An interdisciplinary approach from linguistics, information sciences, learning sciences, and educational technology is used to explore the concept of information. Several key issues are highlighted, including: (1) learning language through meaning or probability; (2) the situational difference between message and meaning; (3) relationship between…

Behavior analysis has exploited conceptual tools whose experimental validity has been amply demonstrated, but their relevance to large-scale and fine-grained behavioral phenomena remains uncertain, because the experimental analysis of these domains faces formidable obstacles of measurement and control. In this essay I suggest that, at least at the…

In his article, Chris Burt focuses on the relationship between time and autobiographical memory. The question Burt puts forward is whether temporal markers in reports on autobiographic memories reflect specific temporal information or result from rather complex cognitive processing of time-relevant knowledge. The aspect of time is inherent to the…

E. Dhooge and R. J. Hartsuiker (2010) reported experiments showing that picture naming takes longer with low- than high-frequency distractor words, replicating M. Miozzo and A. Caramazza (2003). In addition, they showed that this distractor-frequency effect disappears when distractors are masked or preexposed. These findings were taken to refute…

How long does it take the human mind to grasp the idea when hearing or reading a sentence? Neurophysiological methods looking directly at the time course of brain activity indexes of comprehension are critical for finding the answer to this question. As the dominant cognitive approaches, models of serial/cascaded and parallel processing, make…

The Information Age has been built, in part, on the belief that more information is always better. True to that sentiment, people have found ways to make a lot of information available to the masses--perhaps more than anyone ever imagined. The goal of the Semantic Web, often called Web 3.0, is for users to spend less time looking for information…

Recent work addressing the phenomenon of perceptual simulation offers new and exciting avenues of investigating how to model knowledge representation. From the perspective of language, the simulation approach has given rise to new impetus to work on models of language understanding (e.g., Zwaan, 2004, and references therein), and provides a way of…

Discusses the characterization of the meaning of the Russian perfective-imperfective opposition and concludes that these characterizations fail. The article maintains that aspects are temporal relations between the time at which some situation obtains and the time for which an assertion is made by the utterance that describes the situation. (33…

This article presents a theory of visual word recognition that assumes that, in the tasks of word identification, lexical decision, and semantic categorization, human readers behave as optimal Bayesian decision makers. This leads to the development of a computational model of word recognition, the Bayesian reader. The Bayesian reader successfully…

Unless a clear distinction is made between the semantic time reference of the modal "perfect" and that of the present perfect aspect, these forms will remain confusing to students of English as a second language. A brief sequence is suggested for teaching modals which incorporates and clarifies these time relationships and simplifies the…

D. C. Plaut and J. R. Booth presented a parallel distributed processing model that purports to simulate human lexical decision performance. This model (and D. C. Plaut, 1995) offers a single mechanism account of the pattern of factor effects on reaction time (RT) between semantic priming, word frequency, and stimulus quality without requiring a…

Compares the English modals "could,""might,""should,""ought to" and others with German "konnte,""durfte,""sollte,""mubte," referring to the diachronic perspective and using Reichenbach's (1947) grid of times and worlds. The article suggests that the variety of use of…

Notes that in a typical word monitoring paradigm, subjects monitor ongoing language input for a pre-designated target word and that independent variables include the nature and position of the target word and the context in which it is embedded. Also notes that forms of this task are suitable for studies with young children and with individuals…