The article describes and discusses the learning potential of unofficial techno-literacy activities in the classroom with regards to Swedish 7-8-year-olds' exploration of semiotic resources when interacting with computers. In classroom contexts where every child works with his or her own computer, such activities tend to take up a substantial…

Contextual synonym is a linguistic phenomenon often applied but rarely discussed. This paper is to discuss the semantic relationships between contextual synonyms and the requirements under which words can be used as contextual synonyms between each other. The three basic relationships are embedment, intersection and non-coherence. The requirements…

This paper takes up the sea-faring metaphor at the centre of this special edition and asks what kinds of navigational tools (metalanguages) are necessary to steer English through the digital seas of contemporary communication. Much of this territory is yet to be mapped and the disciplinary "boat" is buffeted by contrary winds such as…

This article seeks to recover a history of ideas about the role of signs in the development of mind that connects Vygotsky to major traditions in Enlightenment language studies. It offers historical perspectives on ideas about thinking and speaking that shed light on the scope and trajectory of Vygotsky's conception of signs as psychological…

Previous research has suggested that a failure in processing contextual information may account for the heterogeneous clinical manifestations and cognitive impairments observed in schizophrenia. In the domain of language, context processing in schizophrenia has been investigated mostly with single-word semantic priming paradigms; however, natural…

This experiment examined the item-level relationship between 7-year-olds' ability to read words aloud and their knowledge of the same words in the oral domain. Two types of knowledge were contrasted: familiarity with the phonological form of the word (lexical phonology), measured by auditory lexical decision, and semantic knowledge, measured by a…

Calls to broaden notions of "literacy" from a focus on print-based and verbal literacies to the incorporation of a range of modes of communication and representation are increasing. This paper uses case study data from 3- and 4-year-olds in a New Zealand kindergarten to explore the affordances offered by different literacies to…

Tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) responses on a picture-naming task were used to test the hypothesis that dyslexia involves phonological, but not semantic, processing deficits. Participants included 16 children with dyslexia and 31 control children between 8 and 10 years of age who did not differ in receptive vocabulary. As hypothesized, children with…

It is broadly agreed that the processing of a word triad with a common remote associate (coherent triad) leads to its partial activation, which is the process underlying intuitive coherence judgments. The present studies demonstrate that this process not only is independent of the intention to find the common associate (CA), but rather may be…

The authors investigated linguistic relativity effects by examining the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English) in fluent bilingual speakers as compared with monolingual speakers. In an error-induction experiment, they used responses by monolingual speakers to establish a baseline for bilingual speakers…

Three experiments tested the main claims of the idiom decomposition hypothesis: People have clear intuitions on the semantic compositionality of idiomatic expressions, which determines the syntactic behavior of these expressions and how they are recognized. Experiment 1 showed that intuitions are clear only for a very restricted number of…

The current research uses a novel methodology to examine the role of semantics in reading aloud. Participants were trained to read aloud 2 sets of novel words (i.e., nonwords such as bink): some with meanings (semantic) and some without (nonsemantic). A comparison of reading aloud performance between these 2 sets of novel words was used to provide…

The Simulation Framework, also known as the Embodied Cognition Framework, maintains that conceptual knowledge is grounded in sensorimotor systems. To test several predictions that this theory makes about the neural substrates of verb meanings, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan subjects' brains while they made semantic…

The article presents research into literacy practices in secondary English classrooms in a multicultural urban school. Using data from digital videotape, it brings a multimodal social semiotic approach to bear on the exploration of how literature is read collectively in the classroom, and how teachers encourage the active, embodied reading of…

Basic-level picture naming is hampered by the presence of a semantically related context word (compared to an unrelated word), whereas picture categorization is facilitated by a semantically related context word. This reversal of the semantic context effect has been explained by assuming that in categorization tasks, basic-level distractor words…