Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to…

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject…

This research tests whether mood affects semantic processing during discourse comprehension by facilitating integration of information congruent with moods' valence. Participants in happy, sad, or neutral moods listened to stories with positive or negative endings during EEG recording. N400 peak amplitudes showed mood congruence for happy and sad…

Purpose: This research investigated children's ability to acquire semantic and syntactic knowledge of derived nominals and derived adjectives in the context of short passages. The study also investigated the relation of morphological awareness and the ability to acquire knowledge of derived words in context. Method: A total of 106 children in…

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence…

Some models of semantic memory claim that items from living and nonliving domains have different feature-type profiles. Data from feature generation and perceptual modality rating tasks were compared to evaluate this claim. Results from two living (animals, fruits/vegetables) and two nonliving (tools, vehicles) categories showed that…

Previous research on the lateralization of memory errors suggests that the right hemisphere's tendency to produce more memory errors than the left hemisphere reflects hemispheric differences in semantic activation. However, all prior research that has examined the lateralization of memory errors has used self-paced recognition judgments. Because…

We present three event-related potential studies that investigated the contribution of givenness and position-induced topicality (what a sentence is about) to information processing. The studies compared two types of referential expressions (given and inferred noun phrases (NPs)) in distinct sentential positions. The data revealed…

In the present work, we conducted a series of experiments to explore the processing stages required to name numerals presented in different notations. To this end, we used the semantic blocking paradigm previously used in psycholinguist studies. We found a facilitative effect of the semantic blocked context relative to the mixed context for Arabic…

In natural languages, the mapping from surface form to meaning is often quite complex, and hence the acquisition of the phenomena at the boundary between syntax and semantics has been one of the central issues in current acquisition research. This study addresses the issue of whether children have adult-like knowledge of LF "wh"-movement and its…

Parafoveal word processing was examined during Korean reading. Twenty-four native speakers of Korean read sentences in two conditions while their eye movements were being monitored. The boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975) was used to create a mismatch between characters displayed before and after an eye movement contingent display change. In the…

Although it is assumed that semantics is a critical component of visual word recognition, there is still much that we do not understand. One recent way of studying semantic processing has been in terms of semantic neighbourhood (SN) density, and this research has shown that semantic neighbours facilitate lexical decisions. However, it is not clear…

In this paper we describe a special form of future thinking, termed "episodic foresight" and its relation with episodic and semantic memory. We outline the methodologies that have largely been developed in the last five years to assess this capacity in young children and non-human animals. Drawing on Tulving's definition of episodic and semantic…

In this study we investigated whether the human brain distinguishes between telic events that necessarily entail a specified endpoint (e.g., "reaching"), and atelic events with no delimitation or final state (e.g., "chasing"). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the patterns of neural response associated with verbs denoting…

We begin with a theoretical overview of the concepts of recollection and familiarity, focusing, in the spirit of this special issue, on the important contributions made by Andrew Mayes. In particular, we discuss the issue of when the generation of semantically-related information in response to a retrieval cue might be experienced as recollection…