The comprehension of connectives is crucial for understanding the discourse relations that make up a text. We studied connective comprehension in English to investigate whether adult comprehenders acquire the meaning and intended use of connectives to a similar extent and how connective features and individual differences impact connective…

Causation is a core feature of human cognition and language. How children learn about intricate causal meanings is yet unresolved. Here, we focus on how children learn verbs that express causation. Such verbs, known as lexical causatives (e.g., break and raise), lack explicit morphosyntactic markers indicating causation, thus requiring that the…

All communication systems rely on sets of rules that must generally be followed for successful communication to be possible; in the case of human language, these rules are given by the grammar. However, despite these rules, there is considerable variation that has been noted across the grammar. In this dissertation, I explore one understudied…

The term "governance" is one of the most widely applied concepts in education policy and research. Yet its meaning has changed over space and time both analytically and normatively. This history is a complicated one marked by both shifts and continuations in the politics of language and the development of unique intellectual histories…

A tension exists between rationalists and empiricists regarding the nature of knowledge: innate then activated/discovered (rationalists) or constructed then invented (empiricists). The assumption is that, to a certain extent, basic knowledge seems to be innate in our mind and develops through experience by thinking processes to construct meanings.…

Blind adults display language-specificity in their packaging and ordering of events in speech. These differences affect the representation of events in "co-speech gesture"--gesturing with speech--but not in "silent gesture"--gesturing without speech. Here we examine when in development blind children begin to show adult-like…

The article describes the main types of mental information processing in the context of a systematic structural method. The author analyses the semantic theories of information. The author reviews the mechanisms of information processing and its qualitative properties. The article describes the mechanism of textual presupposition accommodation.

A central concern that TL theory approaches but does not fully address is the process whereby an individual generates a more adequate meaning perspective after shedding an outmoded one. This article complements TL theory's account with a phenomenological description of the dangers and opportunities encountered on that quest. It employs the concept…

When a situation could lead to multiple mutually exclusive consequences, recent research shows that people automatically generate multiple predictive inferences in memory. Several theoretical mechanisms have been proposed to account for the generation of predictive inferences. One hypothesis is that inferences are minimally encoded, represented…

The incongruity-resolution model plays a key role in the cognitive mechanisms of perceived humour. This study employed the incongruity-resolution model to discuss humorous design techniques to help design novices and students understand the influence of various humorous design techniques on perceived humour. First, 260 humorous products currently…

Including causal links in concept maps enables learners to meaningfully relate concepts to a larger context or problem in terms of how and where concepts apply within the chains of causal events that lead to a given goal or outcome. Given that higher quality maps are produced when students link and sequence events to flow temporally and…

The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information of compound words with contexts in the present…

The ability to search memory for diverse contextual usages of words is proposed to play a role in creative idea generation. However, it is not yet known whether searching for more diverse contextual usages of words enhances the novelty of ideas during idea generation. In three experiments, participants were given a noun as a creativity prompt…

The semantics and pragmatics of polar questions remain undertheorized. Standard proposition-set accounts (Hamblin, 1976; Groenendijk and Stokhof, 1984), which take question meanings to be identifiable with the (appropriately defined) set of their answers, have been developed mostly for wh-questions; when applied to polar questions, they predict…

The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]". The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment…