Naming a picture of a dog primes the subsequent naming of a picture of a dog (repetition priming) and interferes with the subsequent naming of a picture of a cat (semantic interference). Behavioral studies suggest that these effects derive from persistent changes in the way that words are activated and selected for production, and some have…

Eye movements in reading are sensitive to foveal and parafoveal word features. Whereas the influence of orthographic or phonological parafoveal information on gaze control is undisputed, there has been no reliable evidence for early parafoveal extraction of semantic information in alphabetic script. Using a novel combination of the gaze-contingent…

A variety of research has pointed to the interdependent linkage among vocabulary knowledge, reading comprehension, and level of literacy. With this point in mind, the present study addressed the question of whether student vocabulary acquisition could be accelerated by using a multi-part, semantic word-family-oriented learning strategy to…

This dissertation investigates constructional alternation among the English verb- "at," verb- 'away-at," and verb- "away" constructions. The primary purpose is to lay a fundamental conceptual framework on the interrelation between how we perceive a "situation" in an "external" world and how we construe it as an "event structure" in a…

In dialog settings, conversational partners converge on similar names for referents. These "lexically entrained" terms [Garrod, S., & Anderson, A. (1987). "Saying what you mean in dialog: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination." "Cognition, 27," 181-218] are part of the common ground between the particular individuals who established the…

Developmental dyslexia is the most common learning disability in school-aged children with an estimated incidence of five to ten percent. The cause and pathophysiological substrate of this developmental disorder is unclear. Recently, a possible involvement of the cerebellum in the pathogenesis of dyslexia has been postulated. In this study, 15…

Agrammatic aphasic individuals exhibit marked production deficits for tense morphology. This paper presents three experiments examining whether a group of English-speaking agrammatic individuals (n = 10) exhibit parallel deficits in their comprehension of tense. Results from two comprehension experiments (on-line grammaticality judgment studies)…

Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements…

False memories are sometimes strong enough to elicit recollective experiences. This phenomenon has been termed Phantom Recollection (PR). The Conjoint Recognition (CR) paradigm has been used to empirically separate PR from other memory processes. Recently, a simplification of the CR procedure has been proposed. We herein extend the simplified CR…

It is suggested that the distinction between global versus local processing styles exists across sensory modalities. Activation of one-way of processing in one modality should affect processing styles in a different modality. In 12 studies, auditory, haptic, gustatory or olfactory global versus local processing was induced, and participants were…

Students must be able to consciously use their knowledge of phonology, orthography, morphology, semantics, syntax, and pragmatics to successfully read and write. Difficulties in the conscious awareness of 1 or more of these 6 linguistic knowledge components may lead to reading and writing deficits. In this article, we present a componential model…

This paper evaluates two classes of hypotheses about how people prosodically segment utterances: (1) meaning-based proposals, with a focus on Watson and Gibson's (2004) proposal, according to which speakers tend to produce boundaries before and after long constituents; and (2) balancing proposals, according to which speakers tend to produce…

This thesis aims to define and extend a line of computational models for text comprehension that are humanly plausible. Since natural language is human by nature, computational models of human language will always be just that--models. To the degree that they miss out on information that humans would tap into, they may be improved by considering…

Semantic roles are a critical aspect of linguistic knowledge because they indicate the relations of the participants in an event to the main predicate. Experimental studies on children and adults show that both groups use associations between general semantic roles such as Agent and Theme, and grammatical positions such as Subject and Object, even…

I track the influence, presence and pivotal role of changes in the understanding of metaphor, which accompanied the paradigm shift from objectivism to pluralism and relativism in education. These shifts are also reflected in the choice of teaching methodology. I argue that metaphors are constitutive of educational activities, events and processes…