The effect of orthographic transparency on letter position encoding was investigated using a visual search task given to skilled readers of English (a deep orthography) or Greek (a transparent orthography). Two groups of younger participants, matched for age and education, were monoscriptal in English, or biscriptal in Greek and English. Two…

Recent theories of morphological processing have been dominated by the notion that morphologically complex words are decomposed into their constituents on the basis of their semantic properties. In this article we argue that the weight of evidence now suggests that the recognition of morphologically complex words begins with a rapid morphemic…

The Information Packaging Hypothesis (Kita, 2000) holds that gestures play a role in conceptualising information for speaking. According to this view, speakers will gesture more when describing difficult-to-conceptualise information than when describing easy-to-conceptualise information. In the present study, 24 participants described ambiguous…

Speaking a word can be started faster when all the words in a given block share the initial portion (e.g., syllable) than when they do not (known as the form preparation effect). Two experiments employed the task to examine the role of morphemes in Chinese word production. In Experiment 1, the disyllabic target words were monomorphemic or…

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the…

Previous studies haves shown that under masked priming conditions, CORNER primes CORN as strongly as TEACHER primes TEACH and more strongly than BROTHEL primes BROTH. This result has been taken as evidence of a purely structural level of representation at which words are decomposed into morphological constituents in a manner that is independent of…

An eye-movement study was conducted to examine whether Chinese readers immediately activate and integrate related background information during discourse comprehension. Participants were asked to read short passages, each containing a critical word that fitted well within the local context but was inconsistent or neutral with background…

Introduces this special issue of the journal on conceptual representation--considered the most important cognitive function in humans because it stands at the center of the information processing flow, with input from perceptual modules of differing kinds, and is centrally involved in memory, speech, planning, decision-making, actions, inductive…

We present a microgenetic analysis of the gestures that children produce as they talk about a balance task. Children gesture spontaneously on this task and here their hand gestures are considered in relation to the accompanying speech. By close examination of 21 children's single sessions, and the 163 iconic gestures they produced (a mean of 7.6…

Proposes a new view of count nouns and mass nouns in which the use of count-mass syntax is often systematically related to a conceptual distinction in the minds of speakers. Provides preliminary evidence suggesting other reasons for count-mass syntax use that are not predicted by the cognitive individuation hypothesis. (Author/VWL)

Focuses on an important aspect of conceptual thinking--the role of causal notions in the content of our concepts. Presents a set of experiments introducing the Illusion of Explanatory Depth (IOED), in which he shows that people confidently believe they know how things work, but when challenged are forced to acknowledge that their understanding is…

Contrasts two views for mentally representing referents of plural expressions: 1) the atomic-tokens view, according to which the detonation of a plural expression is represented by a number of distinct tokens, and 2) the assemblage-token view, according to which it is represented as a single whole. The conjecture was investigated with German…

Four theories of the human conceptual system--semantic memory, exemplar models, feed-forward connectionist nets, and situated simulation theory--are characterized and contrasted on five dimensions. Empirical evidence is then reviewed for the situated simulation theory and conclusions are discussed. (Author/VWL)

Reports on a study that investigated the interpretation of adjective-noun combinations. Results confirm important predictions of schema-based theory but also point to required elabortions of this theory. (Author/VWL)

Evaluates three theories of categorization in the domain of artifacts. Two are versions of psychological essentialism, positing that artifact categorization is a matter of judging membership in a kind by appealing to a belief about the underlying nature of the object. The third is called "minimalism," and it states that judgments of kind…