Provides a complex analysis of the semiotic relationship between a word and the potential meaning that a word carries. Discusses Chinese words as a form, creating and carrying a venue for broad philosophical interpretation. (Author/VWL)

Investigated the effects of semantic predictability on children's preservation of the /t/-/d/ phonemic voice contrast. Children in three age groups completed testing. Twelve adults acted as controls. There were age-related effects in the influence of semantic predictability on the preservation of a phonemic voice contrast. Differences produced by…

This paper tests two claims about the thematic roles Agent and Patient: first, that they can be decomposed into more primitive features, as laid out in Dowty's (1991) Proto-Roles Hypothesis; and second, that these properties can be inferred directly from the grammatical roles subject and object. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants rated the…

The main objective of this study is to illustrate how adaptation to linguistic limitations takes place in a specific activity and is affected by factors pertaining to the social activity or the individuals. A man with aphasia is compared to an adult immigrant L2 learner. An argumentative role play was video-recorded, transcribed and analysed. Both…

Recent evidence indicates that task and subject variables that are associated with increased interaction between the left and right cerebral hemispheres result in enhanced performance on tests of episodic memory. The current study looked at the effects of increased interhemispheric interaction on false memories using a verbal converging semantic…

The present experiments represent a phenomenon in which people experienced an illusion of knowing such that they were overconfident in their ability to remember information they subsequently were unable to recall. Semantic associates of cues served as targets and were studied during the original and interpolated study phases of a retroactive…

There is disagreement within both linguistics and psycholinguistics concerning the use of unaccented third person pronouns to refer to implicit referents. Some researchers (e.g., Erku & Gundel, 1987) argue that it is impossible or highly marked, while others (e.g., Yule, 1982) maintain that it is not only acceptable but commonly used in normal…

Using an auditory semantic priming paradigm, the present study investigated the abilities of left-hemisphere-damaged (LHD) non-fluent aphasic, right-hemisphere-damaged (RHD) and normal control individuals to access, out of context, the multiple meanings of three types of ambiguous words, namely homonyms (e.g., ''punch''), metonymies (e.g.,…

Conveying complex mental scenarios is at the heart of human language. Advances in cognitive linguistics suggest this is mediated by an ability to activate cognitive systems involved in non-linguistic processing of spatial information. In this fMRI-study, we compare sentences with a concrete spatial meaning to sentences with an abstract meaning.…

The compensatory-encoding model (CEM) postulates that readers whose decoding of words or verbal working memory capacities is inefficient can compensate so that literal comprehension of text is not deleteriously affected. However, the use of compensations may draw cognitive resources away from higher level reading activities such as comprehension…

The Academic Word List (Coxhead 2000) consists of 570 word families that are frequent and wide ranging in academic texts. It was created by counting the frequency, range, and evenness of spread of word forms in a specially constructed academic corpus. This study examines the words in the Academic Word List (AWL) to see if the existence of…

The authors argue that the meaning through syntax (MTS) model proposed by G. McKoon and R. Ratcliff fails to account for the comprehension of sentences with reduced relative clauses. First, the theory's core assumptions regarding verb-based event representations and how they link to constructions are incompatible with well-established analyses…

The "meaning through syntax" framework proposes lexical, decompositional representations of verb meaning. For several classes of verbs, the proposed representations have successfully predicted 2 types of data that pattern differently: the syntactic structures of sentences that are naturally produced by speakers and writers and the comprehension…

It has been shown that harmonic structure may influence the processing of phonemes whatever the extent of participants' musical expertise [Bigand, E., Tillmann, B., Poulin, B., D'Adamo, D. A., & Madurell, F. (2001). The effect of harmonic context on phoneme monitoring in vocal music. "Cognition," 81, B11-B20]. The present study goes a step further…

Models of bilingual speech production generally assume that translation equivalent lexical nodes share a common semantic representation. Though this type of architecture is highly desirable on both theoretical and empirical grounds, it could create difficulty at the point of lexical selection. If two translation equivalent lexical nodes are…