This study uses the morphological family size effect as a tool for exploring the degree of isomorphism in the networks of morphologically related words in the Hebrew and Dutch mental lexicon. Hebrew and Dutch are genetically unrelated, and they structure their morphologically complex words in very different ways. Two visual lexical decision…

Spaced retrieval (SR) has recently been modified to target anomia in persons with aphasia (PWA). It relies on a strict management of the inter-stimulus interval (ISI) where the time between stimulus presentations is doubled or halved based on response accuracy. Although SR is successful in treating anomia, it remains to be studied whether the…

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a…

Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster…

Background: Orthographic-motor integration refers to the way in which orthographic knowledge is integrated with fine-motor demands of handwriting. A strong relationship has shown to exist between orthographic-motor integration and students' ability to produce creative and well-structured written text (De La Paz & Graham, 1995). This…

Discussion abounds in the literature as to whether aphasia is a deficit of linguistic competence or linguistic performance and, if it is a performance deficit, what are its precise mechanisms. Considerable evidence suggests that alteration of nonlinguistic factors can affect language performance in aphasia, a finding that raises questions about…

This study examined the extent to which readers integrate information from related texts as a function of both top-down evaluation processes and bottom-up resonance. In Experiment 1, participants read and recalled ambiguous texts about events that were preceded by a descriptive text (primer) of the event. Participants' recall of the ambiguous…

This study examined the interaction between speech perception and sentential context among 13 poor readers and 49 good readers in grades one to three. Children's performance was examined on tasks assessing expressive and receptive vocabulary, reading skill, phonological awareness, pseudoword repetition, and phoneme identification. Good readers…

Over the centuries, English has shown a remarkable flexibility in borrowing foreign words, which has resulted in a very cosmopolitan vocabulary. This study examines some of the latest Arabic loanwords frequently used in the context of the war in Iraq. The nature of those words, their connotations, and the semantic shifts that some of them have…

The present study investigates the developmental aspect of the revised hierarchical model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) concerning the access to the conceptual store from the second language (L2). We manipulated the level of proficiency and age of L2 acquisition. We tested Spanish-Catalan bilinguals (49 early proficient bilinguals, 28 late proficient…

An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, Tomasello (2000) suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of…

Event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that emotional stimuli elicit greater amplitude late positive-polarity potentials (LPPs) than neutral stimuli. This effect has been attributed to arousal, but emotional stimuli are also more semantically coherent than uncategorized neutral stimuli. ERPs were recorded during encoding of positive,…

Children with language impairments demonstrate a broad range of semantic difficulties, including problems with new word acquisition, storage and organization of known words, and lexical access/retrieval. Unfortunately, assessments of children's semantic skills are often limited to measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary size. As a result,…

Core symptoms of Tourette's syndrome (TS) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may be attributed to an impairment in inhibitory control. Neuropsychological studies have addressed inhibition in both disorders, but findings have been inconsistent. The aim of this study was to examine cognitive inhibition, using a semantic Simon effect paradigm,…

This study examined linguistic recasts provided by 16 early childhood educators to preschool children learning English as a second language (EL2). Recasts are semantic and syntactic revisions of children's utterances. The educator-child interactions were filmed during book reading and play dough activities with small groups of four children, one…