The present study investigated the utility of employing computerized speech content analysis software to detect feigned depression in psychologically healthy adults. Twenty-two subjects between the ages of 19 and 54 years old, who scored lower than 10 on the Beck depression inventory (BDI, 1996), were asked to speak freely in response to a neutral…

The nature of the memory processes that support language comprehension and the manner in which information packaging influences online sentence processing were investigated in three experiments that used eye-tracking during reading to measure the ease of understanding complex sentences in Korean. All three experiments examined reading of embedded…

Traditional syntactic accounts of verb phrase ellipsis (e.g., ''Jason laughed. Sam did [ ] too.'') categorize as ungrammatical many sentences that language users find acceptable (they ''undergenerate''); semantic accounts overgenerate. We propose that a processing theory, together with a syntactic account, does a better job of describing and…

Studies of sentence comprehension deficits in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients suggest that language processing involves circuits connecting subcortical and cortical regions. Anatomically segregated neural circuits appear to support different cognitive and motor functions. To investigate which functions are implicated in PD comprehension…

To investigate the stability of trace reactivation in healthy older adults, 22 older volunteers with no significant neurological history participated in a cross-modal priming task. Whilst both object relative center embedded (ORC) and object relative right branching (ORR) sentences were employed, working memory load was reduced by limiting the…

Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors,…

Most current models of speech production predict interference from related context words in picture-naming tasks. However, Glaser and Dungelhoff (1984) reported semantic facilitation when the task was changed from basic-level naming to category-level naming. The authors explore two proposals to account for this change in polarity of the semantic…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language…

In a sequel to a review of the translation theory of Peter Newmark, it is argued that there is a single best method of translating regardless of whether the translator takes a semantic, communicative, or other approach. Methods of translating and approaches to extracting the sense of the text are clearly distinguished. Newmark is criticized for…

A role is proposed for the lexicon in the grammatical consciousness-raising (GCR) framework for second language teaching outlined by W. Rutherford and M. Sharwood Smith (1987, 1988). First, a lexical framework that offers a series of questions to help teachers discover the relevant semantic and pragmatic information associated with grammatical…

This report describes part of a longer study on sentence comprehension. The long range goal is to identify distinct levels of processing in terms of the types of linguistic and extralinguistic information each level uses. The focus of this part of the study is sentences with filler-gap relations, such as, "This is the girl the teacher wanted to…

"Levels of processing" is an explanatory framework postulating that differences in memory processing quality or effort affect the duration of the memory trace. Using recall (immediate, one week, or two week) for connected discourse processed under three semantic and three orthographic interference conditions, as well as a noninterference…

Describes a means of characterizing one of many semantic aspects of young children's comprehension ("necessity for linking"). This semantic aspect is then used to experimentally clarify sentence processing results that are ambiguous at the syntactic level. (HOD)

Examines the verification of false sentences of the form "All S are P." It was found that the number of properties shared by the subject and predicate concept of the sentence was directly proportional to reaction time. These findings question the assumption that only property relations are prestored in memory. (Author/EJS)

Verifying simple sentences generally involves a process wherein the meanings of individual words are combined to form the meaning of the entire sentence. Three experiments are described in which the combination process was investigated by asking subjects to decide whether S-V-Adj-O sentences were true or false. (Author/RM)