This research studied one aspect of pragmatic language processing, the ability to understand metaphorical language, to determine whether patients with Parkinson disease (PD) are impaired for these abilities, and whether cognitive resource limitations/fronto-striatal dysfunction contributes to these deficits. Seventeen PD participants and healthy…

The development of native language phonetic representations in bilingual infants was compared to that of monolingual infants. Infants (ages 6-8, 10-12, and 14-20 months) from English-French or English-only environments were tested on their ability to discriminate a French and an English voice onset time distinction. Although 6- to 8-month-olds…

Ecological approaches (e.g. [Gibson, J.J., 1979. "The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception." Houghton-Mifflin, Boston]) to psychology and language are selectively reviewed, focusing on social learning. Is social learning (e.g., acquiring language) a matter of conformity [Tomasello, M., 2006. "Acquiring linguistic…

Broca's area encompasses opercular and triangular part of the inferior frontal gyrus, covered by Brodmann's areas 44 and 45, respectively. Recent neuroimaging studies have revealed that, in addition to classical language functions, Broca's area has novel and unexpected functions, serving as a likely interface of action and perception important for…

Much developmental work has been devoted to "scalar implicatures." These are implicitly communicated propositions linked to relatively weak terms (consider how "Some" pragmatically implies "Not all") that are more likely to be carried out by adults than by children. Children tend to retain the linguistically encoded…

This paper studies the development of taxonomic processing as measured by an adapted version of the Wechsler Similarities subtest, which distinguishes between categorization of concrete and abstract words. Two factors--age and concreteness--are also tested by a recall task. The results show an age-related increase in taxonomic categorization,…

This article presents findings from a year-long study of how intermediate second language (L2) learners of German (English first language) used case markings, word order, and semantic information when comprehending individual German sentences. The results showed that the learners relied on word order and semantic information, but did not…

The present study focuses on noun and verb processing during language acquisition, whereby the word production and the word comprehension of preschool children of different ages were investigated across three languages. Two hypotheses were put forward: first, given that languages differ with respect to the clarity of the noun-verb distinction and…

Three accounts of common ground maintenance make different assumptions about speakers' responsibilities regarding listener-privileged information. Duplicated responsibility requires each interlocutor to assimilate the other's knowledge before designing appropriate utterances. Shared responsibility appeals to least collaborative effort [Clark, H.…

This study explores incremental processing in spoken word recognition in Russian 5- and 6-year-olds and adults using free-viewing eye-tracking. Participants viewed scenes containing pictures of four familiar objects and clicked on a target embedded in a spoken instruction. In the cohort condition, two object names shared identical three-phoneme…

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous…

Evidence from 3 experiments reveals interference effects from structural relationships that are inconsistent with any grammatical parse of the perceived input. Processing disruption was observed when items occurring between a head and a dependent overlapped with either (or both) syntactic or semantic features of the dependent. Effects of syntactic…

This study looks at whether conventional and anomalous metaphors are processed in different locations in the brain while being read when compared with a literal condition in Mandarin Chinese. We find that conventional metaphors differ from the literal condition with a slight amount of increased activation in the right inferior temporal gyrus. In…

Six experiments explored how native and non-native Spanish speakers process article-noun sequences in real time, using eye movements as a response measure. Can listeners use gender-marked articles ("la" and "el", the feminine and masculine forms of "the") to rapidly identify familiar and novel nouns? In Experiment 1, adults who learned Spanish as…

The purpose of this paper is to describe a variety of teaching and learning strategies that were used within a classroom of Deaf adults participating in a high school English course as part of an upgrading program. The class was conducted in a bilingual manner; that is, being Deaf and communicating with American Sign Language (ASL) was not…