Three experiments examined whether the process of lexical inferences differs according to the direction of contextual elaboration using a semantic relatedness judgment task. In Experiment 1, Japanese university students read English sentences where target unknown words were semantically elaborated by prior contextual information (forward lexical…

Morphological systems are constrained in how they interact with each other. One case that has been widely studied in the psycholinguistic literature is the avoidance of plurals inside compounds (e.g. *"rats eater" vs. "rat eater") in English and other languages, the so-called "plurals-in-compounds effect." Several…

In a previous gaze-contingent boundary experiment, Angele and Rayner (2013) found that readers are likely to skip a word that appears to be the definite article "the" even when syntactic constraints do not allow for articles to occur in that position. In the present study, we investigated whether the word frequency of the preview of a…

Participants completed a battery of 3 attentional control (AC) tasks (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop, as in Hutchison, 2007) and performed a lexical decision task with symmetrically associated (e.g., "sister-brother") and asymmetrically related primes and targets presented in both the forward (e.g., "atom-bomb") and backward…

The current study tests the Interface Hypothesis through forward and backward anaphora in complex sentences with temporal subordinate clauses in highly proficient English-speaking learners' second-language (L2) Chinese. Forward anaphora is involved when the overt pronoun "ta" "he/she" or a null element appears in the subject…

This study investigated the role of morphological and contextual information in inferring the meaning of unknown L2 words during reading. Four groups of college-level ESL students, beginning (n?=?34), intermediate (n?=?27), high-intermediate (n?=?21), and advanced (n?=?25), chose the inferred meanings of 20 pseudo compounds (e.g.,…

Although several types of figurative language exist, neuropsychological tests of non-literal language have focused on proverbs. Metaphors in the form X is (a) Y (e.g., "The body's immunological response is a battle against disease.") place a lower demand on language skills and are more easily manipulated for novelty than proverbs.…

Environmental education owes its very existence to a particular interpretation of reality. The author's purpose in this article is to examine critically the "selected fictions" on which that view of reality is based--to examine the ways in which perceptions of environmental problems and issues are "conditioned by our position in…

"Reclaiming Ga?" is a curious title for readers oblivious to the fact that the meaning of "?a?" has been lost. Indeed, "?a?" is but one of several linguistic signals of Koine Greek that allude the grasp of the modern scholar. This has created an environment within NT studies described here as conjunctive…

This dissertation investigates the topic of scholarship in the Information Systems (IS) discipline through a series of three papers. The papers, presented in Chapters 2, 3, and 4, each delve into a specific chronological period of IS scholarship which are delineated into the past, present, and future. Chapter 2 elucidates the IS discipline's…

The tip-of-the-tongue experience (TOT) is a universal phenomenon in which a speaker cannot fully produce a word that he or she believes will eventually be recalled and could easily be recognized. The purpose of the current experiment is to determine how variables such as word concreteness and word frequency influence TOT rates. Participants were…

This research proposes a unified approach to the semantics of the so-called bare nominals, which include proper names (e.g., "Mary"), mass and plural terms (e.g., "water," "cats"), and articleless noun phrases in Japanese. I argue that bare nominals themselves are monadic predicates applicable to more than one…

Many sentences of modal discourse are "inconstant": "Paris Hilton could have been a politician", for example, seems to be true in some contexts, false in others. In this dissertation, I explore this topic, which we can call the "inconstancy of de re modal attributions". My goal is to develop, motivate, and defend a…

Most English adjectives can appear either prenominally or as predicates. (1) a. the red rose b. Roses are red. There are also adjectives that can appear only in one position or the other, but not in both: (2) a. * the awake child b. The child is awake. (3) a. the former president b. * The president is former. The primary goal of this dissertation…

This article provides the first comprehensive conceptual account for the imagistic mental machinery that allows us to travel through time--for the time machine in our mind. It is argued that language reveals this imagistic machine and how we use it. Findings from a range of cognitive fields are theoretically unified and a recent proposal about…