This paper provides an overview of the design and motivation for creating the Social Cognition Parallax Interview Corpus (SCOPIC), an open-ended, accessible corpus that balances the need for language-specific annotation with typologically-calibrated markup. SCOPIC provides richly annotated data, focusing on functional categories relevant to social…

Multiple constraints, including semantic, lexical, and usage-based factors, have been shown to influence dative alternation across different languages. This work explores whether fine-grained statistics and semantic properties of the verb affect the acceptability of dative constructions in Spanish. First, a corpus analysis reveals that verbs of…

Although episodic and semantic memory share overlapping neural mechanisms, it remains unclear how our pre-existing semantic associations modulate the formation of new, episodic associations. When freely recalling recently studied words, people rely on both episodic and semantic associations, shown through temporal and semantic clustering of…

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) experience difficulties with language, particularly higher-level functions like semantic integration. Yet some studies indicate that semantic processing of non-linguistic stimuli is not impaired, suggesting a language-specific deficit in semantic processing. Using a semantic priming task, we…

Vagueness is semantic indecision, David Lewis said. This dissertation vindicates this insight by applying social choice theory, the branch of economics concerning collective decision making, to account for linguistic vagueness. Vagueness effects are analogues to cycles that sometimes arise in collective decisions. Cycles (e.g. A is preferred to B…

Artificial intelligence (AI) that is based upon semantic search has become one of the dominant means for accessing information in recent years. This is particularly the case in mobile contexts, as search-based AI are embedded in each of the major mobile operating systems. The implications are such that information is becoming less a matter of…

Just as pronouns like "she" and "he" make anaphoric reference to individuals, English words like "that" and so can be used to refer anaphorically to a proposition introduced in a discourse: "That's true; She told me so". Much has been written about individual anaphora, but less attention has been paid to…

Among the texts of the Dead Sea Scrolls, there are four literary compositions that bear the superscriptional designations shir and mizmor. These designations correspond directly to superscriptional designations provided many times in both the now-canonical Psalter and the various witnesses to those texts unearthed at Qumran. On its face, this fact…

Language processing heuristics are one of the possible sources of divergence between first and second language systems. The Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) (Clahsen and Felser, 2006) proposes that non-native language processing relies primarily on semantic, and not syntactic, information, and that second language (L2) processing is therefore…

This article is about note taking, but it is not an exhaustive review of note-taking literature. Instead, it portrays the application of note-taking research to an unusual and important area of practice--the law. I was hired to serve as an expert witness on note taking in a legal case that hinged, in part, on the completeness and accuracy of…

Recent research suggests that infants tend to add words to their vocabulary that are semantically related to other known words, though it is not clear why this pattern emerges. In this paper, we explore whether infants leverage their existing vocabulary and semantic knowledge when interpreting novel label-object mappings in real time. We initially…

The current experiments systematically examined semantic content integration as a mechanism for explaining source inattention and forgetting when reading-to-remember multiple texts. For all 3 experiments, degree of semantic overlap was manipulated amongst messages provided by various information sources. In Experiment 1, readers' source…

The article deals with the problems of colloquial interrogative sentences having the function features in the source and target fiction texts. The importance of the research of interrogative sentences is defined by frequent use of questioning in the process of communication and a close connection of the problem of questioning with other…

To progress as a field, evaluators must be able to describe their work to nonevaluators, and to persuade an audience they have something unique and valuable to offer. Yet anecdotal reports suggest many evaluators have difficulty describing their work. Through 42 interviews with practicing evaluators, we aimed to better understand evaluators'…

Children acquire argument structure through distributional evidence, but how does this interacts with event semantics and existing verb knowledge? The current study compares verb learning in adult speakers of Japanese (where lexical causatives span wider semantic categories) and English (where alternation is more restricted). In the Fully…