BACKGROUND The remediation of pragmatic problems forms a significant part of the caseload for professionals working with children with communication problems. There is little systematic evidence that demonstrates the benefits of speech and language therapy for children whose difficulties lie primarily within the pragmatic domain or which indicates whether changes in pragmatic behaviours, which ...

This study employs discourse analysis to examine the pragmatic functions of vague language in Donald Trump’s Inaugural Address. By interpreting hedging, abstract concepts and generalizations address, author explores how is strategically utilized by political leaders achieve his purposes, such as establishing unity inclusivity, alluding past grievances, promising change, eliciting emotional reac...

While some individuals with agenesis of the corpus callosum can perform normally on standardized intelligence tests, clinical observations suggest that they nevertheless have deficits in the domains of fluid and social intelligence. Particularly important for social competence is adequate understanding and use of paralinguistic information. This study examined the impact of callosal absence on ...

than others. The study looked at comprehension and application of irony compared to subjective affective evaluation of irony reported by Polish-speaking adults and with relation to nonverbal intelligence measured with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised-Polish versions (WAIS-R(PL), 2004). Fifty-four subjects aged 20-66 years (28 females and 26 males) participated in Study 1 on subject...

Language processing in context requires more than merely comprehending words and sentences. Important subprocesses are inferences for bridging successive utterances, the use of background knowledge and discourse context, and pragmatic interpretations. The functional neuroanatomy of these text comprehension processes has only recently been investigated. Although there is evidence for right-hemis...

We propose a new functional-anatomical mapping of the N400 and the P600 to a minimal cortical network for language comprehension. Our work is an example of a recent research strategy in cognitive neuroscience, where researchers attempt to align data regarding the nature and time-course of cognitive processing (from ERPs) with data on the cortical organization underlying it (from fMRI). The succ...

For a correct interpretation of the thematic roles of constituents of a sentence, the relation between those constituents has to be understood. For each language, a combination of specific interpretation cues leads to a correct understanding of a sentence, and one of the comprehension cues is most reliable. The speed and success rate of children in acquiring those cues most relevant for their l...

This study investigated how resource-demanding reading tasks and stressful conditions affect 1stlanguage (L1) and intermediate 2nd-language (L2) reading comprehension. Using the attentional control theory framework (Eysenck, Derakshan, Santos, & Calvo, 2007), we investigated the roles of central executive working memory (WM) resources, reading task difficulty, trait reading anxiety, and social ...

Many comprehension studies have shown that children as late as age 6 ; 6 misinterpret object pronouns as co-referring with the referential subject about half the time. A recent review of earlier experiments testing children's interpretation of object pronouns in sentences with quantified subjects (Elbourne, 2005) also suggests that there is a 'Pronoun Interpretation Problem'. In contrast, two e...

We will argue that this construction combines semantic and syntactic quirks that necessitate a constructional analysis. Further, we will show that specifying the pragmatic properties of the construction (and in particular the presuppositions that introduces) allows for a particularly elegant account of the construction’s distribution. This, in turn, provides further support for the sign-based v...