distributions. Consistent with the extant literature, stimulus quality and word frequency produced additive effects in lexical decision, not only in the means but also in the…

To investigate hemispheric differences in the timing of word priming, the modulation of event-related potentials by semantic word relationships was examined in each cerebral hemisphere. Primes and targets, either categorically (silk-wool) or associatively (needle-sewing) related, were presented to the left or right visual field in a go/no-go…

Computers can help the range of ways learners build up their own perception. Students who collect data from the Internet can be self-directed and independent. They can select sources to study and the connections to follow. Relying on the bounds laid down by teachers, the students may be in full control of their subjects and their studies. Students…

This paper explores the potential of Semantic Web technologies to support teaching and learning in a variety of higher education settings in which some form of case-based learning is the pedagogy of choice. It draws on the empirical work of a major three year research and development project in the United Kingdom: "Ensemble: Semantic…

When preparing to perform a task, the brain settles into task-set states which are relevant for the selection of the appropriate task-rules and stimulus-response mappings. The way this selection takes place within the Language domain is not well understood. We used high-density electrophysiological recordings while participants were engaged in a…

Language comprehension occurs when the left-hemisphere (LH) and the right-hemisphere (RH) share information derived from discourse [Beeman, M. J., Bowden, E. M., & Gernsbacher, M. A. (2000). Right and left hemisphere cooperation for drawing predictive and coherence inferences during normal story comprehension. "Brain and Language, 71", 310-336].…

Two studies were conducted across three countries to examine samples of beginning readers without systematic explicit phonics who had reached the same level of word reading accuracy as comparison samples with high and moderate explicit phonics. Had they employed any compensatory learning to reach that level? Four hypotheses of compensatory…

Theories of autism have proposed that a bias towards low-level perceptual information, or a featural/surface-biased information-processing style, may compromise higher-level language processing in such individuals. Two experiments, utilizing linguistic stimuli with competing low-level/perceptual and high-level/semantic information, tested…

Phonological processing was examined in school-age children who stutter (CWS) by assessing their performance and recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in a visual rhyming task. CWS had lower accuracy on rhyming judgments, but the cognitive processes that mediate the comparisons of the phonological representations of words, as indexed by…