For identifying children with four major kinds of verbal learning disabilities viz. reading disability, speech and language comprehension disability, writing disability and mathematics disability, the present task was undertaken to construct and standardize verbal learning disabilities checklist. This checklist was developed by keeping in view the…

The authors present a computational model that builds a holographic lexicon representing both word meaning and word order from unsupervised experience with natural language. The model uses simple convolution and superposition mechanisms to learn distributed holographic representations for words. The structure of the resulting lexicon can account…

This study investigated metaphor comprehension in the broader context of task-difference effects and manipulation of processing difficulty. We predicted that right hemisphere recruitment would show greater specificity to processing difficulty rather than metaphor comprehension. Previous metaphor processing studies have established that the left…

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the time course of orthographic facilitation on picture naming in Chinese. We used a picture-word paradigm to investigate orthographic and phonological facilitation on monosyllabic spoken word production in native Mandarin speakers. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word…

For over a century, a link between left prefrontal cortex and language processing has been accepted, yet the precise characterization of this link remains elusive. Recent advances in both the study of sentence processing and the neuroscientific study of frontal lobe function suggest an intriguing possibility: The demands to resolve competition…

Two grammatical classes are commonly distinguished in psycholinguistic research. The open-class includes content words such as nouns, whereas the closed-class includes function words such as determiners. A standing issue is to identify whether these words are retrieved through similar or distinct selection mechanisms. We report a comparative…

Focal brain lesions are assumed to produce language deficits by two basic mechanisms: local cortical dysfunction at the lesion site, and remote cortical dysfunction due to disruption of the transfer and integration of information between connected brain regions. However, functional imaging studies investigating language outcome after aphasic…

We investigated the relation of two dimensions of attentional functioning (sustained auditory attention and resource capacity/allocation) and complex sentence comprehension of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a group of typically developing (TD) children matched for age. Twenty-six school-age children with SLI and 26 TD peers…

In this paper we describe a simple software system that allows students to practise their critical thinking skills by constructing argument maps of natural language arguments. As the students construct their maps of an argument, the system provides automatic, real time feedback on their progress. We outline the background and theoretical framework…

Purpose: This study describes a post hoc analysis of segmental, stress, and syllabification errors in third graders' productions of derived English words with the stress-changing suffixes "-ity" and "-ic." We investigated whether (a) derived word frequency influences error patterns, (b) stress and syllabification errors always co-occur, and (c)…

Language requires both storage and composition. However, exactly what is retrieved from memory and what is assembled remains controversial, especially for inflected words. Here, "imageability effects" is introduced as a new diagnostic of storage and a complement to frequency effects. In 2 studies of past-tense morphology, more reliable…

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…

Prosodic contrastive focus is used to attract the listener's attention to a specific part of the utterance. Mostly conceived of as auditory/acoustic, it also has visible correlates which have been shown to be perceived. This study aimed at analyzing auditory-visual perception of prosodic focus by elaborating a paradigm enabling an auditory-visual…

This study investigates the way in which speakers determine which aspects of an utterance to emphasize and how this affects the form of utterances. To do this, we ask whether the binding between emphasis and thematic roles persists between utterances. In one within-language (Dutch-Dutch) and three cross-linguistic (Dutch-English) structural…

Event-related potentials were used to investigate if there is a lexical bias effect in comprehension monitoring. The lexical bias effect in language production (the tendency of phonological errors to result in existing words rather than nonwords) has been attributed to an internal self-monitoring system, which uses the comprehension system, and…