Measures the impact of cross-cultural differences on language learners' interpretation of imageable idioms--idioms that have associated conventional images. French-speaking students were asked to guess the meaning of unfamiliar English idioms without contextual clues. Results invite teachers and learners to approach the semantics of imageable…

Presents the case for a mapping theory of developmental language impairment, which branches into a theory that specific language impairment arises from impaired phonological processing and the consequent disruption of the mapping process through which the words and sentence structure of language are established. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the basic elements of a global cognitive theory for information retrieval (IR) interaction from a cognitive point of view. Within this framework are outlined the principles underlying the concept of polyrepresentation applied simultaneously to the user's cognitive space and the information space of IR systems. Contains 95 references.…

Four studies examined the influence of essentialist information such as internal properties and perceptual similarity on 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds' interpretations of labels. Results suggested that children have essentialist beliefs about animals, but not about artifacts, and that these beliefs interact with children's assumptions about word meaning…

Some research has posited a natural order of acquisition of English grammatical morphemes common to all learners of English as a Second Language. This meta-analysis investigated whether a combination of five determinants--perceptual salience, semantic complexity, morphophonological regularity, syntactic category, and frequency) accounts for a…

Examined whether phonological information was activated automatically in processing two kanji compound words. In one experiment, participants judged whether pairs of words were homophones, while others judged whether pairs were synonyms. In the second, participants were asked to make one of the two judgments, as in experiment one. Findings support…

Notes young children's fast mapping ability for word and fact learning. Finds children's extension of a new word to novel objects from same category but lack of extension for new facts, as replicated by Waxman and Booth, unsurprising. Poses more interesting question: is word learning done solely through more general cognitive systems or through…

Exploits the diachronic potential of vantage theory with psychologists' notion of framing. Compares vantage theory and cognitive grammar, based on the analysis of a particular problem in the history of French, the development of the negator "pas" (not) from a full noun. (Author/VWL)

Examines whether children make use of the conceptual link between animacy and agency when interpreting the verb "move" in English. Hypothesized that, for inanimates, children would allow "move" to have a patient subject but not so for inanimates. Subjects were 3- and 4-year-olds and adults who viewed video clips of animals or…

Proposes an account of linking patterns that does away with intermediary mechanisms such as thematic or actor/undergoer hierarchies. Shows that the generalizations a linking theory needs to capture can be modeled via the same mechanisms as other lexical generalizations, using conditions specified within the hierarchy of word classes. (Author/VWL)

Explores the function of items of procedural vocabulary as signals of conceptual relations in scientific discourse. Procedural vocabulary consists of lexical items that do not belong to any particular schema. Develops a taxonomy of procedural items in terms of the contextual relations they create between content-bearing words, classifying the…

Reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the aspectual conditioning of a morphosyntactic construction within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. (Author/VWL)

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

This study asked whether aphasic adults show different noun/verb retrieval patterns based upon their clinical categorization as fluent or nonfluent. Participants selected either the noun or the verb meaning of target words, as presented in three contexts. The framework was that nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) are processed, stored,…

The study investigated gender differences in resting EEG (in three individually determined narrow [alpha] frequency bands) related to the level of general and emotional intelligence. Brain activity of males decreased with the level of general intelligence, whereas an opposite pattern of brain activity was observed in females. This difference was…