Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g., ''Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.'') categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they ''undergenerate''); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and…

On the standard, neo-Gricean view, most is semantically lower bounded but may give rise to the meaning "not all" through scalar implicature (Horn (1972)). More recent proposals have claimed that most does not generate a scalar implicature but is semantically both lower and upper bounded (Ariel (2004; in press)). In this article, we investigate the…

Two prototype voice output communication aids were implemented to compare methods of graphic symbol message formulation; one emulated current devices that require syntactical ordering of icons (Default) and the other used semantic frames (iconCHAT). Message constructions of eight typically developing children (7-10 years of age) using both…

Studies of sentence comprehension deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients suggest that language processing involves circuits connecting subcortical and cortical regions. Anatomically segregated neural circuits appear to support different cognitive and motor functions. To investigate which functions are implicated in PD comprehension…

Recent debates on lexical ambiguity resolution have centered on the subordinate-bias effect, in which reading time is longer on a biased ambiguous word in a subordinate-biasing context than on a control word. The nature of the control word--namely, whether it matched the frequency of the ambiguous word's overall word form or its contextually…

To investigate the stability of trace reactivation in healthy older adults, 22 older volunteers with no significant neurological history participated in a cross-modal priming task. Whilst both object relative center embedded (ORC) and object relative right branching (ORR) sentences were employed, working memory load was reduced by limiting the…

Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors,…

This study explores whether the brain can discriminate degrees of semantic congruency during wakefulness and sleep. Experiment 1 was conducted during wakefulness to test degrees of congruency by means of N400 amplitude. In Experiment 2, the same paradigm was applied to a different group of participants during natural night sleep. Stimuli were 108…

Purpose: The effect of semantic naming treatment on crosslinguistic generalization was investigated in 3 participants with English-Spanish bilingual aphasia. Method: A single-subject experimental designed was used. Participants received semantic treatment to improve naming of English or Spanish items, while generalization was tested to untrained…

Most current models of speech production predict interference from related context words in picture-naming tasks. However, Glaser and Dungelhoff (1984) reported semantic facilitation when the task was changed from basic-level naming to category-level naming. The authors explore two proposals to account for this change in polarity of the semantic…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language…

A new approach to the study of text building behavior is possible through the application of Scanator. This paper consists of a demonstration of some of its fundamental functions. These are suitable in a study of text building. The basic concepts, expressed through an analysis of a small part of an interview text, derive from a thermodynamic…

The goal of the present study was to examine scenarios for using two schematic organizers, schematic knowledge maps and conceptual matrices, in integrating episodic and semantic knowledge about alcohol. Seventy students (36 males and 34 females) from undergraduate general psychology classes participated for course credit. Participants were…

Communication teachers can use magic in the classroom to teach the selective nature of the communication process and principles of general semantics. Since magic "works" due to perceptual limitations, selective perception can be illustrated through various magic effects. Magical effects where the secret is apparent to everyone in the…

An analysis of the English lexical items "even" and "only" looks at features of their behavior in discourse and brings attention to certain unexamined aspects of their role in text. Their syntactic behavior is reviewed and some problems with previous interpretations are examined. The features of "even" are defined:…