A study assessed the effect of American/Western culture on English-speaking Japanese bilinguals as reflected in differences in the connotative meanings of certain kinds of words. Differences in culturally determined meanings were examined in translation-equivalent concrete concepts, abstract words, and personality attributes, as measured on a…

An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

When asked to recall the words from a just-presented target list, subjects occasionally recall words that were not on the list. These intrusions either appeared on earlier lists (prior-list intrusions, or PLIs) or had not appeared over the course of the experiment (extra-list intrusions). The authors examined the factors that elicit PLIs in free…

Studies have investigated and proposed different potential influences on children's initial mappings of object words to referents. Each proposal is a variant on the idea that children use one source of evidence about the structure of word meanings or of grammar to discover other forms of structure, and in doing so they "bootstrap" their…

Previous cognitive science research demonstrates how the Agent-action-Objective (AaO) paradigm controls the cognitive processes of differentiation and integration. The present discussion advances the process to the fourth of five phases. Of the four dependent variables emerging at this stage, two are discussed: zero processing and variations in…

The meaning of children's lexical innovations is distinguished from the forms they rely on to convey meaning. Children require knowledge of the context in order to judge how the meaning of their innovation can be conveyed to the addressee. This contextualization is often achieved by default, since children tend to limit their early conversations…

This study investigated the role of semantic variables, derivable from multidimensional scaling, in search and decision processes. (Author/RM)

Children with language disorders experience problems in three dimensions of semantics: (1) content of content (reference, referents, concepts); (2) form of content (structural units of meaning); (3) use of content (functional variation in meaning). Teacher intervention strategies in each area (e.g., for problems of reference, sentence meaning,…

For the whole of the last half-century, most theoretical syntacticians have assumed that knowledge of language is different from the tasks of speaking and understanding. There have been some dissenters, but, by and large, this view still holds sway. This book takes a different view: it continues the task set in hand by Kempson et al (2001) of…

Assumptions about comprehension of utterances are challenged in two experiments using as an example the verb phrase "to do a Richard Nixon on a tape" (i.e., erase it). It is argued that creating meanings, as with this phrase, works differently from selecting senses for utterances and that many require a mixture of the two. (MSE)

Past studies of autistic children's memory for linguistic materials have shown that autistics have a special linguistic coding difficulty. Because the autistic deficit stems from a failure to use semantic and syntactic knowledge or from a failure to acquire such forms, future research should explore the mechanics underlying this deficit. (PJM)

Two experiments studied how people determine relationships among family members. In one experiment, subjects were to determine relationships in hypothetical families. In the second, the families were in the subjects' experience. It was determined that memory was organized in terms of parent-child relations together with knowledge of which members…

Examines the claim that transformational rules are psychologically real, and applies this claim to all aspects of transformational grammar. (AM)

Two experiments offer clear support for an interactive view of sentence comprehension; semantic factors do interact with syntactic factors. (RL)

Examined adults' intuitions about the distinction between what is said and what is implied by indicative utterances, such as "Jane has three children." Four experiments demonstrated that people assume that enriched pragmatics play a significant role in determining what is said and recognize a distinction between what is said and what is…