The notions of user involvement and user orientation have become popular catchphrases in innovation research and practice. Central in this research are the ideas that knowledge about users leads to better design, and that the interests of users and producers need to be aligned. In another field of research, scholars have long recognised the…

In this study, we investigated semantic context effects in language production with event-related brain potentials, extracted from the ongoing EEG recorded during overt speech production. We combined the picture-word interference paradigm and the semantic blocking paradigm to investigate the temporal dynamics and functional loci of semantic…

Reflective skills are widely regarded as a means of improving students' lifelong learning and professional practice in higher education (Rogers 2001). While the value of reflective practice is widely accepted in educational circles, a critical issue is that reflective writing is complex, and has high rhetorical demands, making it difficult to…

This paper explores the process through which children sort out the relations among verbs belonging to the same semantic domain. Using a set of Chinese verbs denoting a range of action events that are labeled by carrying or holding in English as a test case, we looked at how Chinese-speaking 3-, 5-, and 7-year-olds and adults apply 13 different…

The predominance of the left hemisphere in language comprehension and production is well established. More recently, the right hemisphere's contribution to language has been examined. Clinical, behavioral, and neuroimaging research support the right hemisphere's involvement in metaphor processing. But, there is disagreement about whether…

A new metric, Word Maturity, estimates the development by individual students of knowledge of every word in a large corpus. The metric is constructed by Latent Semantic Analysis modeling of word knowledge as a function of the reading that a simulated learner has done and is calibrated by its developing closeness in information content to that of a…

While numbers generally cue processing of quantity or order, they can also contain semantic information, as in the case of historic years (e.g., "1492" calls forth associations of Columbus sailing the ocean blue). Whether these dates are processed as quantities or events may depend on the context in which they occur. We examined such "ambiguous…

The few studies that have investigated emotion labeling in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have generally focused on global identification performances and appear contradictory. The current study is a fine-grained examination of how children with SLI and typical peers differ in the accuracy of their emotional lexicon use. Children…

Excitatory anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (A-tDCS) over the left dorsal prefrontal cortex (DPFC) has been shown to improve language production. The present study examined neurophysiological underpinnings of this effect. In a single-blinded within-subject design, we traced effects of A-tDCS compared to sham stimulation over the left…

I examined the nature of morphological decomposition in a series of masked-priming experiments with Russian prefixed nouns. In Experiments 1A and 1B, I tested 3 types of prime-target pairs in which the prime was a morphologically simple word, and a facilitation was found when the prime and the target were truly morphologically related (e.g.,…

Achieving a clearer picture of categorial distinctions in the brain is essential for our understanding of the conceptual lexicon, but much more fine-grained investigations are required in order for this evidence to contribute to lexical research. Here we present a collection of advanced data-mining techniques that allows the category of individual…

The activities described in this article, Prediction Path and Quotation Cafe, are adapted from the IRA book "Building Reading Comprehension Habits in Grades 6-12." They highlight the reading comprehension habit of making inferences and predictions, which can be used across content areas and grade levels. In creating this toolkit of activities, the…

Semantic priming paradigms have been used to investigate semantic knowledge in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). While priming effects produced by prime-target pairs with associative relatedness reflect processes at both lexical and semantic levels, priming effects produced by words that are semantically related but not associated should…

This study examined whether children use prosodic correlates to word meaning when interpreting novel words. For example, do children infer that a word spoken in a deep, slow, loud voice refers to something larger than a word spoken in a high, fast, quiet voice? Participants were 4- and 5-year-olds who viewed picture pairs that varied along a…

The goal of the dissertation is to determine aspects of the structure of the human language faculty, a cognitive system, specifically focusing on human syntactic systems, (unique in the animal kingdom) which enable us to creatively produce an unlimited number of grammatical sentences (like the one you just read, probably never before written or…