A study investigated the reciprocal relationship between colors and semantic terms--just as certain semantic terms elicit thoughts of particular colors, so those colors may also elicit their reciprocal semantic terms. Twenty-six students were each shown 18 words: 3 each of bipolar pairs that expressed evaluation, activity, or potency. The students…

The purpose of the present research was to examine younger (7-years-old) and older (10-years-old) children's attitudes toward older individuals following one type of five primes: positive prime, negative prime, elderly prime, grandparent prime, or neutral prime. Overall, children's attitudes on three tests--Apperception, Semantic Differential, and…

Elucidates Richard Whately's philosophy of language, particularly his observations on the relationship between language and thought, language and reality, and language and meaning. Claims that his stylistic advice in "Elements of Rhetoric" is grounded in this tripartite philosophy. (SR)

Discusses the varied meanings of the term "meta." Suggests the need for development of a list of preferred uses for the word and of a glossary of the ways "meta" appears in the literature of education and allied fields. (CMG)

The issue of the relationship between semantic features and semantic categories has been raised by Warrington and colleagues, who claimed that sensory and functional-associative features are differentially important in determining the meaning of living and nonliving things (Warrington & McCarthy, 1983, 1987; Warrington & Shallice, 1984). In the…

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated the processing of mass nouns used as count nouns and count nouns used as mass nouns. Following Copestake and Briscoe (1995), the basic or underived sense of a word was treated as the input to a derivational rule (''grinding'' or ''portioning'') which produced the derived sense as output. It was…

In this study, an extensive episode of teachers working with the intention of developing children's understanding of rhyme is analysed. The data for the analysis consist of a video-recording of two teachers and seven children (aged 3-5 years) working with a type of rhyme-card and trying to construct a poem. The analytical interest lies in the…

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a…

Rapid acquisition of linguistic categories or constructions is sometimes regarded as evidence of innate knowledge. In this paper, we examine Polish children's early understanding of an idiosyncratic, language-specific construction involving the instrumental case--which could not be due to innate knowledge. Thirty Polish-speaking children aged 2; 6…

This paper examines the hypothesis that grammatical function reanalyses in simple sentences should not be treated as phrase structure revisions, but rather as increased costs in "linking" an argument from a syntactic to a semantic representation. To this end, we investigated whether subject-object reanalyses in German verb-final sentences can be…

This investigation explored the effects of action research on teachers in a graduate education program. Mixed methods were utilized, combining a semantic differential study of student attitudes with qualitative analysis of students' perceptions of their experience as action researchers. Results indicate that participants perceived themselves as…

This article investigates the role of play and playlike activities (imagination, art) in developing and using symbolic tools. We understand processes of development of symbolic tools as coordination between two types of relationships: the subject-object relationships and the subject-subject relationships. This coordination begins when a new,…

Baggio presents the results of an event-related potential (ERP) study in which he examines the processing consequences of reading tense violations such as *"Afgelopen zondag lakt Vincent de kozijnen van zijn landhuis" (*"Last Sunday Vincent paints the window-frames of his country house"). The violation is arguably caused by a mismatch between the…

Children with reading comprehension difficulties display impaired performance on semantic processing tasks. These impairments are assumed to reflect weaker knowledge about abstract semantic associations between words in poor comprehenders [Nation, K., & Snowling, M. (1999). Developmental differences in sensitivity to semantic relations among good…

Semantic errors are commonly found in semantic dementia (SD) and some forms of stroke aphasia and provide insights into semantic processing and speech production. Low error rates are found in standard picture naming tasks in normal controls. In order to increase error rates and thus provide an experimental model of aphasic performance, this study…