Theories of reference have been central to analytic philosophy, and two views, "the descriptivist view of reference" and "the causal-historical view of reference," have dominated the field. In this research tradition, theories of reference are assessed by consulting one's intuitions about the reference of terms in hypothetical situations. However,…

How do people think about social status? We investigated the nature of social status and number representations using a semantic distance latency test. In Study 1, 21 college students compared words connoting different social status as well as numbers, which served as a control task. Participants were faster at comparing occupations and numbers…

In addition to information about phonology, morphology and syntax, lexical entries contain semantic information about participants (e.g., Agent). However, the traditional criteria for determining how much participant information is lexically encoded have proved unreliable. We have proposed two semantic criteria (obligatoriness and selectivity)…

Through much is known about the N400 component, an event-related EEG potential that is sensitive to semantic manipulations, it is unclear whether modulations of N400 amplitude reflect automatic processing, controlled processing, or both. We examined this issue using a semantic judgment task that manipulated local and global contextual cues. Word…

Deep dyslexia is an acquired reading disorder that involves the production of semantic errors and the inability to read aloud nonwords successfully. Several explanations for this reading impairment posit multiple loci of damage to account for the various error types produced in deep dyslexia. In contrast, the failure of inhibition hypothesis…

This study investigated how normal subjects and Broca's and Wernicke's aphasics integrate thematic information incrementally using syntax, lexical-semantics, and pragmatics in a simple active declarative sentence. Three priming experiments were conducted using an auditory lexical decision task in which subjects made a lexical decision on a…

This investigation assesses interobserver agreement on conversation analytic (CA) transcription. Four professional CA transcribers spent a maximum of 3 hours transcribing 2.5 minutes of a previously unknown, naturally occurring, mundane telephone call. Researchers unitized transcripts into words, sounds, silences, inbreaths, outbreaths, and laugh…

Children tend to infer that when a speaker uses a new label, the label refers to an unlabeled object rather than one they already know the label for. Does this inference reflect a default assumption that words are mutually exclusive? Or does it instead reflect the result of a pragmatic reasoning process about what the speaker intended? In two…

Two major mechanisms of encoding telicity across languages are either marking the object as exhaustively countable or measurable, or utilizing a specific prefix on the verbal form. English predominantly uses the first mechanism, while Russian mostly utilizes the second. The learning task of an English speaker acquiring Russian, then, is two-fold:…

Four experiments support the hypothesis that syntactically relevant information about verbs is encoded in the lexicon in semantic event templates. A verb's event template represents the participants in an event described by the verb and the relations among the participants. The experiments show that lexical decision times are longer for verbs with…

This study was undertaken to examine the performance of 23 children who stutter (CWS) and 23 children who do not stutter (CWNS) on three metalinguistic tasks. These included two phonological awareness assessment procedures (The Lindamood Auditory Conceptualization Test (LAC) and a Phoneme Reversal Task) and one modified Grammar Judgments Task…

The present research was aimed to reply and extend several recent findings showing qualitatively different behavioral effects produced by words perceived with vs. without awareness. Participants made a semantic categorization task on a target that was preceded by a prime word belonging either to the same (20% of trials) or to a different category…

In this study, 3-year-olds matched on vocabulary score were taught three new shape terms by one of three types of linguistic contrast: corrective, semantic, or referential. A 5-week training paradigm implemented four training sessions and four assessment sessions. Corrective contrast ("This is concave, it is not square," where "square" is the…

Two experiments investigated phonological, derivational-morphological and semantic aspects of grammatical gender assignment in a perception and a production task in German aphasic patients and age-matched controls. The agreement of a gender indicating adjective (feminine, masculine or neuter) and a noun was evaluated during perception in…

I examine some of the issues connected with the internalist/externalist distinction in work on the ontology of language. I note that Chomskyan radical internalism necessarily leads to a passive conception of child language acquisition. I reject that passive conception, and support current versions of constructivism [Tomasello, M., 2001. "The…