Event-related potential (ERP) studies have shown that emotional stimuli elicit greater amplitude late positive-polarity potentials (LPPs) than neutral stimuli. This effect has been attributed to arousal, but emotional stimuli are also more semantically coherent than uncategorized neutral stimuli. ERPs were recorded during encoding of positive,…

Children with language impairments demonstrate a broad range of semantic difficulties, including problems with new word acquisition, storage and organization of known words, and lexical access/retrieval. Unfortunately, assessments of children's semantic skills are often limited to measures of receptive and expressive vocabulary size. As a result,…

Core symptoms of Tourette's syndrome (TS) and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) may be attributed to an impairment in inhibitory control. Neuropsychological studies have addressed inhibition in both disorders, but findings have been inconsistent. The aim of this study was to examine cognitive inhibition, using a semantic Simon effect paradigm,…

This study examined linguistic recasts provided by 16 early childhood educators to preschool children learning English as a second language (EL2). Recasts are semantic and syntactic revisions of children's utterances. The educator-child interactions were filmed during book reading and play dough activities with small groups of four children, one…

The extant picture-learning research does not address confusing word pairs that are not concrete (e.g., in and into). In this study, university students viewed 11 timed Web pages containing information on confusing word pairs. Each page addressed one word pair and distinguished the words with examples (example group), examples and rules (rule…

When participants are presented simultaneously with spoken language and a visual display depicting objects to which that language refers, participants spontaneously fixate the visual referents of the words being heard [Cooper, R. M. (1974). The control of eye fixation by the meaning of spoken language: A new methodology for the real-time…

Generation effect (generated words are better memorized than read words) of anagrams, rhymes, and associates of target words was examined in young, elderly, and very old subjects. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that only young subjects benefit from the generation effect in a free-recall test when the rule is of a phonological nature. Experiments 3, 4,…

This article considers how children and young people conceptualize and construct different types of texts. The initial parts of narrative and expository texts written by grade-schoolers, adolescents, and adults were analyzed, on the assumption that the opening to a piece of discourse serves as a window on the text as a whole. Analysis was…

This paper examines the relationship between orthographic depth and reliance upon context for oral reading in English and Hebrew. Research on context effects in English has indicated that the decoding ability of adequate readers is only minimally affected by context. The effect of context may be greater in Hebrew because of its deeper orthography…

This article focuses on word order - the order of constituents in the sentence - as one way in which languages establish the relationship between a verb and its arguments. The spoken languages of the world have been classified into three, major word-order types: SVO, VSO, and SOV. Greenberg' work (1963) on language typology has been a stimulus to…

This article examines whether the idea of "temperament" is a useful construct for families to understand babies' and toddlers' behavior. The author suggests that "regulatory skill" may be a more neutral term than temperament for parents and practitioners to use in discussing individual differences among babies and toddlers and suggests that…

Purpose: Aims to investigate the way that the semantic web is being used to represent and process social network information. Design/methodology/approach: The Swoogle semantic web search engine was used to construct several large data sets of Resource Description Framework (RDF) documents with social network information that were encoded using the…

What is the nature of the change represented by digital communications technologies? How will the impact of the digital compare with the massive changes spawned in its time by print and books? These are the two key questions addressed in this article. The authors answer the first of these questions by comparing the emergence of the printed book…

The authors studied sensitivity to semantic priming, as distinct from semantic judgment, in poor readers. Association strength (high vs. low semantic association) was manipulated factorially with semantic association type (categoric vs. thematic association). Participants were 11-year-old poor readers (n = 15) who were matched with a group of…

The present study examined the neural correlates of speech and hand gesture comprehension in a naturalistic context. Fifteen participants watched audiovisual segments of speech and gesture while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to the speech. Gesture influenced the ERPs to the speech. Specifically, there was a right-lateralized N400…