This article aims to fill a gap in current studies on the semantics of branding. Through the analysis of a number of well-known international brand names, we provide ample evidence supporting the claim that a finite set of cognitive operations, such as those of domain reduction and expansion, mitigation, and strengthening, among others, can…

The influence of coarticulation cues on spoken word recognition is not yet well understood. This acoustic/phonetic variation may be processed early and recognized as sensory noise to be stripped away, or it may influence processing at a later prelexical stage. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) in a picture/spoken word matching…

Recent ERP studies report that implausible verb-argument combinations can elicit a centro-parietal P600 effect (e.g., "The hearty meal was devouring..."; Kim & Osterhout, 2005). Such eliciting conditions do not involve outright syntactic anomaly, deviating from previous reports of P600. Kim and Osterhout (2005) attributed such P600 effects to…

In contrast with widely documented deficits of semantic knowledge relating to object concepts and the corresponding nouns in semantic dementia (SD), little is known about action semantics and verb production in SD. The degradation of action semantic knowledge was studied in 5 patients with SD compared with 17 matched control participants in an…

In Russian infinitives of impersonal verbs have a peculiar distribution: they are not acceptable in most syntactic contexts, but there are also syntactic contexts in which they are perfectly acceptable. Based on a qualitative analysis of data from corpora, the Internet and an acceptability survey, it is argued that the restrictions on impersonals…

Adult word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words ("cup" primes "cat" or "plate") compared to unrelated words ("door"), suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but…

This paper presents and discusses the results of a research project in Education Sciences, which aimed at identifying and understanding the effects of in-service teacher education carried out in schools, on the educational practices of a school of the 1st Cycle of Basic Education (CBE). The training was organized with small project groups…

When two individual characters are introduced in discourse, it is often, but not always, possible to make anaphoric reference to them as a complex reference object via a plural pronoun. According to the Equivalence hypothesis, the circumstances under which such reference is possible depend on the equivalence of the characters. Various factors have…

Two subject-verb agreement error elicitation studies tested the hierarchical feature-passing account of agreement computation in production and three timing-based alternatives: linear distance to the head noun, semantic integration, and a combined effect of both (a scope of planning account). In Experiment 1, participants completed subject noun…

Verb-doubling, where a copy of the main verb occurs both before and after the direct object, is a structure commonly used in Chinese in sentences containing a frequency or duration phrase. In Cantonese, verb-doubling is highly optional and therefore problematic for existing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic accounts of its distribution in…

Curricula authoring is a complex process, involving different actors and different kinds of knowledge. Learners aim at acquiring expertise about some topic of their own interest, and need to perceive that the curriculum they attend will lead them toward their goal; when this does not happen, they become demotivated. Learners are all different, not…

We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated the effects of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus on the interpretation of pronouns in subsequent discourse. By probing the effects of these factors on real-time pronoun interpretation, we aim to contribute to our understanding of how topicality-related…

Is language processing universal? How do the specific properties of each language influence the way it is processed? In this study, we compare the neural correlates of morphological processing in Hebrew--a Semitic language with a rich and systematic morphology, to those revealed in English--an Indo-European language with a linear morphology. Using…

Sorting procedures are frequently adopted as an alternative to dissimilarity ratings to measure the dissimilarity of large sets of stimuli in a comparatively short time. However, systematic empirical research on the consequences of this experiment-design choice is lacking. We carried out a behavioral experiment to assess the extent to which…

The main point of our study was to examine the vocabulary knowledge of pupils in grades 3-6, and in particular the relative reading vocabulary disadvantage of hearing-impaired pupils. The achievements of 394 pupils with normal hearing and 106 pupils with a hearing impairment were examined on two vocabulary assessment tasks: a lexical decision task…