To function well in an unpredictable environment using unreliable components, a system must have a high degree of robustness. Robustness is fundamental to biological systems and is an objective in the design of engineered systems such as airplane engines and buildings. Cognitive systems, like biological and engineered systems, exist within…

Semantic priming effects are popularly explained in terms of an automatic spreading activation process, according to which the activation of a node in a semantic network spreads automatically to interconnected nodes, preactivating a semantically related word. It is expected from this account that semantic priming effects should be routinely…

This study investigated the interpretation of the logical words "some" and "every…or…" in 4-15-year-old high-functioning Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Children with ASD performed similarly to typical controls in demonstrating semantic knowledge of simple sentences with "some", and…

Computational modeling and eye-tracking were used to investigate how phonological and semantic information interact to influence the time course of spoken word recognition. We extended our recent models (Chen & Mirman, 2012; Mirman, Britt, & Chen, 2013) to account for new evidence that competition among phonological neighbors influences…

Debra Rog presented the 2014 Eleanor Chelimsky Forum address, offering ways to integrate evaluation theory and practice by abundant use of practice examples. These examples illustrate the effective use of the Ladder of Abstraction from semantics, working from the concrete to the abstract and back again.

Information sources such as relational databases, spreadsheets, XML, JSON, and Web APIs contain a tremendous amount of structured data, however, they rarely provide a semantic model to describe their contents. Semantic models of data sources capture the intended meaning of data sources by mapping them to the concepts and relationships defined by a…

This paper examines the usage frequency of phonetically reduced modals (i.e. "gonna," "wanna," "gotta") in Present-day English. It is assumed that in distinct sociolinguistic and discourse contexts, the use of reduced modals is dynamic. To collect the data, there are five corpora used in this study, "Corpus of…

Recent research investigating embedded stem priming effects with the masked priming paradigm and pseudoword primes (e.g., "quickify"--"quick") has shown that priming effects can be obtained even when the embedded target word is followed by a non-morphological ending (e.g., "quickald"--"quick"). Here we…

Bilingual children's reading as a function of age of first bilingual language exposure (AoE) was examined. Bilingual (varied AoE) and monolingual children (N = 421) were compared in their English language and reading abilities (6-10 years) using phonological awareness, semantic knowledge, and reading tasks. Structural equation modeling was applied…

Previous research has shown that children demonstrate similar sentence processing reflexes to those observed in adults, but they have difficulties revising an erroneous initial interpretation when they process garden-path sentences, passives, and "wh"-questions. We used the visual-world paradigm to examine children's use of syntactic and…

For the purpose of achieving a successful communication, issues such as the appropriateness of speech acts and face saving become essential. Therefore, it is very important to achieve a high level of pragmatic competence in speech acts. Bearing this in mind, this study was conducted to investigate the preferred refusal strategies Kurdish and…

This study examines the proposition that second language learners tend to map second language (L2) lexical forms onto the existing semantic content of their first language (L1) translations rather than creating a separate semantic network for the second language. To test this, the participants (n=9) responded to three semantic judgement tasks. In…

There seems to be a gap in the literature on educational management that focuses on school image and its assessment. This paper addresses this issue by reviewing the state of the art regarding school image and communication with the public. School image can be defined as the overall impression and mosaic synthesised from numerous impressions of…

Just as language reflects one's thoughts, the text of science textbooks reflects the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. Therefore, students' learning of scientific language leads to their acquisition of the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. The purposes of this study were to extract scientific semantic network from science…

This study investigated the processes reflected in the widely observed N400 and P600 event-related potential (ERP) effects and tested the hypothesis that the N400 and P600 effects are functionally linked in a tradeoff relationship, constrained in part by individual differences in cognitive ability. Sixty participants read sentences, and ERP…