What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of "or." We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on "or" uses.…

Lexical ambiguity--the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses--is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to…

Purpose: This study investigated the dimensionality of language in bilingual children using measures of semantics and morphosyntax in English and Spanish. Method: Participants included 112 Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4-8 years from a wide range of language abilities and dominance profiles. Using measures of semantics and morphosyntax…

Computational and animal models suggest that the unlearning or pruning of incorrect meanings matters for word learning. However, it is currently unclear how such pruning occurs during word learning and to what extent it depends on supervised and unsupervised learning. In two experiments (N[subscript 1] = 40; N[subscript 2] = 42), adult…

Children's early grammatical constructions, e.g., SVO, exhibit a learning curve with cumulative verb types (CVT) increasing exponentially. According to Ninio (2006), the fact that learning curves, though nonlinear, can be modelled by a continuous regression suggests instant generalisation. Moreover, differences in initial verbs across children…

The relevance of studying the theory and practice of building the reputation of higher educational institutions is of an enduring nature due to the fixed cyclical nature of their work process and the high degree of specificity of the results obtained. In the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, the rethinking and development of…

Learning the meaning of a verb is challenging because learners need to resolve two types of ambiguity: (1) word-referent mapping--finding the correct referent event of a verb, and (2) word-meaning mapping--inferring the correct meaning of the verb from the referent event (e.g., whether the meaning of an action word is TURNING or TWISTING). The…

It has been reported that children's comprehension of complex structures is affected by temporary ambiguity. Yet, much less is known about its effect on children's comprehension of relative clauses (RCs). To fill this gap, the present study focused on Mandarin RCs, where temporary ambiguity often plays a role in the comprehension of…

The rhizome is like the poem. The growth power of nature and the possibilities of culture simultaneously and reciprocally. It stretches from biological cell and level of particles to our universal dreams and thoughts about and with life. The rhizome as poem is thus a picture and image of the importance of context and movement, production of…

In natural reading, the processing of words in fixation is influenced by semantic information obtained through preview (i.e., the semantic preview effect). Previous studies have confirmed that two types of semantic information exhibit the semantic preview effect: semantic association, which is reflected by the semantic relationship between preview…

Visual working memory (VWM) refers to the temporary storage and manipulation of visual information. Although visually different, objects we view and remember can share the same higher-level category information, such as an apple, orange, and banana all being classified as fruit. We study the influence of category information on VWM, focusing on…

Individuals diagnosed with autism are often thought to face challenges in comprehensive metaphors, even for the individuals without intellectual impairment. This study is to investigate the features and mechanisms of metaphor integration in the process of metaphor comprehension in real-time and context-free situations in autism, as well as the…

This study investigates how quantifiers are used strategically to serve different argumentative goals. We report two experiments on how English speakers describe the results of school exams when being instructed to frame their descriptions either as a good or bad outcome. Experiment 1 shows that participants have clear preferences for specific…

Often, eye-tracking researchers define areas of interest (AOIs) to analyze eye-tracking data. Although AOIs can be defined with systematic methods, researchers in organic chemistry education eye-tracking research often define them manually, as the semantic composition of the stimulus must be considered. Still, defining appropriate AOIs during data…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to determine if the Vocabulary Acquisition and Usage for Late Talkers (VAULT) intervention could be efficaciously applied to a new treatment target: words a child neither understood nor said. We also assessed whether the type of context variability used to encourage semantic learning (i.e., action or object)…