The research investigated the time course of integrative semantic processing during sentence processing. Reading time was measured on sentences containing an NP composed of an adjective and a noun whose combined meaning was plausible or anomalous (Experiment 1) or was typical or atypical (Experiment 2). The noun in the NP was either plural or…

The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7-23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green.…

This study examines the relationship between ESL learners' depth of vocabulary knowledge, their lexical inferencing strategy use, and their success in deriving word meaning from context. Participants read a passage containing 10 unknown words and attempted to derive the meanings of the unknown words from context. Introspective think-aloud…

Using a think-aloud procedure this study explored why certain vocabulary interventions are more facilitative for word learning than others. Second Language (L2) readers' "quality" and "quantity" (Hulstijn, 2001) of word processing strategies were recorded to determine the effect on (a) establishing and (b) strengthening lexical…

This study explores emerging lexical processes that may be the foundation for children's acquisition of morphological knowledge and the relation of these processes to reading comprehension. First and third graders were given two tasks involving lexical analysis of morphologically complex words. Two years later, they were given a measure of…

It has been known for several decades that young children have difficulties with universal sentences. In this article, I present an analysis of the main errors that have been reported in the literature. My proposal is based on an old idea, namely, that children's errors are caused by a noncanonical mapping from syntactic form to semantic…

This study examined the way successful college students with LD compensated for their deficits in phonological processing. Successful was defined as average or above-average grades in college coursework. The study compared the cognitive and metacognitive performance of students with and without LD (N = 40). Although achievement levels for both…

The authors used 2 "visual-world" eye-tracking experiments to examine lexical access using Dutch constructions in which the verb did or did not place semantic constraints on its subsequent subject noun phrase. In Experiment 1, fixations to the picture of a cohort competitor (overlapping with the onset of the referent's name, the subject) did not…

Emerging data support the construct validity of component process variables of learning and memory within the Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-Revised (HVLT-R; Brandt & Benedict, 2001); however, the test-retest reliabilities of such measures are heretofore largely unknown. This study reveals generally modest-to-low 1-year test-retest stability for…

Summary Street is educational software based on latent semantic analysis (LSA), a computer method for representing the content of texts. The classroom trial described here demonstrates the power of LSA to support an educational goal by providing automatic feedback on the content of students' summaries. Summary Street provides this feedback in an…

This study investigates the avoidance of English phrasal verbs by Chinese learners. Six groups of Chinese learners (intermediate and advanced; a total of 70) took one of 3 tests multiplechoice, translation, or recall, which included literal and figurative phrasal verbs, while 15 native speakers took the multiple-choice test. The results show that…

The use of BE as an auxiliary verb with intransitive verbs has declined in all the Romance languages over the past five centuries. Today, Spanish and Portuguese use only HAVE, in Catalan and Romanian BE occurs in marginal contexts, and in French, BE is used with approximately 40 verbs. Italian is a notable exception, since BE is still used as the…

This study explores the ways in which academic writers employ expressions of attitude in the construction of evaluative stance in the introductory sections of research papers. The study draws on the theoretical base of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) (Halliday, 1994, Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004), and in particular on Appraisal theory as a…

The study addressed two findings in the creativity literature that show, on the one hand, that bipolar disorder and other clinical dysfunctions are overrepresented among eminently creative people, and that positive affect is positively associated with creativity. The central hypothesis of the study was that emotional intelligence could be an…

Developmental changes in children's verbal fluency were explored in this study. One hundred and forty children aged from 7 to 16 completed four verbal fluency tasks, each with a different the production criterion (letter, sound, semantic, and free). The age differences were analyzed both in terms of number of words produced, and clustering,…