During reading acquisition children learn to recognize orthographic stimuli and link them to phonology and semantics. The present study investigated neurocognitive processes of learning to read after one year of schooling. We aimed to elucidate the cognitive processes underlying neural tuning for print that has been shown to play an important role…

Language acquisition involves learning not only grammatical rules and a lexicon but also what people are intending to convey with their utterances: the semantic/pragmatic component of language. In this article we separate the contributions of linguistic development and cognitive maturity to the acquisition of the semantic/pragmatic component of…

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German…

The objectives of the present study were to 1) assess student attitudes to physiology, 2) evaluate student opinions about the influence of an objective structured practical examination (OSPE) on competence, and 3) assess the validity and reliability of an indigenously designed feedback questionnaire. A structured questionnaire containing 16 item…

Modern intelligent agents will need to learn the actions that humans perform. They will need to recognize these actions when they see them and they will need to perform these actions themselves. We want to propose a cognitive system that interprets human manipulation actions from perceptual information (image and depth data) and consists of…

In this dissertation, I examine the interpretation of NP-ellipsis (henceforth, NPE) in Korean. Some unexpected interpretive and grammatical contrasts arise in Korean between pro-forms such as "caki" "self" and "ku" "'3.S.M" (~"he") in object position and their null counterparts in NPE…

We argue for decreasing the use of the word "spread" when describing the statistical idea of dispersion or variability in introductory statistics courses. In addition, we argue for increasing the use of the word "variability" as a replacement for "spread."

Emotion appears to have a substantial impact on a wide variety of attentional functions. However, stimuli that elicit affective responses also tend to be meaningful. Here we attempted to disentangle the effects of meaning from the effects of affect on attentional capture by irrelevant distractors. Experiment 1 used a previously unfamiliar…

Localist models of spreading activation (SA) and models assuming distributed representations offer very different takes on semantic priming, a widely investigated paradigm in word recognition and semantic memory research. In this study, we implemented SA in an attractor neural network model with distributed representations and created a unified…

We address the issue of how information flows within the written word production system by examining written object-naming latencies. We report 4 experiments in which we manipulate variables assumed to have their primary impact at the level of object recognition (e.g., quality of visual presentation of pictured objects), at the level of semantic…

There are three hallmarks of core linguistic properties. First, they are expected to be manifested in typologically different languages. Second, they should unify superficially unrelated linguistic phenomena. Third, they are expected to emerge early in the course of language development, all things being equal (Crain, 1991). The present study…

Our series of three chapters (Faust, Bridges, & Ahern, 2009a, 2009b; Bridges, Faust, & Ahern, 2009) on the methodology of identifying sexually abused children elicited a number of comments, both supportive and critical. The criticisms appear related to three primary issues or apparent misconceptions of our work, perhaps due in part to incomplete…

Are comprehenders affected by an alternative analysis that they do not adopt (a nonadopted analysis) in case of syntactic ambiguity? If the processor only considers and maintains the preferred analysis at a given time, an alternative analysis is then not considered and will hence not affect processing. In two experiments, we examined the…

Recent studies illustrate cases of turn continuations that are not necessarily criterially dependent on clausal syntax (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono, 2007; Ford, Fox, & Thompson, 2002), advancing a more multidimensional construal of turn expansions, in general, which, as Auer (2007) put it, "is not a syntactic issue alone" (p. 651). This study further…

This study compares four methodologies used to examine online sentence processing during reading. Specifically, self-paced, non-cumulative, moving-window reading (Just et al. in "J Exp Psychol Gen" 111:228-238, 1982), eye tracking (see e.g., Rayner in "Q J Exp Psychol" 62:1457-1506, 2009), and two versions of the maze task (Forster et al. in…