Human creativity and ingenuity partly depend on divergent thinking -- the ability to generate many varied, original, and elaborate responses. Prior research has found ample evidence of an effect of cognitive factors, including the organization of semantic networks and associative ability, on divergent thinking. Less is known, however, about how…

This study investigates how academic disciplines impact second language (L2) lexical competencies. Prior L2 research has often overlooked the broader effects of disciplinary backgrounds on lexical development. To address this gap, this study utilized lexical decision, memory, and semantic fluency tasks to examine lexicon recognition, memory, and…

This article highlights a Cultural Sustenance View of Reading (CSVR), a complex reader model illuminated by vivid findings from an eight-year collaborative classroom-based study and extensive reviews of cognitive and sociocultural research. Within the CSVR, reading is conceptualized as being shaped by a readers' culturally and linguistically…

Lakoff and Johnson (1980) gave a cognitive point of view to metaphor study explaining that metaphor is not a mere literary stylistic device, rather a tool for conceptualization. According to this view, metaphors are conceptualized in man's mind with regard to source domain and target domain in different types of context. This study is an attempt…

The dialogical character of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations" has received scant attention in the literature, given the work's status in his total oeuvre, and is dismissed as a marginal as compared to the other differences between the "Tractatus" and the "Investigations." The main lines of interpretation…

Previous research has demonstrated that adults are successful at visually tracking rigidly moving items, but experience great difficulties when tracking substance-like "pouring" items. Using a comparative approach, we investigated whether the presence/absence of the grammatical count-mass distinction influences adults and children's…

Perceptual simulations are unconscious and automatic, whereas perceptual imagery is conscious and deliberate, but it is unclear how easily one can transfer perceptual information from unconscious to conscious awareness. We investigated whether it is possible to be aware of what one is mentally representing; that is, whether it is possible to…

The aim of the present paper is to provide an overview of the so-called "Spanglish" phenomenon and its linguistic repertoires (code-switching utterances). We propose that it is necessary to link all different forms of analysis in order to verify hypotheses regarding the relationship among social, linguistic, and cognitive processes behind…

This study examines whether the production of words with two phonological variants involves single or multiple lexical phonological representations. Three production experiments investigated the roles of the relative frequencies of the two pronunciation variants of French words with schwa: the schwa variant and the reduced variant. In two naming…

This article reports on a study of second language (L2) French learners' self-generated use of gesture to think through and resolve a metalinguistic awareness-raising task during small-group work with an expert mediator. Although the use of gesture in L2 communication and pedagogy has recently received increasing attention, little research has…

Spoken words undergo frequent and often predictable variation in pronunciation. One form of variation is medial /t/ deletion, in which words like "center" and "cantaloupe" are pronounced without acoustic cues indicative of syllable-initial /t/. Three experiments examined the consequences of this missing phonetic information on lexical activation.…

Research concerning the spatial dimension "fit" ("tight" versus "loose") has been based on a tacit but untested assumption that the dimension "fit" is symmetrical, with tight- and loose-fitting relations highlighting the dimension "fit" with equal force. We propose a reformulation, documenting that adult speakers of English (Experiment 1) and…

Data are presented from crossmodal form priming experiments in German on regressive and progressive assimilation at word boundaries. Results show that some, but not all forms of lawful variation are tolerated by the lexical system. Consequences of these findings for psycholinguistic and linguistic models are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Investigated two historically isolated communities in the United States--Smith Island, Maryland and the Lumbee Native American community in Robeson County, North Carolina. Demonstrates that contrary to assumption, isolated communities may be linguistically innovative and heterogeneous. Explanations for this are found to be both cognitive and…

Examines possible solutions to the problem of form variation in the perception of speech. Asks whether sentential context can influence the identification of potentially assimilated forms of words. (Author/VWL)