Accounts of how research capacity in education can be developed often make reference to electronic networks and online resources. This paper presents a theoretically driven analysis of the role of one such resource, an online archive of educational research studies that includes not only digitised collections of original documents but also videos…

The ability to mentally simulate possible futures ("episodic future thinking") is of fundamental importance for various aspects of human cognition and behavior, but precisely how humans construct mental representations of future events is still essentially unknown. We suggest that episodic future thoughts consist of transitory patterns…

How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements…

The present research tested the hypothesis that the age at which one's first language (L1) words are learned influences language processing in bilinguals. Prior research on bilingual language processing by Kroll and colleagues has suggested that memory links between L1 words and conceptual representations are stronger than memory links between…

Verbal working memory (VWM), the ability to maintain and manipulate representations of speech sounds over short periods, is held by some influential models to be independent from the systems responsible for language production and comprehension [e.g., Baddeley, A. D. "Working memory, thought, and action." New York, NY: Oxford University Press,…

This research investigates the ability of adult proficient readers to predict words that have been fully or partially deleted, without being able to read what came after the blank. Predictions were analyzed for accuracy and if inaccurate for their grammatical nature, syntactic and semantic acceptability, and retention of the author's meaning.…

This study investigated the role of verbal working memory on bilingual lexical disambiguation. Spanish-English bilinguals read sentences that ended in either a cognate or noncognate homonym or a control word. Participants decided whether follow-up target words were related in meaning to the sentences. On critical trials, sentences biased the…

In the development of their semantic networks, bilinguals can be influenced by the levels of proficiency they have in their second language (L2) and by the age at which they acquired the language. Two exercises, one in word association and one in forced-choice decision-making, were used to test whether the pattern of relative awareness of thematic…

Many studies suggest that long-term lexical-semantic knowledge is an important determinant of verbal short-term memory (STM) performance. This study explored the impact of emotional valence on word immediate serial recall as a further lexico-semantic long-term memory (LTM) effect on STM. This effect is particularly interesting for the study of…

Vocabulary development is a critical goal for early childhood education. However, it is difficult for researchers and teachers to determine whether this goal is being met, given the limitations of current assessment tools. These tools tend to view word knowledge dichotomously--as right or wrong. A clear sense of children's depth of semantic…

The vast majority of word meanings are learned simply by extracting them from context rather than by rote memorization or explicit instruction. Although this skill is remarkable, little is known about the brain mechanisms involved. In the present study, ERPs were recorded as participants read stories in which pseudowords were presented multiple…

Early acquired words are processed faster than later acquired words in lexical and semantic tasks. Demonstrating such age of acquisition (AoA) effects beyond reasonable doubt, and then investigating those effects empirically, is complicated by the natural correlation between AoA and other word properties such as frequency and imageability. In an…

This thesis explores finite control in Korean. An overview of the previous studies of control shows that the mainstream literature on control has consistently argued that referential dependence between an overt matrix argument and an embedded null subject is characteristic of non-finite clauses which contain a PRO subject. Moreover, although some…

Since the seminal work of Gildea and Jurafsky (2000), semantic role labeling (SRL) researchers have been trying to determine the appropriate syntactic/semantic knowledge and statistical algorithms to tackle the challenges in SRL. In search of the appropriate knowledge, SRL researchers shifted from constituency grammar to dependency grammar around…

This paper aims to clarify and discuss the reasons and limits of three rather popular metaphors that are used to speak of today's complex social and cultural fabric, through references to cultural anthropology, biology and genetics. In her analysis, the author considers not only the linguistic and semantic dimension of each metaphor, but also the…