Two experiments investigated whether 4- and 5-year-old children are sensitive to whether the content of a generalization is about a salient or noteworthy property (henceforth “striking”) and whether varying the number of ...

Do readers benefit from their knowledge of the phonological form and meaning of stems when seeing them embedded in morphologically complex words for the first time in print? This question was addressed using a word learning ...

Introduction Human emotions can be complex to interpret as they have multiple sources and are often times ambiguous, for example, when the signals sent by different channels of communication are inconsistent. Our study ...

In this paper, I discuss nominal compound formation in language contact situations, the question being of how compounding in language mixing can inform both theories of mixing and theories of word-hood. This contributes ...

Spoken production requires lexical selection, guided by the conceptual representation of the to-be-named target. Currently, the question whether lexical selection is subject to competition is hotly debated. In the picture-word ...

In interpreting spoken sentences in event contexts, comprehenders both integrate their current interpretation of language with the recent past (e.g., events they have witnessed) and develop expectations about future event ...

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a ...

When a word is used metaphorically (for example “walrus” in the sentence “The president is a walrus”), some features of that word's meaning (“very fat,” “slow-moving”) are carried across to the metaphoric interpretation ...

The theory of language must predict the possible thought—signal (or meaning—sound or sign) pairings of a language. We argue for a Meaning First architecture of language where a thought structure is generated first. The ...