The complexity of Chinese orthography has hindered the progress of research in Chinese to the same level of sophistication of that in alphabetic languages such as English. Also, there has been no publicly available resource concerning the decomposition of Chinese characters, which is essential in any attempt to model the cognitive processes of…

The origin and functions of the hand and arm gestures that accompany speech production are poorly understood. It has been proposed that gestures facilitate lexical retrieval, but little is known about when retrieval is accompanied by gestural activity and how this activity is related to the semantics of the word to be retrieved. Electromyographic…

A self-paced reading experiment investigated processing of sentences containing a noun-phrase that could temporarily be mistaken as the direct-object argument of a verb in a subordinate clause but actually constituted the syntactic subject of the main clause (often referred to as an "early" vs. "late closure" ambiguity). Subcategorization…

The present study investigated scrambling effects on the processing of Japanese sentences and priority information used among thematic roles, case particles and grammatical functions. Reaction times for correct sentence decisions were significantly prolonged for scrambled active sentences with transitive verbs in the first experiment and with…

This study explores the connection between writing and working memory, specifically the role of the subvocal articulatory rehearsal process (or inner voice). The authors asked the 18 participants to type sentences describing 24 multipanel cartoons. In some conditions, the participants were required to repeat a syllable continuously while writing.…

Generation enhances memory for occurrence but may not enhance other aspects of memory. The present study further delineates the negative generation effect in context memory reported in N. W. Mulligan (2004). First, the negative generation effect occurred for perceptual attributes of the target item (its color and font) but not for extratarget…

The purpose of this study was to assess to what extent specific reading disabilities and poor phonologic processing in children who read Hebrew, a primarily consonant orthography, are related to central auditory temporal processing deficits (TPDs). Twenty-four Hebrew-speaking children (ages 10-13) with and without reading disabilities were asked…

The authors examined the effect of sound-to-spelling regularity on written spelling latencies and writing durations in a dictation task in which participants had to write each target word 3 times in succession. The authors found that irregular words (i.e., those containing low-probability phoneme-to-grapheme mappings) were slower both to…

The history of the writing of "Verbal Behavior" (Skinner, 1957), Chomsky's review (1959), and MacCorquodale's rebuttal (1970) are briefly summarized. Chomsky's recent reflections on his review are analyzed: Chomsky's refusal to acknowledge the review's errors or its aggressive tone is consistent with his polemical style but comes at a minor cost…

According to the spatial registration hypothesis, the representation of stimulus location is automatically encoded during perception and it can interact with a more abstract linguistic representation. We tested this hypothesis in two experiments, using the semantic judgements of words. In the first experiment, words for animals that either fly or…

Purpose: Prosodic cues are used to clarify sentence structure and meaning. Two studies, one of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and one of adults with a history of learning disabilities, were designed to determine whether individuals with poor language skills recognize prosodic cues on par with their normal-language peers. Method:…

Language-related differences between discrepancy-defined and non-discrepancy-defined poor readers were examined in a three-year longitudinal study that began at school entry. The discrepancy-defined (dyslexic) poor readers (n = 19) were identified in terms of poor reading comprehension and average or above average listening comprehension…

Objective: Executive dysfunction in ADHD is well supported. However, recent studies suggest that more fundamental impairments may be contributing. We assessed brain function in adults with ADHD during simple and complex forms of processing. Method: We used functional magnetic resonance imaging with forward and backward digit spans to investigate…

Multilinguals appear to become better at learning additional languages the more languages they know, and in particular, to be faster at learning grammar. This study investigates the use of grammar learning strategies in 144 participants who knew between 2 and 12 languages each, using a language background questionnaire, a set of 40 grammar…

In the context of teaching culture, this article presents teaching materials that provide learners of German with opportunities to reflect about, analyze, and practice, how Germans commonly react to compliments. Based on findings from conversation analysis, the materials provide students with rich contextual information and a variety of…