This paper draws from cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience to develop a preliminary similarity-choice theory of how people allocate attention among information patches on webpages while completing search tasks in complex informational websites. Study 1 applied stepwise multiple regression to a large dataset and showed that success rate…

We investigated the impact of readers' visuo-spatial (VS) capacity on their incidental learning of page links during the exploration of simple hierarchical hypertextual documents. Forty-three university students were asked to explore a series of hypertexts for a limited period of time. Then the participants were asked to recall the layout and the…

This article investigates how adult Korean-speaking learners of English interpret English definite descriptions ("the book," "the books") and demonstrative descriptions ("that book," "those books"). Korean lacks articles, but has demonstratives, and it is hypothesized that transfer leads learners to (initially) equate definites with…

Semantic differential instruments are often used to assess fluent speakers' attitudes toward people who stutter (PWS). Such instruments are prone to response bias and often lack the power to explain respondents' general impressions of PWS. To address these concerns 149 fluent university students completed an open-ended questionnaire in which they…

This dissertation proposes a structured semantic account of the polysemous Russian verbal prefix "po-" within the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and using corpus linguistic methods. While scholarly consensus identifies five meanings for "po-" and an additional meaning in conjunction with the suffix--"yva"--, the relationships among…

This dissertation examines the semantic interpretation of various types of DPs in so-called concealed-question (CQ) constructions, as "Bill's phone number" in the sentence "John knows Bill's phone number". The peculiar characteristic of DP-CQs is that they are interpreted as having the meaning of an embedded question. So, for instance, the…

This work focuses on the licensing conditions and logical structure of understood-argument constructions, or complement-drop constructions, in English. There are two main types of such arguments: Indefinite Understood Arguments (IUA) and Definite Understood Arguments (DUA). IUA readings occur in such cases in "He ate, He cooked". In such cases,…

Three experiments investigated facilitation in synonym decisions as a function of prior synonym decision trials that were either identical or semantically related. Experiment 1 demonstrated that semantically related prime trials produced less facilitation than identical prime trials, but facilitation from both persisted over 14 intervening trials.…

On being told "John or Mary will come", one might infer that "not both" of them will come. Yet the semantics of "or" is compatible with a situation where both John and Mary come. Inferences of this type, which enrich the semantics of "or" from an "inclusive" to an "exclusive" interpretation, have been extensively studied in linguistic pragmatics.…

Is morphology a discrete and independent element of lexical structure or does it simply reflect a fine-tuning of the system to the statistical correlation that exists among orthographic and semantic properties of words? Hebrew provides a unique opportunity to examine morphological processing in the brain because of its rich morphological system.…

Rob MacLaury's Vantage Theory, VT, models the way in which a cognizer constructs, recalls, uses, and modifies a category in terms of point of view or vantage. Alongside of VT, there is place for the kind of semantic specification found in the lexicon. VT2 [Allan, Keith, 2002. "Vantage theory, VT2, and number." "Language Sciences" 24(5-6), 679-703…

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is crucially has been found to be involved in syntactic processing of various kinds. This study investigates the cortical effects of two types of syntactic processes: (i) Reconstruction in ellipsis (recovery of left-out material given by context, "More people have been to Paris than" [...] "to…

This paper revisits the effect of lexical ambiguity in word recognition, which has been controversial as previous research reported advantage, disadvantage, and null effects. We discuss factors that were not consistently treated in previous research (e.g., the level of lexical ambiguity investigated, parts of speech of the experimental stimuli,…

To further our understanding of the nature of the form-function mapping in anaphoric paradigms, this study investigated the referential properties of strong pronouns (long pronouns) in Estonian. Cross-linguistically, 2 main accounts of the long-short distinction have been proposed: the salience account (long pronouns refer to less salient…

Research on children's computation of meanings involving the focus operator "only" has provided an equivocal conclusion as to whether children's semantic representation of "only" is adult-like. The present study discusses the importance of assessing children's knowledge about "only" in light of its semantic interaction with other logical words in…