Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

Visual working memory (VWM) has a limited capacity of approximately 3-4 visual objects. Current theories of VWM propose that a limited pool of resources can be flexibly allocated to objects, allowing them to be represented at varying levels of precision. Factors that influence the allocation of these resources, such as the complexity and…

The current study investigated whether those with higher levels of autism-like traits process emotional information from speech differently to those with lower levels of autism-like traits. Neurotypical adults completed the autism-spectrum quotient and an emotional priming task. Vocal primes with varied emotional prosody, semantics, or a…

Ever since Aristotle and Plato ("The Categories"; "Cratylus"), linguists have considered language to be the pairing of form (sounds or gestures or written strings) and meaning. This is true for all meaningful linguistic units from morphemes, through words, phrases and sentences, to discourse. Generally speaking, semantics is…

This paper argues against the assumption that Spanish--and more generally Romance--imperfective past (IMP) is an intrinsically anaphoric tense. It is a widely accepted view that IMP requires a temporal discourse antecedent to be licensed. My aim is to show that such requirement is not actually in force when IMP combines with a stative/atelic…

We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as "Concession" or "Purpose") are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we…

The ways in which societies and institutions institutionalize and practice invention management reflects not only how new ideas are valued, but also imaginaries about the role of science and technology for societal development. Often taking the US Bayh-Dole-Act as a model, many European states have recently implemented changes in how inventions at…

In foreign language teaching, the transmission of the culture within which the target language grows is as important as teaching new words and grammar. All elements of the culture have their own special places within the vocabulary of the language. Reflecting not only the linguistic structure but also the culture of the society to which they…

This study investigates how L1 and L2 users of Mandarin perceive a rare construction in Mandarin that involves interpreting an NP in the object position as a location argument or instrument argument instead of as a theme/patient argument. For example, "kai zuoshou" (literally "drive left-hand") has been used to mean "use…

Instructional Systems Design is the practice of creating of instructional experiences that make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient, effective, and appealing [18]. Specifically in designing courses, an hour of training material can require between 30 to 500 hours of effort in sourcing and organizing reference data for use in just…

Reading in difficult or novel fonts results in slower and less efficient reading (Slattery & Rayner, 2010); however, these fonts may also lead to better learning and memory (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011). This effect is consistent with a desirable difficulty effect such that more effort during encoding results in better…

Working memory is necessary for a wide variety of cognitive abilities. Developmental work has shown that as working memory capacities increase, so does the ability to successfully perform other cognitive tasks, including language processing. The present work demonstrates the effects of working memory availability on children's language production.…

The concept of recipience is emerging within the literature as a useful idea to inform our understanding of student engagement with feedback. In this paper, the applicability of the concept of recipience is broadened from its origins in the literature on student feedback to consider its role in developing student knowledge structures that are more…

Preschoolers' earliest productions of sentential complement sentences have matrix clauses that are limited in form. Diessel proposed that matrix clauses in these early productions are propositionally empty fixed phrases that lack semantic and syntactic integration with the clausal complement. By 4 years of age, however, preschoolers produce…

Purpose: The value of shared reading as an opportunity for learning word meanings, or semantics, is well established; it is less clear whether children learn about the orthography, or word spellings, in this context. We tested whether children can learn the spellings and meanings of new words at the same time during a tightly controlled shared…