Two explanations for deficits underlying autism were tested: weak central coherence (WCC) and executive dysfunction. Consistent with WCC, Happe ("British Journal of Developmental Psychology" 15 (1997) 1) found that children with autism failed to use sentence context in pronouncing homographs. In an alternate approach, we investigated whether…

Children's developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent-child activity and conversation. Drawing on family conversations in everyday settings, the chapter explores an apparent paradox between a global analysis of conventionality as stable shared knowledge and a local…

Research on AAC symbols has focused almost exclusively on iconicity and complexity, and thus has not established whether additional visual features are necessary for conveying meaning in graphic representations. Despite variations in individual depictions of an "apple," we understand the underlying concept due to shared consensus on the set of…

The word-frequency effect (WFE) in recognition memory refers to the finding that more rare words are better recognized than more common words. We demonstrate that a familiarity-discrimination model operating on data from a semantic word-association space yields a robust WFE in data on both hit rates and false-alarm rates. Our modeling results…

The purpose of this study was to determine the natural order of acquisition of the proform "it," comparing deictic pronoun "it," anaphoric pronoun "it" and expletive "it." Files from four children (Adam, Eve, Nina and Peter) aged 1 ; 6-3 ; 0 in the CHILDES database were coded for occurrences of NP it (here it is) and expletive it (it's raining).…

Whilst findings from experimental studies suggest that perceptual mechanisms underpinning musical cognition are preserved or enhanced in autism, little is known about how higher-level, structural aspects of music are processed. Twenty participants with autism, together with age and intelligence matched controls, completed a musical priming task in…

Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was…

The purpose of the research reported here was to evaluate the meaning of words within the language system to both black and white persons in order to determine whether substantially different meanings exist for people according to racial background. (Author/JM)

Study demonstrates that children, like adults, do have lower tachistoscopic recognition thresholds for good than for bad words. (Authors)

Factor analysis of ratings of rehabilitation concepts across semantic differential scales indicated physically disabled adults connotatively structure their worlds along three major dimensions: attractiveness, dynamism, and morality. Potential theoretical implications are discussed. Descriptive information on factors of meaning extracted and…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…

The objective of this investigation was to analyze rhetorical strategies of Alice Walker in four narratives, namely, "The Color Purple, In Search of Our Mother's Gardens, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and Now Is the Time To Open Your Heart". As such, this study helps to expand the body of investigation relating linguistics to literature and medium…

This study investigated the impact of aspects of the lexical proficiency of EFL students on their summary writing in English (L2) by controlling for the impact of a range of linguistic abilities in English and Japanese (L1). Sixty-eight Japanese undergraduate students wrote two summaries of English texts in English. Their English lexical…

Autism is one of the fastest developing childhood disorders. The increase in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASD) has been highlighted in the media once again. The prevalence of school-age children with ASD has a considerable impact on the schools and teachers who are responsible for their education. Children with ASD served in the…