In this article, the authors explore semantic context effects in speaking. In particular, the authors investigate a marked discrepancy between categorically and associatively induced effects; only categorical relationships have been reported to cause interference in object naming. In Experiments 1 and 2, a variant of the semantic blocking paradigm…

Two explanations for deficits underlying autism were tested: weak central coherence (WCC) and executive dysfunction. Consistent with WCC, Happe ("British Journal of Developmental Psychology" 15 (1997) 1) found that children with autism failed to use sentence context in pronouncing homographs. In an alternate approach, we investigated whether…

Children's developing understanding that words have conventional meanings and objects have conventional functions emerges in parent-child activity and conversation. Drawing on family conversations in everyday settings, the chapter explores an apparent paradox between a global analysis of conventionality as stable shared knowledge and a local…

Research on AAC symbols has focused almost exclusively on iconicity and complexity, and thus has not established whether additional visual features are necessary for conveying meaning in graphic representations. Despite variations in individual depictions of an "apple," we understand the underlying concept due to shared consensus on the set of…

The word-frequency effect (WFE) in recognition memory refers to the finding that more rare words are better recognized than more common words. We demonstrate that a familiarity-discrimination model operating on data from a semantic word-association space yields a robust WFE in data on both hit rates and false-alarm rates. Our modeling results…

The purpose of this study was to determine the natural order of acquisition of the proform "it," comparing deictic pronoun "it," anaphoric pronoun "it" and expletive "it." Files from four children (Adam, Eve, Nina and Peter) aged 1 ; 6-3 ; 0 in the CHILDES database were coded for occurrences of NP it (here it is) and expletive it (it's raining).…

Whilst findings from experimental studies suggest that perceptual mechanisms underpinning musical cognition are preserved or enhanced in autism, little is known about how higher-level, structural aspects of music are processed. Twenty participants with autism, together with age and intelligence matched controls, completed a musical priming task in…

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…

This article examined the effects of body-object interaction (BOI) on semantic processing. BOI measures perceptions of the ease with which a human body can physically interact with a word's referent. In Experiment 1, BOI effects were examined in 2 semantic categorization tasks (SCT) in which participants decided if words are easily imageable.…

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning…

There is evidence for both semantic and asemantic routes for naming Arabic digits, but neuropsychological dissociations suggest that number-fact retrieval (2x3=6) can inhibit the semantic route for digit naming. Here, we tested the hypothesis that such inhibition should slow digit naming, based on the principle that reduced access to multiple…

In expressing rich, multi-dimensional thought in language, speakers are influenced by a range of factors that influence the ordering of utterance constituents. A fundamental principle that guides constituent ordering in adults has to do with information status, the accessibility of referents in discourse. Typically, adults order previously…

The debate over the extent to which individual letters are perceived by proficient readers continues to play a dominant role in the ongoing "reading wars." One view holds that virtually all letters are processed, the other view that only some letters are perceived, supplemented by context and background knowledge. There is little research,…

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic…

The working memory model for Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) predicts that processing differences between language modalities emerge when cognitive demands are explicit. This prediction was tested in three working memory experiments with participants who were Deaf Signers (DS), Hearing Signers (HS), or Hearing Nonsigners (HN). Easily nameable…