Two lexical-decision experiments investigated the effects of semantic priming and stimulus intensity when target location varied and was cued by an abrupt onset. In Experiment 1, the spatial cue was a good predictor of target location, and in Experiment 2 it was not. The results indicate that word recognition processes were postponed until spatial…

The aim of this study was to bring to the surface the strategic use of imitative processes in the context of a 2-route model: (a) direct imitation, used in reproducing new, meaningless actions, and (b) imitation based on stored semantic knowledge of familiar meaningful actions. Three experiments were carried out with healthy participants who…

In 3 experiments, the authors examined the role of knowledge activation in the suppression of contextually irrelevant meanings for ambiguous homographs. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants with greater baseball knowledge, regardless of reading skill, more quickly suppressed the irrelevant meaning of ambiguous words in baseball-related, but not…

The authors investigated whether the meaning of visually presented words is activated faster for early-acquired words than for late-acquired words. They addressed the issue using the semantic Simon paradigm. In this paradigm, participants are instructed to decide whether a stimulus word is printed in uppercase or lowercase letters. However, they…

Studies investigating orthographic similarity effects in semantic tasks have produced inconsistent results. The authors investigated orthographic similarity effects in animacy decision and in contrast with previous studies, they took semantic congruency into account. In Experiments 1 and 2, performance to a target (cat) was better if a previously…

Vocabulary is important, yet instruction in word meaning is often tedious and ineffective. This article presents motivating and time-efficient strategies for introducing and practicing the meaning vocabulary students will encounter across subject areas and texts in school. In the "Semantic Impressions" word-introduction strategy, students write a…

Two experiments were carried out to examine how adult readers of English learn to acquire the orthographic structure and function of Chinese characters selected from reading material in their first-semester college course in Chinese. The first experiment, an online lexical decision task, demonstrated that the learners quickly acquired knowledge…

Two main traditions now operate in philosophy, influencing the choice about which theories are appropriate in library and information science (LIS). A third tradition, known as process philosophy, gives prominence to human knowledge as an organically integrated, self-sustaining whole, thereby opening another avenue for the effort to revitalize…

This study investigates whether or not the representation of lexical stress information can be primed during speech production. In four experiments, we attempted to prime the stress position of bisyllabic target nouns (picture names) having initial and final stress with auditory prime words having either the same or different stress as the target…

The experiment reported here investigated the sensitivity of concreteness effects to orthographic neighborhood density and frequency in the visual lexical decision task. The concreteness effect was replicated with a sample of concrete and abstract words that were not matched for orthographic neighborhood features and in which concrete words turned…

I show how a conversational process that takes simple, intuitively meaningful steps may be understood as a sophisticated computation that derives the richly detailed, complex representations implicit in our knowledge of language. To develop the account, I argue that natural language is structured in a way that lets us formalize grammatical…

A series of self-paced reading time experiments was performed to assess how characteristics of noun phrases (NPs) contribute to the difference in processing difficulty between object- and subject-extracted relative clauses. Structural semantic characteristics of the NP in the embedded clause (definite vs. indefinite and definite vs. generic) did…

An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

This paper proposes an ontology mapping-based framework that allows searching for learning resources using multiple ontologies. The present applications of ontologies in e-learning use various ontologies (eg, domain, curriculum, context), but they do not give a solution on how to interoperate e-learning systems based on different ontologies. The…

Both cerebral hemispheres contain phonological, orthographic and semantic representations of words, however there are between-hemisphere differences in the relative engagement and specialization of the different representations. Taking orthographic processing for example, previous studies suggest that orthographic neighbourhood size (N) has…