Co-Planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain—3-Dimensional Proportional System: An Approach to Cerebral Imaging, J. Talairach, P. Tournoux. Georg Thieme Verlag, New York (1988), 122 pp., 130 figs. DM 268

I have developed "tennis elbow" from lugging this book around the past four weeks, but it is worth the pain, the effort, and the aspirin. It is also worth the (relatively speaking) bargain price. Including appendixes, this book contains 894 pages of text. The entire panorama of the neural sciences is surveyed and examined, and it is comprehensive in its scope, from genomes to social behaviors. The editors explicitly state that the book is designed as "an introductory text for students of biology, behavior, and medicine," but it is hard to imagine any audience, interested in any fragment of neuroscience at any level of sophistication, that would not enjoy this book. The editors have done a masterful job of weaving together the biologic, the behavioral, and the clinical sciences into a single tapestry in which everyone from the molecular biologist to the practicing psychiatrist can find and appreciate his or

Principles of Neural Science

As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired 'role hierarchies'. By examining occurrences of the 'same' verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.

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Thematic proto-roles and argument selection

http://psych.colorado.edu/~kimlab/Gibson.1998.pdf

Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies

K. Haberlandt, Methods in Reading Research. F. Ferreira and M. Anes, Why Study Spoken Language? K. Rayner and S.C. Sereno, Eye Movements in Reading Psycholinguistic Studies. M. Kutas and C.K. Van Petten, Psycholinguistics Electrified: Event-Related Brain Potential Investigations. R.E. Remez, A Guide to Research on the Perception of Speech. K.R. Kluender, Speech Perception as a Tractable Problem in Cognitive Science. D.W. Massaro, Psychological Aspects of Speech Perception: Implications for Research and Theory. S.E. Lively, D.B. Pisoni, and S.D. Goldinger, Spoken Word Recognition: Research and Theory. D.A. Balota, Visual Word Recognition: The Journey from Features to Meaning. G.B. Simpson, Context and the Processing of Ambiguous Words. D.C. Mitchell, Sentence Parsing. R.W. Gibbs, Jr., Figurative Thought and Figurative Language. C. Cacciari and S. Glucksberg, Understanding Figurative Language. M. Singer, Discourse Inference Processes. A.C. Graesser, C.L. McMahen, and B.K. Johnson, Question Asking and Answering. P. van den Broek, Comprehension and Memory of Narrative Texts: Inferences and Coherence. C.R. Fletcher, Levels of Representation in Memory for Discourse. A.M. Glenberg, P. Kruley, and W.E. Langston, Analogical Processes in Comprehension: Simulation of a Mental Model. B.K. Britton, Understanding Expository Text: Building Mental Structures to Induce Insights. S.C. Garrod and A.J. Sanford, Resolving Sentences in a Discourse Context: How Discourse Representation Affects Language Understanding. A.J. Sanford and S.C. Garrod, Selective Processing in Text Understanding. W. Kintsch, The Psychology of Discourse Processing. P. Bloom, Recent Controversies in the Study of Language Acquisition. L. Gerken, Child Phonology: Past Research, Present Questions, Future Directions. J. Oakhill, Individual Differences in Children's Text Comprehension. C.A. Perfetti, Psycholinguistics and Reading Ability. R.K. Olson, Language Deficits in Specific Reading Disability. K. Kilborn, Learning a Language Late: Second Language Acquisition in Adults. K. Bock and W. Levelt, Language Production: Grammatical Encoding. H.H. Clark, Discourse in Production. D. Caplan, Language and the Brain. E. Zurif and D. Swinney, The Neuropsychology of Language. P.A. Carpenter, A. Miyake, and M.A Just, Working Memory Constraints in Comprehension: Evidence from Individual Differences, Aphasia, and Aging. A. Garnham, Future Directions. Index.

Handbook of Psycholinguistics

Chapter 1. Introduction by Monika S. Schmid.- Chapter 2. Multi-factorial studies: Populations and linguistic features by Monika S. Schmid.- Chapter 3. The multi-lab, multi-language, multi-method challenge By Bregtje J. Seton and Laurie A. Stowe.- Chapter 4. Collecting and analyzing spontaneous speech data by Christopher Bergmann.- Chapter 5. Eye-tracking and the visual world paradigm by Sanne Meike Berends, Susanne M. Brouwer and Simone A. Sprenger.- Chapter 6. EEG and event-related brain potentials by Nienke Meulman, Bregtje J. Seton and Laurie A. Stowe.

Designing Research on Bilingual Development: Behavioral and Neurolinguistic Experiments

Previous research on pronoun resolution has identified several individual factors that are deemed to be important for resolving reference. In this paper, we argue that of these factors, as tested here, plausibility is the most important, but interacts with form markedness and structural parallelism. We investigated how listeners resolved object pronouns that were ambiguous in the sense of having more than one possible antecedent. We manipulated the form of the anaphoric expression in terms of accentuation (English: Experiments 1a and 2a) and morphology (Spanish: Experiments 1b and 2b). We looked at sentences where both antecedents were equally plausible, or where only one of the antecedents was plausible. Listeners generally resolved toward the (parallel) grammatical object of the previous clause. When the pronouns were marked due to accentuation (English) or use of specific morphology (Spanish), preference switched to the alternative antecedent, the grammatical subject of the previous clause. In contrast...

Comprehension of marked pronouns in Spanish and English: object anaphors cross-linguistically.

This chapter will focus on the use of eye-tracking in the visual world paradigm. This method can be employed to investigate a number of language comprehension issues, and we will begin with a brief overview of the history of the method and some of the applications. More centrally, we will discuss how it can be used to assess the impact of cross-linguistic interference, proficiency levels, and age of onset in L2 acquisition and L1 attrition, with an introduction to the issues that are involved in designing a study using this technique. As a case in point, we present and discuss the specific experiment employed within the multi-task, multi-language and multi-lab study on which this book is based, with special attention to the issues for analysis that arise when data from multiple systems must be combined.

Eye-tracking and the visual world paradigm

Use of motor pathways in comprehension of syntactically ambiguous sentences

/pdf/time-reference-teased-apart-from-tense-4yf710bjb5.pdf

Laurie A. Stowe

Papers

Designing Research on Bilingual Development: Behavioral and Neurolinguistic Experiments

Comprehension of marked pronouns in Spanish and English: object anaphors cross-linguistically.

Eye-tracking and the visual world paradigm

Use of motor pathways in comprehension of syntactically ambiguous sentences

Time reference teased apart from tense