As one of the best known linguistic constraints on code switching, Poplack (1980) has proposed the "free morpheme constraint," which predicts no switching between free morphemes and bound morphemes. It is argued that this theory is not supported by linguistic data, and that semantic content, rather than morphology, must be considered. An…

Examined whether context marked for grammatical gender can constrain the processing of homphone words in French. Homophones whose different meaning are associated with words of different genders were used in two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. (Author/VWL)

Describes and illustrates several syntactic constraints on intrasentential pronoun reference, and provides operational examples of Paktus, a system that implements these constraints. An argument is made for the advantages of this system over another particular system that addresses roughly the same phenomena. (GLR)

Attempts to shed light on the selection of future time expressions in English tense usage. Descriptive accounts of time usage expressions are reinterpreted against the background of the theory of utterance interpretation known as Relevance Theory. (31 references) (Author/VWL)

Approaches the analysis of proper names from the point of view of communication. An attempt is made to show that the various uses of proper names can be accounted for in terms of the assumptions the hearer makes about the speaker's thought as expressed through her utterance. (Author/VWL)

Explores concepts of formal language and automata theory underlying computational linguistics. A computational formalism is described known as a "logic grammar," with which computational systems process linguistic data, with examples in declarative and procedural semantics and definite clause grammars. (13 references) (CB)

Describes a category of riddles based on lexical ambiguity and uses category theory to illustrate the function of the accessibility hierarchy in riddling. A discussion of riddles and parallelism (the tendency to stay on the same syntactic, semantic, pragmatic track while processing language) shows how parallelism partially accounts for how the…

Provides evidence that automatic lexical priming is a product of an informationally specific lexical level network. An alternative account appealing to retrospective but automatic semantic integration processes is discussed.(52 references) (JL)

Considers specific aspects of phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese that may differ from those in English. Emphasizes that early phonological processes and phonological mediation are two different questions in the identification-with-phonology hypothesis. Shows that "mediation" and "prelexical phonology," two very…

Finds phonological priming effects on compound targets (characters containing separate radical components); no evidence of phonological priming on integrated targets (those not containing separate radicals); semantic priming effects on both compound and integrated target recognition, suggesting that phonological and semantic activation are…

Finds that, because kanji morphemes of opposite and similar concepts are semantically activated both as morpheme units and compound-word units, semantic representations of the two morphemes and the compound word which they create compete with each other at the concept level, which slows down lexical decision and naming of the compound word. (SR)

Masked priming effects for prefixed words sharing a bound stem (e.g., submit-permit) are compared with priming effects for semantically transparent prefixed words (e.g., fold-unfold). In three experiments, priming effects were obtained for both types with no significant difference between them. Results suggests semantic transparency is not…

This study investigates whether or not the representation of lexical stress information can be primed during speech production. In four experiments, we attempted to prime the stress position of bisyllabic target nouns (picture names) having initial and final stress with auditory prime words having either the same or different stress as the target…

The experiment reported here investigated the sensitivity of concreteness effects to orthographic neighborhood density and frequency in the visual lexical decision task. The concreteness effect was replicated with a sample of concrete and abstract words that were not matched for orthographic neighborhood features and in which concrete words turned…

Infants younger than 20 months of age interpret both words and symbolic gestures as object names. Later in development words and gestures take on divergent communicative functions. Here, we examined patterns of brain activity to words and gestures in typically developing infants at 18 and 26 months of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were…