This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

The aim of this study is to develop a partial theory of phonological paraphasias which has some cross-syndrome and cross-linguistic validity. It is based on the distinction between content and structural units and emphasizes the role of the latter. The notion of structure holds the key to an understanding of the differences among the following…

We examine the time-course of semantic structure formation during real-time sentence comprehension. We do this through the lens of aspectual coercion, a semantic combinatorial operation that lacks morpho-syntactic reflections, yet is indispensable for sentence interpretation. We describe two experiments. Experiment 1 replicates the results of a…

This article presents an overview of current automatic sign recognition research. A review of recent studies, as well as on our own research, has identified several problem areas that hamper successful sign recognition by a computer. Some of these problems are shared with automatic speech recognition, whereas others seem to be unique to automatic…

In 3 experiments, affirmative and hypothetical probes were presented after narrative texts containing conditional arguments. According to the data, readers represented modus ponens deductions as certain, except when it was only a weakly necessary cause of a given effect. They represented any logically invalid inferences resulting from affirming…

In 2 experiments, a boundary technique was used with parafoveal previews that were identical to a target (e.g., sleet), a word orthographic neighbor (sweet), or an orthographically matched nonword (speet). In Experiment 1, low-frequency words in orthographic pairs were targets, and high-frequency words were previews. In Experiment 2, the roles…

The focus of this paper is the "culture of learning" in Chinese complementary schools. The term "culture" refers to the norms, attitudes, values and beliefs of the participants in these schools. Using data collected through multiple research methods from Chinese community schools in Britain, this paper takes a glimpse at cultural negotiation by…

Purpose: This purpose of this study was to investigate the lexical and semantic fast mapping ability of young children with specific language impairment (SLI) and normal language (NL), with a specific emphasis on the influence of phonological factors. Method: The study included 46 children (mean age 58 months), half with SLI and half with NL.…

The authors present an overview of recent research conducted in the field of language production based on papers presented at the first edition of the International Workshop on Language Production (Marseille, France, September 2004). This article comprises two main parts. In the first part, consisting of three sections, the authors review the…

Millennial students make up a large portion of undergraduate students attending colleges and universities, and they have a variety of online resources available to them to complete academically related information searches, primarily Web based and library-based online information retrieval systems. The content, ease of use, and required search…

Speech technology--especially automatic speech recognition--has now advanced to a level where it can be of great benefit both to able-bodied people and those with various disabilities. In this paper we describe an application "TalkMaths" which, using the output from a commonly-used conventional automatic speech recognition system,…

Purpose: Children with language impairment (LI) often perform below the level of typically developing peers on measures of both processing speed and working memory. This study examined the relationship between these 2 types of measures and attempted to determine whether such measures can account for the LI itself. Method: Fourteen-year-old…

The neurophysiological and neuroanatomical foundations of developmental language disorder (DLD) are still a matter of dispute. A main argument is that children with DLD show atypical anatomical asymmetries of speech-relevant brain areas, which possibly affect efficient language processing. In contrast to previous anatomical studies in DLD…

This article reports on a crosslinguistic comparative study of the processing of Japanese relative clauses (RCs) by Chinese-, Sinhalese-, Vietnamese-, Thai-, and Indonesian-speaking second language (L2) learners. A robust finding in studies on the acquisition of RCs in L2 English and other European languages is that subject-gap RCs are easier than…

Age-related changes in the use of verbal processes for the efficient switching between tasks were investigated in 5-year-old children (N = 32, M age = 5.9 years) and 9-year-old children (N = 32, M age = 9.4 years). Task switching was assessed by means of a cued switching paradigm to examine two switching components: (a) to maintain and select and…