We employed a triadic comparison task in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and healthy controls to contrast (a) multidimensional scaling (MDS) and accuracy-based assessments of semantic memory, and (b) degraded-store versus degraded-access accounts of semantic impairment in Alzheimer's disease (AD). Similar to other studies using triadic…

Purpose: This study evaluated the effects of an intervention program aimed to improve reading and spelling ability through instruction in morphological awareness together with other forms of linguistic awareness, including knowledge of phonology, orthography, syntax, and semantics. Method: Sixteen children aged between 8;07 (years;months) and…

In responses time tasks, inhibitory neighborhood effects have been found for word pairs that differ in a transposition of two adjacent letters (e.g., "clam/calm"). Here, the author describes two eye-tracking experiments conducted to explore transposed-letter (TL) neighborhood effects within the context of normal silent reading. In…

Purpose: This study was designed to test the word learning abilities of adults with typical language abilities, those with a history of disorders of spoken or written language (hDSWL), and hDSWL plus attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (+ADHD). Methods: Sixty-eight adults were required to associate a novel object with a novel label, and then…

Background: Traits and mental states are considered to be inter-related parts of theory of mind. Attribution research demonstrates the influential role played by traits in social cognition. However, there has been little investigation into how individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) understand traits. Method: The ability of individuals…

Bilinguals report more tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) failures than monolinguals. Three accounts of this disadvantage are that bilinguals experience between-language interference at (a) semantic and/or (b) phonological levels, or (c) that bilinguals use each language less frequently than monolinguals. Bilinguals who speak one language and sign another…

The present study investigated the time-course of semantic integration in auditory compound word processing. Compounding is a productive mechanism of word formation that is used frequently in many languages. Specifically, we examined whether semantic integration is incremental or is delayed until the head, the last constituent in German, is…

A learning design describes a sequence of learning activities that learners undertake in order to help them achieve particular learning objectives, including the resources and services needed to complete the activities. Unfortunately, there is no learning design language which can be used by teachers to describe pedagogical strategies explicitly…

The effects of associative strength and gist relations on rates of children's and adults' true and false memories were examined in three experiments. Children aged 5-11 and university-aged adults participated in a standard Deese/Roediger-McDermott false memory task using DRM and category lists in two experiments and in the third, children…

Bilinguals' lexical mappings for their two languages have been found to converge toward a common naming pattern. The present paper investigates in more detail how semantic convergence is manifested in bilingual lexical knowledge. We examined how semantic convergence affects the centers and boundaries of lexical categories for common household…

Effects of perceptual and cognitive loads on spoken-word recognition have so far largely escaped investigation. This study lays the foundations of a psycholinguistic approach to speech recognition in adverse conditions that draws upon the distinction between energetic masking, i.e., listening environments leading to signal degradation, and…

The influence of phonological (i.e. individual sounds), lexical (i.e. whole-word forms) and semantic (i.e. meaning) characteristics on the words known by infants age 1;4 to 2;6 was examined, using an existing database (Dale & Fenson, 1996). For each noun, word frequency, two phonological (i.e. positional segment average, biphone average), two…

The present study determined whether parenting style, defined by control strategies varying in power-assertion mediated the established relation between maternal language usage (grammar and semantics) and child language (grammar, semantics and pragmatics) during toddlerhood (n = 60). Based upon their use of control strategies mothers were…

The sequential nature of action ensures that an individual can anticipate the conclusion of an observed action via the use of semantic rules. The semantic processing of language and action has been linked to the N400 component of the event-related potential (ERP). The authors developed an ERP paradigm in which infants and adults observed simple…

Passives has been the focus of much research in language acquisition since the 1970s. It has been clear from this research that young children seldom produce passives spontaneously, particularly "long" or "full" passives with a by-phrase; and they usually perform poorly on experimental tests of the comprehension of passives, especially passives of…