Conditionals somehow express conditional beliefs. However, conditional belief is a bi-propositional attitude that is generally not truth-evaluable, in contrast to unconditional belief. Therefore, this article opts for an expressivistic semantics for conditionals, grounds this semantics in the arguably most adequate account of conditional belief,…

The rise of causality and the attendant graph-theoretic modeling tools in the study of counterfactual reasoning has had resounding effects in many areas of cognitive science, but it has thus far not permeated the mainstream in linguistic theory to a comparable degree. In this study I show that a version of the predominant framework for the formal…

Monitoring and control over the process of studying the distance learning course are based on solving the problem of making out an adequate integral mark to the educatee for mastering entire study course, by testing results. It is suggested to use the degree of correspondence between educatee's thesaurus and the study course thesaurus as an…

The present study investigated whether Short Message Service shortcuts are more difficult to process in sentence context than the spelled-out word equivalent and, if so, how any additional processing difficulty arises. Twenty-four student participants read 37 Short Message Service shortcuts and word equivalents embedded in semantically plausible…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the argumentative structure of students' arguments using argumentation schemes as an instrument for reconstructing the missing premises underlying their reasoning. Building on the recent literature in science education, in order for an explanation to be persuasive and achieve a conceptual change it needs…

This is a report of the main points I made in an informal "conversation" with Paul Fletcher and the audience at the 14th ICPLA conference in Cork. The observations arose randomly, as part of an unstructured 1-h Q&A, so they do not provide a systematic account of the subject, but simply reflect the issues which were raised by the conference…

Purpose: In this article, the authors examine (a) the effect of semantic context on accentedness, comprehensibility, and intelligibility of Spanish-accented American English (AE) as judged by monolingual AE listeners and (b) the interaction of semantic context and accentedness on comprehensibility and intelligibility. Method: Twenty adult native…

The current study investigated the interaction of implicit grammatical gender and semantic category knowledge during object identification. German-learning toddlers (24-month-olds) were presented with picture pairs and heard a noun (without a preceding article) labeling one of the pictures. Labels for target and distracter images either matched or…

Do we access information from any object we can see, or do we access information only from objects that we intend to name? In 3 experiments using a modified multiple object naming paradigm, subjects were required to name several objects in succession when previews appeared briefly and simultaneously in the same location as the target as well as at…

Previous studies suggest that action representations are activated during object processing, even when task-irrelevant. In addition, there is evidence that lexical-semantic context may affect such activation during object processing. Finally, prior work from our laboratory and others indicates that function-based ("use") and structure-based…

According to what is now commonly referred to as "the Equation" in the literature on indicative conditionals, the probability of any indicative conditional equals the probability of its consequent of the conditional given the antecedent of the conditional. Philosophers widely agree in their assessment that the triviality arguments of…

Data integration is a critical component of enterprise system integration, and XML data validation is the foundation for sound data integration of XML-based information systems. Since B2B e-commerce relies on data validation as one of the critical components for enterprise integration, it is imperative for financial industries and e-commerce…

Japanese employs different strategies for expressing relative clauses and complement clauses. The relative clause constructions are generally described as Externally Headed Relative Clauses (EHRCs), which are the closest analogue to English relative clauses, and Headless Relative Clauses (HRCs) (also called Internally Headed Relative Clauses)…

This dissertation investigates the contextual factors that affect the understanding and interpretation of one Japanese topicalized construction, NP[subscript 1] wa NP[subscript 2] da sentences, by native speakers of Japanese. The construction allows two possibilities in the relation between the NP[subscript 1] and the NP[subscript 2]. When the two…

A key debate in the psycholinguistic study of grammatical language production is whether the process is a syntactocentric one, driven by grammatical information and grammatical rules, or a dynamic, interactive one, involving both semantic and syntactic information. Examining how speakers produce subject-verb number agreement has been useful in…