We examined whether bilinguals' conceptual representation of homonyms in one language are influenced by meanings in the other. One hundred and seventeen Spanish-English bilinguals generated sentences for 62 English homonyms that were also cognates with Spanish and which shared at least one meaning with Spanish (e.g., plane/"plano"). Production…

This study reports on the characteristics and distribution of naming errors of patients undergoing cortical stimulation mapping (CSM). During the procedure, electrical stimulation is used to induce temporary functional lesions and locate "essential" language areas for preservation. Under stimulation, patients are shown slides of common objects and…

This research tests whether comprehenders use their knowledge of typical events in real time to process verbal arguments. In self-paced reading and event-related brain potential (ERP) experiments, we used materials in which the likelihood of a specific patient noun ("brakes" or "spelling") depended on the combination of an agent and verb…

This paper investigates the cognitive processes underlying picture naming and auditory word repetition. In the two-step model of lexical access, both the semantic and phonological steps are involved in naming, but the former has no role in repetition. Assuming recognition of the to-be-repeated word, repetition could consist of retrieving the…

Purpose: Although conversational recasting has been a generally successful treatment approach, the precise factors that influence children's learning through recasts are not yet understood. In this study, we examined details of the relationship between child utterance and clinician utterance that seemed likely to influence learning. Method: Three…

For socially appropriate communication, speakers must command a variety of linguistic styles, or "registers", that vary according to social context and social relationships. This study examined preschool children's ability to use a speaker's register choice to infer the identity of their addressee. Four-year-olds could draw correct inferences…

This study examined how the two cerebral hemispheres recruit semantic processing mechanisms by combining event-related potential measures and visual half-field methods in a word priming paradigm in which semantic strength and predictability were manipulated using lexically associated word pairs. Activation patterns on the late positive complex…

The pervasiveness of word-finding difficulties in aphasia has motivated several theories regarding management of the deficit and its effectiveness. Recently, the hypothesis was advanced that instead of simply accompanying speech gestures participate in language production by increasing the semantic activation of words grounded in sensory-motor…

Previous research on second language (L2) vocabulary learning has examined the relationship between word properties and learnability (e.g. Ellis and Beaton 1993). Few studies, however, have examined patterns in partial word form learning as a method of assessing learnability and improving our understanding of allocation of processing resources…

This study examines the link between distributional patterns in the input and infants' acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies. In two Headturn Preference experiments, Dutch-learning 24-month-olds (but not 17-month-olds) were found to track the remote dependency between the definite article "het" and the diminutive suffix…

Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs…

In this paper we discuss a computational cognitive model of children's poor performance on pronoun interpretation (the so-called Delay of Principle B Effect, or DPBE). This cognitive model is based on a theoretical account that attributes the DPBE to children's inability as hearers to also take into account the speaker's perspective. The cognitive…

This study provides an empirical examination of how American learners of German accomplish the social action of requesting in L2 conversation, demonstrating how L2 learners use their linguistic and interactional resources to orient to preference structure in their talk. The data illustrate the sequential contingencies surrounding requests and…

Recent neuroimaging research has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate, while work on modality switching costs suggests that they share some of the same attentional mechanisms. In three experiments, we employed a modality detection task that displayed modality-specific object properties…

Plagiarism has become a serious problem in education, and several plagiarism detection systems have been developed for dealing with this problem. This study provides an empirical evaluation of eight plagiarism detection systems for student essays. We present a categorical hierarchy of the most common types of plagiarism that are encountered in…