Investigates whether the literal use of synesthetic advertising (associating sense A to sense B) inhibits undergraduate students' appreciation of synesthetic language and thus reduces its persuasive impact. Discusses findings with respect to the underlying processes by which synesthetic metaphors persuade and the implications for sensory-rich…

Investigated four cases of English-speaking children with Williams Syndrome (WS), a neuro-developmental disorder characterized by an unusual fractionation of language abilities. Found that, despite low IQ, subjects performance on syntactic tasks and on regular inflection is not impaired, suggesting a distinction between a computation system and an…

Discussion of automatic recognition of hand and machine-written cursive text using the Arabic alphabet focuses on an algorithm for word recognition. Describes results of testing words for recognition without segmentation and considers the algorithms' use for words of different fonts and for processing whole sentences. (Author/LRW)

Proposes that the P600 component in event related potential research is not restricted to reanalysis processes, but reflects difficulty with syntactic integration processes in general. (Author/VWL)

Although similarity plays an important role in accounts of language processing, there are surprisingly few direct empirical studies of the phonological similarity between words, and it is therefore not clear whether similarity comparisons between words involve processes similar to those involved in other cognitive domains. In five experiments,…

Current theories of specific language impairment (SLI) in children fall into 2 general classes: those that attribute SLI to processing limitations and those that attribute the disorder to deficits in grammatical knowledge. In this study, the authors examined children's comprehension of subject and object "Wh"-questions because they offer the means…

The present fMRI study of semantic fluency for animal and tool names provides further evidence for category-specific brain activations, and reports task-related changes in effective connectivity among defined cerebral regions. Two partially segregated systems of functional integration were highlighted: the tool condition was associated with an…

The purpose of this investigation was to assess the influence of lexical/semantic priming on the speech reaction time of young children who do and do not stutter during a picture-naming task. Participants were 23 children who stutter, age-matched ([+ or -] 4 months) to 23 children who do not stutter, ranging in age from 3;0 (years;months) to 5;11.…

Sentences convey relationships between the meanings of words, such as who is accomplishing an action or receiving it. Functional neuroimaging based on positron-emission tomography and functional magnetic resonance imaging has been used to identify areas of the brain involved in structuring sentences and determining aspects of meaning associated…

Previous authors have shown that orthographic experience modifies phonological awareness, yet whether it also impacts on automatic speech processing has not been explored. In the present study, we replicated the effect of early orthographic experience on phonological awareness, and further demonstrated that on-line speech processing varied between…

In this paper we investigated the effects of configurational asymmetry in prefixed verbs in French. We used a simple lexical decision paradigm to compare prefixed verbs with external and internal prefixes as specified in linguistic theory (Di Sciullo, 1997) where external prefixes do not change the aktionsart and the verb argument structure of the…

Listeners cannot recognize highly reduced word forms in isolation, but they can do so when these forms are presented in context (Ernestus, Baayen, & Schreuder, 2002). This suggests that not all possible surface forms of words have equal status in the mental lexicon. The present study shows that the reduced forms are linked to the canonical…

We have a surprising tendency to misperceive the center of visually presented words (Fischer, 1996, 2000a, 2000b). To understand the origin of this bias, four experiments assessed the impact of letter font, letter size, and grapheme-phoneme convergences on perceived stimulus center. Fourteen observers indicated the perceived centers of words,…

Eighty-two participants listened to sentences and then judged whether two sequentially presented visual objects were the same. On critical trials, participants heard a sentence describe the motion of a ball toward or away from the observer (e.g., ''The pitcher hurled the softball to you''). Seven hundred and fifty milliseconds after the offset of…

Theories of natural language syntax often characterize grammatical knowledge as a form of abstract computation. This paper argues that such a characterization is correct, and that fundamental properties of grammar can and should be understood in terms of restrictions on the complexity of possible grammatical computation, when defined in terms of…