This study considers the features of Altai cultural semantics through the cognitive materialism of culture basing on the assumption that the linguistic structures are part of culture, and the metaphorical linguistic use is the basis for cultural cognitive structures forming. Altai text is considered as a structural unit of Altai cognitive…

Whether morpheme-based processing extends to relatively unproductive derived words remains a matter of debate. Although whole-word storage and access has been proposed for some derived words, such as Japanese de-adjectival nominals with the unproductive ("-mi") suffix (e.g., Hagiwara et al. in "Language" 75:739-763, 1999),…

The so-called depth charge sentences (e.g., "no head injury is too trivial to be ignored") were investigated in a comprehension experiment measuring both whether participants understood the stimuli and how certain they were of their interpretation. The experiment revealed that three factors influence the difficulty of depth charge type…

A central question in language acquisition is how children build linguistic representations that allow them to generalize verbs from one construction to another (e.g., "The boy gave a present to the girl" ? "The boy gave the girl a present"), whilst appropriately constraining those generalizations to avoid non-adultlike errors…

Semantic categories in the world's languages often reflect a historical process of "chaining": A name for one referent is extended to a conceptually related referent, and from there on to other referents, producing a chain of exemplars that all bear the same name. The beginning and end points of such a chain might in principle be rather…

This piece of work proposes to descriptively investigate the structures of complex verbs in Meiteilon. The categorization of such verbs is based on the nature of semantic and syntactic functions of a lexeme or verbal lexeme. A lexeme or verbal lexeme in Meiteilon may have multifunctional properties in the nature of occurrence. Such lexical items…

The present study applies a multidimensional methodological approach to the study of the acquisition of morphosyntax. It focuses on evaluating the degree of productivity of an infrequent subject-verb agreement pattern in the early acquisition of French and considers the explanatory role played by factors such as input frequency, semantic…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to investigate the role that cospeech gestures play in lexical production in preschool-age children with expressive specific language impairment (E-SLI). Method: Fifteen preschoolers with E-SLI and 2 groups of typically developing (TD) children matched for chronological age (n = 15, CATD group) and for…

The World Wide Web enables an easy, instant access to a huge quantity of information. Over the last few decades, a number of improvements have been achieved that helped the web reach its current state. However, the current Internet links documents together without understanding them, and thus, makes the content of web only human-readable rather…

AutoTutor uses conversational intelligent agents in learning environments. One of the major challenges in developing AutoTutor applications is to assess students' natural language answers to AutoTutor questions. We investigated an AutoTutor dataset with 3358 student answers to 49 AutoTutor questions. In comparisons with human ratings, we found…

Category-based induction is a hallmark of mature cognition; however, little is known about its origins. This study evaluated the hypothesis that category-based induction is related to semantic development. Computational studies suggest that early on there is little differentiation among concepts, but learning and development lead to increased…

Research on reported speech is old, but scholars working in this field are inclined to see its roots in Davidson's (1968) paratactic account of indirect reports. Although Davidson aimed at a "truth-conditional" theory of indirect reports which could challenge ideational, use, and psychological theories, his paratactic view--of which the…

San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language (CSL) is a group of six family-based signed language varieties in rural Mexico. This study analyzes the variation of iconic patterns of CSL signs with respect to three semantic categories, tools, food, and animals, using an Embodied Cognitive Phonology framework. Signs are organized around iconic prototypes,…

This article reports on a small, classroom-based study exploring the use of a task to teach the passive in an English for specific purposes context. The participants were 34 adult Japanese male learners, all security professionals, ranging in proficiency level from elementary to advanced. The task was designed to highlight the form--meaning…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…