Background: Studies to date in semantic dementia have examined communication in clinical or experimental settings. There is a paucity of research describing the everyday interactional skills and difficulties seen in this condition. Aims: To examine the everyday conversation, at home, of an individual with semantic dementia. Methods &…

Introduction: During the last couple of years the library community has developed a number of comprehensive metadata standardization projects inspired by the idea of linked data, such as the BIBFRAME model. Linked data is a set of best practice principles of publishing and exposing data on the Web utilizing a graph based data model powered with…

When participants are asked to translate an ambiguous word, they are slower and less accurate than in the case of single-translation words (e.g., Laxen & Lavour, 2010; Tokowicz & Kroll, 2007). We report an experiment to further examine this multiple-translation effect by investigating the influence of variables shown to be relevant in bilingual…

We report two picture-word interference experiments investigating conceptual and lexical activation, and response selection, in speaking. We varied stimulus onset asynchrony to investigate potential fine-grained activation and competition effects. Morphologically related existing and pseudoword adjectives, as well as associatively related…

Undergraduate students (N = 40) responded positively to a semantic differential scale after experiencing a "direct practice" service learning group work course. Qualitative data documented student's perceptions of increased skill levels relating to self-efficacy--understood as positively influencing mastery of skills and performance…

Research findings concerning verb-level influences on past-tense morphology carry implications for the careful selection of treatment targets. Using 6 of the broad criteria for "good verbs to choose" proposed by D. Crystal (1985) more than 25 years ago as a framework, this article summarizes some of the more recent research with a nod…

Semantic studies on diagrammatic notations (Barwise & Etchemendy,; Shimojima,; Stenning & Lemon, ) have revealed that the "non-deductive," "emergent," or "perceptual" effects of diagrams (Chandrasekaran, Kurup, Banerjee, Josephson, & Winkler,; Kulpa,; Larkin & Simon,; Lindsay, ) are all rooted in the…

The study aimed to investigate the spelling performance and the semantic understanding of compound words by 103 Greek primary school children (first through sixth grade). The experimental group comprised of 25 children with spelling difficulties and compared with a control group of 78 children of typical development. Children were asked to spell…

Background: Young children's speech is typically more linguistically sophisticated than their writing. However, there are grounds for asking whether production of cohesive devices, such as verb-phrase anaphora (VPA), might represent an exception to this developmental pattern, as cohesive devices are generally more important in writing than in…

Due to European agreements and policy expectations, national authorities are revising their formal curricula in line with an evidence-oriented policy. The article explores how new trends in formulating curricula can be regarded as an outcome of experts' semantics and impact on education policy. The article reanalyses documentation from a project,…

Previous studies have shown that deficiencies in visuospatial perception and semantic processing in people with Williams syndrome (WS) are due to deficient central cohesiveness. Unlike previous studies that used abstract stimuli, this study used pictures to determine the relative ability of people with WS to integrate contextual information with…

Teachers and trainers often try to prevent learners from making errors, but recent findings (e.g., Kornell, Hays, & Bjork, 2009) have demonstrated that tests can potentiate subsequent learning even when the correct answer is difficult or impossible to generate (e.g., "What is Nate Kornell's middle name?"). In 3 experiments, we…

In this study, we present 3 picture-word interference (PWI) experiments designed to investigate whether lexical selection processes are competitive. We focus on semantic associative relations, which should interfere according to competitive models but not according to certain noncompetitive models. In a modified version of the PWI paradigm,…

The priming of concepts has been shown to influence peoples' subsequent actions, often unconsciously. We propose 3 mechanisms (psychological, cultural, and biological) as a unified explanation of such effects. (a) Primed concepts influence holistic representations of situations by parallel constraint satisfaction. (b) The constraints among…

Studies of semantic context effects in spoken word production have typically distinguished between categorical (or taxonomic) and associative relations. However, associates tend to confound semantic features or morphological representations, such as whole-part relations and compounds (e.g., BOAT-anchor, BEE-hive). Using a picture-word interference…