We describe an analysis of speech errors on a confrontation naming task in a man with progressive speech degeneration of 10-year duration from Pick's disease. C.S. had a progressive non-fluent aphasia together with a motor speech impairment and early assessment indicated some naming impairments. There was also an absence of significant…

The pseudoword effect is the finding that pseudowords (i.e., rare words or pronounceable nonwords) give rise to more hits and false alarms than words. Using the retrieving effectively from memory (REM) model of recognition memory, we tested a familiarity-based account of the pseudoword effect: Specifically, the pseudoword effect arises because…

Semantic errors in aphasia (e.g., naming a horse as "dog") frequently arise from faulty mapping of concepts onto lexical items. A recent study by our group used voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping (VLSM) methods with 64 patients with chronic aphasia to identify voxels that carry an association with semantic errors. The strongest associations were…

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs ("lay/stand a bottle on a table") to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents ("nikka…

A primary focus within neuroimaging research on language comprehension is on the distribution of semantic knowledge in the brain. Studies have shown that the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (LPMT), a region just anterior to area MT/V5, is important for the processing of complex action knowledge. It has also been found that motion verbs cause…

It is widely recognized that the processor has a key role to play in creating and strengthening the mapping between form and meaning that is integral to language use. Adopting an emergentist approach to heritage language acquisition, the current study considers the extent to which the operation of the processor can contribute to an account of what…

We investigated whether and when information conveyed by spoken language impacts on the processing of visually presented objects. In contrast to traditional views, grounded-cognition posits direct links between language comprehension and perceptual processing. We used a magnetoencephalographic cross-modal priming paradigm to disentangle these…

When listening to speech in everyday-life situations, our cognitive system must often cope with signal instabilities such as sudden breaks, mispronunciations, interfering noises or reverberations potentially causing disruptions at the acoustic/phonetic interface and preventing efficient lexical access and semantic integration. The physiological…

Deaf bilinguals for whom American Sign Language (ASL) is the first language and English is the second language judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs in English. Critically, a subset of both the semantically related and unrelated word pairs were selected such that the translations of the two English words also had related forms in ASL. Word…

Cantonese shape classifiers encode perceptual information that is characteristic of their associated nouns, although certain nouns are exceptional. For example, the classifier "tiu" occurs primarily with nouns for long-narrow-flexible objects (e.g., scarves, snakes, and ropes) and also occurs with the noun for a (short, rigid) key. In 3…

The study aimed to investigate whether or not negotiation of meaning is effective in L2 vocabulary acquisition of Chinese learners of English in the classroom setting. In the study there were two experimental groups (pre-modified input and negotiation of meaning) and two control groups (pre-modified input). The four groups were required to do a…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…

A number of recent studies have argued that grammatical illusions can arise in the process of completing linguistic dependencies, such that unlicensed material is temporarily treated as licensed due to the presence of a potential licensor that is semantically appropriate but in a syntactically inappropriate position. A frequently studied case…

In recent years, it has been reported that WM (working memory) is concerned with word generation, but many points regarding the relationship between the individual differences of WM capacity and the patterns of word generation remain unclear. This study is to investigate these unclear points by using three types of word fluency task with different…

Studies on L2 reading have provided extensive evidence for the significant contribution of lower-level processing skills in learning to read and the critical impact on the overall development of L2 reading of more accurate and fluent connections between three sub-lexical components: phonology, orthography and semantics. The broad consensus among…