This study shows that 4- and 6-month-old infants can discriminate languages (English from French) just from viewing silently presented articulations. By the age of 8 months, only bilingual (French-English) infants succeed at this task. These findings reveal a surprisingly early preparedness for visual language discrimination and highlight infants' selectivity for retaining only necessary percep...

Visual programming languages use pictures as programs. One approach to building a visual programming environment is to parameterlze a generic environment with a language specification. We describe a mechanism for specifying visual languages that can be used as the basis of a language-independent visual programming environment. Our mechanism is a new type of grammar, called a picture layout gram...

Reasoning errors often arise when information is represented incorrectly. One example is the “conjunction effect”, a tendency to misremember OR statements as AND statements. We investigated the how the time course of consonance between visual and auditory information influenced memory for connectives. We measured memory for statements after manipulating the consonance between language and visua...

In contrast to symbolic models of language understanding, embodied models of language comprehension suggest that language is closely connected with visual and motor processing. In the current study we show that motion words, such as rise or fall, are processed faster if displayed against a background of compatible motion (e.g., upward vs. downward random dot motion with 60% motion coherence). H...

It is frequently assumed that deaf individuals have superior visual-spatial abilities relative to hearing peers and thus, in educational settings, they are often considered visual learners. There is some empirical evidence to support the former assumption, although it is inconsistent, and apparently none to support the latter. Three experiments examined visual-spatial and related cognitive abil...

Language is more than a source of information for accessing higher-order conceptual knowledge. Indeed, language may determine how people perceive and interpret visual stimuli. Visual processing in linguistic contexts, for instance, mirrors language processing and happens incrementally, rather than through variously-oriented fixations over a particular scene. The consequences of this atypical vi...

The subject of this research is linguistic (or: language) audit. The term is new and not being widely used so far. Linguistic audit, in particular, is offered as a service of linguistic-consulting agencies’ activities. Modern linguistic consulting, according to the author, is a form of stimulating theoretical and practical development of linguistic ecology, a new branch of applied linguistics, ...

UNLABELLED Plasticity in the visual cortex of blind individuals provides a rare window into the mechanisms of cortical specialization. In the absence of visual input, occipital ("visual") brain regions respond to sound and spoken language. Here, we examined the time course and developmental mechanism of this plasticity in blind children. Nineteen blind and 40 sighted children and adolescents (4...

When processing language, the cognitive system has access to information from a range of modalities (e.g. auditory, visual) to support language processing. Language mediated visual attention studies have shown sensitivity of the listener to phonological, visual, and semantic similarity when processing a word. In a computational model of language mediated visual attention, that models spoken wor...