Examines whether children make use of the conceptual link between animacy and agency when interpreting the verb "move" in English. Hypothesized that, for inanimates, children would allow "move" to have a patient subject but not so for inanimates. Subjects were 3- and 4-year-olds and adults who viewed video clips of animals or…

Proposes an account of linking patterns that does away with intermediary mechanisms such as thematic or actor/undergoer hierarchies. Shows that the generalizations a linking theory needs to capture can be modeled via the same mechanisms as other lexical generalizations, using conditions specified within the hierarchy of word classes. (Author/VWL)

Explores the function of items of procedural vocabulary as signals of conceptual relations in scientific discourse. Procedural vocabulary consists of lexical items that do not belong to any particular schema. Develops a taxonomy of procedural items in terms of the contextual relations they create between content-bearing words, classifying the…

Reconstructs the present temporal reference system of Early African American English by investigating the aspectual conditioning of a morphosyntactic construction within the domain of present temporal reference in three representative varieties. (Author/VWL)

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

This study asked whether aphasic adults show different noun/verb retrieval patterns based upon their clinical categorization as fluent or nonfluent. Participants selected either the noun or the verb meaning of target words, as presented in three contexts. The framework was that nouns (associated with temporal lobe function) are processed, stored,…

The study investigated gender differences in resting EEG (in three individually determined narrow [alpha] frequency bands) related to the level of general and emotional intelligence. Brain activity of males decreased with the level of general intelligence, whereas an opposite pattern of brain activity was observed in females. This difference was…

Empirical evaluations suggest that use of interactive technologies can reduce the costs of instruction by about one-third. In addition, they can either increase achievement by about one-third while holding time constant or reduce time needed to achieve targeted instructional objectives by about one-third. These technologies can be delivered over…

This article summarizes published research on vocabulary instruction involving students with learning disabilities. Nineteen vocabulary studies that comprised 27 investigations were located. Study interventions gleaned from the review included keyword or mnemonic approaches, cognitive strategy instruction (e.g., semantic features analysis), direct…

Instructional design is an integral part of a balanced approach to teaching vocabulary instruction. The goal of this paper is to reflect on several lessons using research-based vocabulary strategies, and to present think-alouds that detail the steps in matching instructional design with those strategies in order to reach the learning outcome.…

We present statistical analyses of the large-scale structure of 3 types of semantic networks: word associations, WordNet, and Roget's Thesaurus. We show that they have a small-world structure, characterized by sparse connectivity, short average path lengths between words, and strong local clustering. In addition, the distributions of the number of…

In the experiments outlined in this article, the authors investigate lexical access processes in language production. In their earlier work, T. Pechmann and D. Zerbst (2002) reported evidence for grammatical category constraints in a picture-word interference task. Although grammatical category information was not activated when subjects produced…

Processing time and memory for sentences were examined as a function of the degree of semantic and causal relatedness between sentences in short narratives. In Experiments 1-2B, semantic and causal relatedness between sentence pairs was independently manipulated. Causal relatedness was assessed through pretesting and semantic relatedness was…

California and Texas mandate 75% to 80% decodable texts for first-grade reading programs, yet these percentages have no empirical base. This study examines the text selections in 6 first-grade programs from the perspective of lexical, semantic, and syntactic features. The composition of text differed across the 6 programs with respect to length,…

Wernicke (1900, as cited in G. H. Eggert, 1977) suggested that semantic knowledge arises from the interaction of perceptual representations of objects and words. The authors present a parallel distributed processing implementation of this theory, in which semantic representations emerge from mechanisms that acquire the mappings between visual…