Face processing changes when a face is learned with personally relevant information. In a five-day learning paradigm, faces were presented with rich semantic stories that conveyed personal information about the faces. Event-related potentials were recorded before and after learning during a passive viewing task. When faces were novel, we observed…

If stimulus equivalence is a model of meaning, abstract stimuli should acquire the meaning of meaningful stimuli equivalent to them. In Experiment 1, college students matched faces expressing emotions to arbitrary pictures, forming three classes of equivalent stimuli, each comprising an emotional expression and three arbitrary pictures. Semantic…

R. Sekuler, P. Tynan, and E. Levinson (1973) found that when 2 characters are presented side-by-side with a short onset asynchrony, subjectively they often appear in a "first-left, then-right" order. The authors of this article conducted 6 experiments in which observers judged the temporal order (TOJs) in which 2 digits were presented. They found…

Previous research has shown that time to name single-digit Arabic numbers is about 15 ms slower when naming trials are interleaved with simple multiplication (e.g., state product of 2 x 3) than when naming digits is interleaved with magnitude comparison (e.g., state larger; 2 [arrow up] 3). To explain this phenomenon, J. I. D. Campbell and A. W.…

Spoken languages are characterized by flexible, multivariate prosodic systems. As a natural language, American Sign Language (ASL), and other sign languages (SLs), are also expected to be characterized in the same way. Artificially created signing systems for classroom use, such as signed English, serve as a contrast to natural sign languages. The…

Studies on complementation in English and other languages have traditionally focused on syntactic issues, most notably on the constituent structures of different complement types. As a result, they have neglected the role of meaning in the choice of different complements. This paper investigates the semantics of complementation within the…

Hobbs [Hobbs, J.R., 1979. "Coherence and coreference." "Cognitive Science" 3, 67-90] claims that the interpretation of inter-sentential anaphors "falls out" as a "by-product" of using a particular coherence relation to integrate two discourse units. The article argues that this is only partly true. Taking the reader's perspective, I suggest that…

Past research on anaphor resolution has investigated the availability of discourse information related to characters that part and reunite. Upon reunion, distant concepts that have been associated with the characters before they separated become more accessible than they were just before the reunion. This phenomenon has been referred to as the…

The term rubric has a long history in English. In education, rubric means a set of criteria for evaluating student work. Rubrics can be valuable in helping teachers ensure that they're teaching the important points in a subject and that their students are learning them.

Strategy effects on word searching in the Japanese letter fluency test were investigated using the Near-infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). Participants were given a Japanese letter fluency test and they were classified into two types of strategy users, based on analysis of their recorded verbal responses. One group, AIUEO-order strategy users, employed…

It is well established that faces, in contrast to objects, are categorized as fast or faster at the individual level (e.g., Bill Clinton) than at the basic-level (e.g., human face). This subordinate-shift from basic-level categorization has been considered an outcome of visual expertise with processing faces. However, in the present study we found…

When unimpaired participants name pictures quickly, they produce many perseverations that bear a semantic relation to the target, especially when the pictures are blocked by category. Evidence suggests that the temporal properties of these "semantic perseverations" may differ from typical lexical perseverations in aphasia. To explore this, we…

Fodor and Pylyshyn [Fodor, J. A., & Pylyshyn, Z. W. (1988). Connectionism and cognitive architecture: A critical analysis. "Cognition," 28, 3-71] argue that connectionist models are not able to display systematicity other than by implementing a classical symbol system. This claim entails that connectionism cannot compete with the classical…

We test the claim that acquiring a mass-count language, like English, causes speakers to think differently about entities in the world, relative to speakers of classifier languages like Japanese. We use three tasks to assess this claim: object-substance rating, quantity judgment, and word extension. Using the first two tasks, we present evidence…

Changes in oscillatory brain activity have been related to perceptual and cognitive processes such as selective attention and memory matching. Here we examined brain oscillations, measured with electroencephalography (EEG), during a semantic speech processing task that required both lexically mediated memory matching and selective attention.…