Conceptual expansion, one of the core operations in creative cognition, was investigated in the present ERP study. An experimental paradigm using novel metaphoric, nonsensical and literal phrases was employed where individual differences in conceptual knowledge organization were accounted for by using participants' responses to categorize the…

This paper investigates whether an abstract linguistic construction shows the kind of prototype effects characteristic of non-linguistic categories, in both adults and young children. Adapting the prototype-plus-distortion methodology of Franks and Bransford (1971), we found that whereas adults were lured toward false-positive recognition of…

Previous research using the contextual cuing paradigm has revealed both quantitative and qualitative differences in learning depending on whether repeated contexts are defined by letter arrays or real-world scenes. To clarify the relative contributions of visual features and semantic information likely to account for such differences, the typical…

Current research has shown that comprehension can vary depending on text and question types and that readers' word recognition and background knowledge may account for these differences. Other reader characteristics such as semantic and syntactic awareness, inferencing, and planning or organizing all have also been linked to reading comprehension,…

Older adults perform much like younger adults on language. This similar level of performance, however, may come about through different underlying brain processes. In the present study, we evaluated age-related differences in the brain areas outside the typical language areas among adults using a category decision task. Our results showed that…

Several studies have shown that concepts spread activation to words of both of a bilingual's languages. Therefore, a central issue that needs to be clarified is how a bilingual manages to restrict his speech production to a single language. One influential proposal is that when speaking in one language, the other language is inhibited. An…

This study examined the associations of three levels of meaning acquisition, i.e., whole word (vocabulary), morpheme (morphological awareness), and semantic radical (orthography-semantic awareness) to early Chinese reading comprehension among 164 Hong Kong Chinese primary school students, ages 7 and 8 years old, across 1 year. With time 1 word…

This paper examines the acquisition of interpretable features in English second language (L2) learners of Spanish by investigating the personal preposition a in Spanish. The distribution of a in direct object NPs relates to the animacy/specificity of the NP, the animacy/agentivity of the subject, and the semantics of the predicate (Torrego, 1998;…

This paper examines evidence for a nonlexical influence on children's repetition of real words. We investigate the extent to which two computational models of auditory repetition can simulate the performance of 68 children aged between 5 and 11 years-old when they are attempting to repeat familiar words. Both computational accounts were derived…

In adults, the ability to apply semantic grouping strategies has been found to depend on working memory. To investigate this relation in children, two sort-recall tasks (one without and one with a grouping instruction) were administered to 6-12-year-olds. The role of working memory was examined by means of mediation analyses and by assessing…

In this article we present a neural network model of sentence generation. The network has both technical and conceptual innovations. Its main technical novelty is in its semantic representations: the messages which form the input to the network are structured as sequences, so that message elements are delivered to the network one at a time. Rather…

We present data from an artificial language domain that suggest new contributions to the theory of syntactic triggers. Whether a learning algorithm is capable of matching the achievements of child learners depends in part on how much parametric ambiguity there is in the input. For practical reasons this cannot be established for the domain of all…

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb "to be": locative predicates about objects require "estar en", while those relating to events require "ser en", both translatable as "to be in". Subjective ratings showed that while the "object + ser + en" is considered as incorrect,…

Analysis of teacher-to-teacher talk provides researchers with useful information regarding the teaching profession and teachers' perspectives. This article provides a description of a method, with accompanying example, examining teacher-to-teacher talk by incorporating semantic modality and examining trends of its usage in a quantitative manner.…

The dual-route model of reading proposes distinct lexical and sub-lexical procedures for word reading and spelling. Lexically reliant and sub-lexically reliant reader subgroups were selected from 78 university students on the basis of their performance on lexical (orthographic) and sub-lexical (phonological) choice tests, and on irregular and…