The study reported here was conducted in the Algonquian language of Odawa (a.k.a. Ottawa), with the goal of gaining new insight into the ways that conceptual accessibility affects human sentence production. The linguistic characteristics of Odawa are quite different from those found in the languages most often examined by psycholinguists. The data obtained from the sentence production experimen...

Psycholinguistic research using the visual world paradigm has shown that the processing of sentences is constrained by the visual context in which they occur. Recently, there has been growing interest in the interactions observed when both language and vision provide relevant information during sentence processing. In three visual world experiments on syntactic ambiguity resolution, we investig...

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of discourse production. We compared the distributio...

This project deals with the spontaneous second language acquisition (henceforth SSLA) of adult, foreign immigrants, and their communication with speakers of the language of the country where they live and work. "Foreign" refers here to language rather than citizenship. There are at present about 11 million adult immigrants living in the industrialized western European countries, and their numbe...

Synaesthesia has been described as a perceptual phenomenon that creates a 'merging of senses'. Therefore, academic treatments have focused primarily on its sensory characteristics and similarities with veridical perception. This approach has dominated, despite parallel work that has suggested conceptual influences are involved, including data that show a large number of synaesthetic variants ar...

Schwartz (1999, 2002) has claimed that tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) are universal. The studies reported in this paper examine this claim for illiterates, unschooled literates, and schooled readers, all speakers of an unwritten Guatemalan language. The first study showed that, although there was little evidence of a dedicated verbal expression for this state of consciousness in the Mayan lang...

The present paper examines natural language as a dynamical system. The oft-expressed view of language as "a static system of symbols" is here seen as an element of a larger system that embraces the mutuality of symbols and dynamics. Following along the lines of the theoretical biologist H.H. Pattee, the relation between symbolic and dynamic aspects of language is expressed within a more general...