An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

Ethnographic semantics is that discipline which seeks to understand human cognition through an analysis of the cognitive content of linguistic expressions: that is, the systematic study of the meanings of words and the role of these meanings in cognitive systems. There are many misconceptions about the nature of ethnosemantics, however, and by…

Analysis of approximately 5,000 words and phrases of the "hard core poor" is the basis of an attempt to develop a taxonomy of their language usage. The authors examine the problem of culture differences from mainstream society. "This approach assumes that basic beliefs about relevant social reality will be reflected in a group's choice of rules…