Language and Cognitive Processes 

About: Language and Cognitive Processes is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Sentence & Priming (psychology). It has an ISSN identifier of 0169-0965. Over the lifetime, 868 publications have been published receiving 61467 citations.

Contextual correlates of semantic similarity

Abstract: The relationship between semantic and contextual similarity is investigated for pairs of nouns that vary from high to low semantic similarity. Semantic similarity is estimated by subjective ratings; contextual similarity is estimated by the method of sorting sentential contexts. The results show an inverse linear relationship between similarity of meaning and the discriminability of contexts. This relation, is obtained for two separate corpora of sentence contexts. It is concluded that, on average, for words in the same language drawn from the same syntactic and semantic categories, the more often two words can be substituted into the same contexts the more similar in meaning they are judged to be.

The syntactic positive shift (sps) as an erp measure of syntactic processing

Abstract: This paper presents event-related brain potential (ERP) data from an experiment on syntactic processing. Subjects read individual sentences containing one of three different kinds of violations of the syntactic constraints of Dutch. The ERP results provide evidence for M electrophysiological response to syntactic processing that is qualitatively different from established ERP responses to semantic processing. We refer to this electro-physiological manifestation of parsing as the Syntactic Positive Shift (SPS). The SPS was observed in an experiment in which no task demands, other than to read the input, were imposed on the subjects. The pattern of responses to the different kinds of syntactic violations suggests that the SPS indicates the impossibility for the parser to assign the preferred structure to an incoming string of words, irrespective of the specific syntactic nature of this preferred structure. The implications of these findings for further research on parsing are discussed.

Regular morphology and the lexicon.

Abstract: Three models of morphological storage and processing are compared: the dual-processing model of Pinker, Marcus and colleagues, the connectionist model of Marchman, Plunkett, Seidenberg and others, and the network model of Bybee and Langacker. In line with predictions made in the latter two frameworks, type frequency of a morphological pattern is shown to be important in determining productivity. In addition, the paper considers the nature of lexical schemas in the network model, which are of two types: source-oriented and product-oriented. The interaction of phonological properties of lexical patterns with frequency and the interaction of type and token frequency are shown to influence degree of productivity. Data are drawn from English, German, Arabic and Hausa.

An investigation of language impairment in autism: Implications for genetic subgroups

Abstract: Autism involves primary impairments in both language and communication, yet in recent years the main focus of research has been on the communicative deficits that define the population. The study reported in this paper investigated language functioning in a group of 89 children diagnosed with autism using the ADI-R, and meeting DSM-IV criteria. The children, who were between 4- and 14- years-old were administered a battery of standardized language tests tapping phonological, lexical, and higher-order language abilities. The main findings were that among the children with autism there was significant heterogeneity in their language skills, although across all the children, articulation skills were spared. Different subgroups of children with autism were identified on the basis on their performance on the language measures. Some children with autism have normal language skills; for other children, their language skills are significantly below age expectations. The profile of performance across the standardized measures for the language-impaired children with autism was similar to the profile that defines the disorder specific language impairment (or SLI). The implications of this language impaired subgroup in autism for understanding the genetics and definition of both autism and SLI are discussed.

The P600 as an index of syntactic integration difficulty

Abstract: The P600 component in Event Related Potential research has been hypothesised to be associated with syntactic reanalysis processes. We, however, propose that the P600 is not restricted to reanalysis processes, but reflects difficulty with syntactic integration processes in general. First we discuss this integration hypothesis in terms of a sentence processing model proposed elsewhere. Next, in Experiment 1, we show that the P600 is elicited in grammatical, non-garden path sentences in which integration is more difficult (i.e., ''who'' questions) relative to a control sentence (''whether'' questions). This effect is replicated in Experiment 2. Furthermore, we directly compare the effect of difficult integration in grammatical sentences to the effect of agreement violations. The results suggest that the positivity elicited in ''who'' questions and the P600-effect elicited by agreement violations have partly overlapping neural generators. This supports the hypothesis that similar cognitive processes, i.e., in...