One of the functions of everyday human language is to communicate meaning. Thus, when one hears or reads the sentence, "John gave a book to Mary," some aspect of an event concerning the transfer of possession of a book from John to Mary is (hopefully) transmitted. One theoretical approach to language referred to as construction grammar emphasizes this link between sentence structure and meaning...

Tworating studies demonstrate that English speakers willingly produce reduced relatives with internal cause verbs (e.g., Whisky fermented in oak barrels can have a woody taste), and judge their acceptability based on factors known to influence ambiguity resolution, rather than on the internal/external cause distinction. Regression analyses demonstrate that frequency of passive usage predicts re...

Fluent speakers' representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These "selectional restrictions" of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recru...

It is well-established that (non-linguistic) categorization is driven by a functional demand of prediction. We suggest that prediction likewise may well play a role in motivating the learning of semantic generalizations about argument structure constructions. We report corpora statistics that indicate that the argument frame or construction has roughly equivalent cue validity as a predictor of ...

This article reviews cognitive neuroscience research on visual and language processing to suggest an analogy between the neural interpolation mechanisms in perceptual processing and the constructive processes that underlie meaning construction in language. Traditional models of language comprehension as a decoding process are argued to involve an overattribution of the import of linguistic info...

This research analyses the cooperative learning process in three groups applying the case study technique in a virtual university asynchronous communication context. The exploratory study was performed within a subject taught at a Master in e-learning programme. Based on a review of the theory and the current status of research, we delineate the concept of virtual cooperative learning and the m...

Discourse analysis is paramount in the negotiation and construction of meaning of the social world. Discursive psychologists believe that truth is a discursive construction and that the world can be represented in an unlimited number of ways. This paper discusses the importance of context and culture in discursive interactions. The paper discusses knowledge as situated and contingent and thus a...