Showing papers in "Cognition in 1991"

TL;DR: Evidence is extended with evidence suggesting that both the particular configuration of features, and some aspects of the features themselves, are important for preferential tracking in the first hour of life.

TL;DR: These findings challenge the widespread view that children initially map spatial words directly to nonlinguistic spatial concepts, and suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning.

TL;DR: Understanding of insides and essences in 3- to 5-year-old children indicates that preschool children attend to non-obvious features and realize their privileged status, and may indicate a more basic predisposition toward psychological essentialism in young children.

TL;DR: This article propose a configurational theory of event structure and examine how it contributes to a lexical semantic theory for natural language, arguing that an event structure can provide a distinct and useful level of representation for linguistic analysis involving the aspectual properties of verbs, adverbial scope, the role of argument structure, and the mapping from the lexicon to syntax.

TL;DR: Data are presented that suggest that at least some cases of dysphasia are associated with an abnormality in a single dominant gene, and the results of a series of tests on a large three-generation family are reported, showing that abstract morphology is impaired in these subjects.

TL;DR: The results suggest that it is unlikely that a single-layered perceptron is capable of finding an adequate solution to the problem of mapping stems and past tense forms in input configurations that are sufficiently analogous to English.

TL;DR: The analysis shows that lexical semantics and phrasal semantics interpenetrate deeply, and that there is no strict one-to-one correspondence between syntactic and semantic structures, and provides further evidence that natural language semantics must be based on a psychological view of meaning.

TL;DR: This paper assessed whether the ontological distinction between objects and non-solid substances conditions projection of word meanings prior to the child's mastery of count/mass syntax and found that the ontology underlying natural language is induced in the course of language learning, rather than constraining learning from the beginning.

TL;DR: Two competence-deficit hypotheses and a performance-limitation account are evaluated and American children appear to understand that English requires subjects before mean length of utterance (MLU) 2.0.

TL;DR: The results suggest that whatever the nature of the endowment that allows humans to learn language, it undergoes a very broad deterioration as learners become increasingly mature.

TL;DR: In this investigation, even 3-year-olds often responded correctly when asked to predict the initial behavior of a story character with a false belief, and this results are discussed in terms of the conversational worlds of children and adults.

TL;DR: Principles of lexical semantics developed in the course of building an on-line lexical database are discussed, which are relational rather than componential and require synonymy to define the lexicalized concepts that words can be used to express.

TL;DR: A cross-linguistic gating study was conducted to investigate whether listeners would interpret nasal and oral vowels differently in two languages, and the results show that surface phonetic nasality in the vowel in VN sequences is used by English listeners to anticipate the upcoming nasal consonant.

TL;DR: A new connectionist model was constructed using the back-propagation algorithm, a larger input corpus, a fuller paradigm, and a new phonological representation that successfully addressed the criticisms of the phonological representations used by Rumelhart and McClelland.

TL;DR: The results leave open the question of whether autistic children have a metarepresentational ability in the different sense of the term intended by Pylyshyn (1978), that is, representing the relationship between a representation and what it represents.

TL;DR: A set of experiments is reported in which a new formulation of deontic thinking is tested, and it is apparent that people represent subjective utilities inherent in conforming to or violatingDeontic statements, along with the social dynamics of these statements.

TL;DR: 3-year-olds' understanding of the representational capability of the mind is investigated by examining whether they would acknowledge that they had entertained a wrong belief, and the posting task made it possible for children simultaneously to focus on physical reality and acknowledge false belief.

TL;DR: A specific pattern suggests that individual differences in the ease or difficulty with which phonemic awareness can be induced by preschool experiences or by reading instruction is the critical variable underlying the observed correlations between phonemicawareness measures before reading instruction and progress in learning to read.

TL;DR: Evidence suggests that there is a critical, or at least a sensitive, period for language acquisition, which ends around puberty, which is explained by an evolutionary model which assumes that linguistic ability is in principle (if not in practice) measurable and the amount of language controlled by an individual conferred selective advantage on it.

TL;DR: The newer theory was tested in three experiments and confirms that speakers are not confined to labeling moving entities as "themes" or "patients" and linking them to the grammatical object; when a stationary entity undergoes a state change as the result of a motion, it can be represented as the main affected argument and thereby linked to the Grammatical object instead.

TL;DR: The results show that people can plan corrections to their speech while talking, and suggest that Kempen and Hoenkamp's (1987) concept of incremental processing can be extended to repairs.

TL;DR: This paper presents a case study in lexical semantic analysis aimed at uncovering syntactically relevant components of verb meaning by isolating those components of meaning that the members of each subclass share.

TL;DR: An implementation of Bruce and Young's (1986) functional model of face recognition is used to examine patterns of covert face recognition previously reported in a prosopagnosic patient, PH, and it is demonstrated that the implemented model provides the most natural and parsimonious account available.

TL;DR: The present paper presents the probabilistic contrast model, which explains the distinction between causes and enabling conditions by the covariation between potential causes and the effect in question over a focal set--a set of events implied by the context.

TL;DR: Eight experiments are reported showing that subjects can remember rather subtle aspects of the configuration of facial features to which they have earlier been exposed, and preferences for the prototype could be affected by instructions at study and by whether different exemplars of the same face were shown consecutively or distributed through the study series.

TL;DR: 6- and 4.5-month-old infants' ability to represent and to reason about the height and location of a hidden object is examined, with impressive quantitative and qualitative physical reasoning abilities revealed.

TL;DR: Byrne (1989) claims to have demonstrated that context can suppress valid inferences like modus ponens, and by an essentially similar maneuver one can cause subjects to reject instances of modusponens.

TL;DR: Four- and 5-year-olds were equally competent in understanding the need for interpretation of pictorial material and realized that an uninitiated person cannot make sense of a "droodle", which in itself is an uninterpretable section of a larger meaningful drawing.

TL;DR: This article shows that an alternative defence of mental inference rules claims that the suppression relies on inconsistent and incoherent premises is falsified by data from the experiments it was designed to explain.

TL;DR: It is the fate of those who dwell at the lower employments of life, to be rather driven by the fear of evil, than attracted by the prospect of good.