Five experiments used ERPs and eye tracking to determine the interplay of word-level and discourse-level information during sentence processing. Subjects read sentences that were locally congruent but whose congruence with discourse context was manipulated. Furthermore, critical words in the local sentence were preceded by a prime word that was…

Across most languages, verbs produced by agrammatic aphasic individuals are frequently marked by syntactically and semantically inappropriate inflectional affixes, such as "Last night, I walking home." As per language production models, verb inflection errors in English agrammatism could arise from three potential sources: encoding the verbs'…

The authors show that verb aspect influences the activation of event knowledge with 4 novel results. First, common locations of events (e.g., arena) are primed following verbs with imperfective aspect (e.g., was skating) but not verbs with perfect aspect (e.g., had skated). Second, people generate more locative prepositional phrases as…

Two divided visual field priming experiments examined cerebral asymmetries for understanding metaphors varying in sentence constraint. Experiment 1 investigated ambiguous words (e.g., SWEET and BRIGHT) with literal and metaphoric meanings in ambiguous and unambiguous sentence contexts, while Experiment 2 involved standard metaphors (e.g., "The…

This study investigated the development of English two-member onset #sC clusters in Spanish-English bilingual children with phonological disorders. Data from 30 children were analysed in terms of correct and incorrect productions, implicational relationships, and possible groupings according to the sonority index of the second member of the…

This study examines the production and reduction patterns of initial /s/ clusters by Hebrew-speaking children with phonological disorders. Data were collected from 30 children with phonological disorders between the ages of 3;5-5;2. The data were elicited by means of a picture-naming task combined with a sentence completion task. Target words…

Well-documented Romance-Germanic differences in the use of accent in speech to convey information-structure and focus cause problems for the assessment of prosodic skills in populations with clinical disorders. The strategies for assessing the ability to use lexical and contrastive accent in English and Spanish are reviewed, and studies in the…

This paper introduces Ontoolsearch, a new search system that can be employed by educators in order to find suitable tools for supporting collaborative learning settings. Current tool search facilities commonly allow simple keyword searches, limiting the accuracy of obtained results. In contrast, Ontoolsearch supports semantic querying of tool…

Introduces this special issue of the journal on conceptual representation--considered the most important cognitive function in humans because it stands at the center of the information processing flow, with input from perceptual modules of differing kinds, and is centrally involved in memory, speech, planning, decision-making, actions, inductive…

Fronto-cerebellar circuitry is implicated in word production. Data suggest that the cerebellum is involved in word "search," whereas the prefrontal cortex underlies the "selection" of words from among competing alternatives. We explored the role of search and selection processes in word production deficits in schizophrenia patients. In Experiment…

The word virus is not normally considered polymorphemic, yet it is clearly both semantically and orthographically related to the word viral. Thus, the subunit vir takes on the role of a bound morpheme. In contrast, the words future and futile also share a subunit (fut), but are semantically unrelated. The reported experiment demonstrates…

Form-priming effects from sublexical (syllabic or segmental) primes in masked priming can be accounted for in two ways. One is the sublexical pre-activation view according to which segments are pre-activated by the prime, and at the time the form-related target is to be produced, retrieval/assembly of those pre-activated segments is faster…

We describe an experiment that investigated the failure to license polarity items in German using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The results reveal distinct processing reflexes associated with failure to license positive polarity items in comparison to failure to license negative polarity items. Failure to license both negative and…

Event-related potentials were recorded in a paradigm where an unrelated word was interposed between two related words. In one condition, the intervening item was masked and in another condition it was not. The N400 component indicated that priming of the related word was disrupted by the intervening item whether it was masked or not. The data are…

Recent research shows that speakers of languages with obligatory plural marking (English) preferentially categorize objects based on common shape, whereas speakers of nonplural-marking classifier languages (Yucatec and Japanese) preferentially categorize objects based on common material. The current study extends that investigation to the domain…