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...

We investigated the knowledge of emotional and motor verbs in children and adolescents from three age ranges (8-11, 12-15, 16-19 years). Participants estimated the verbs familiarity, age of acquisition, valence, arousal, imageability, and motor- and emotion-relatedness. Participants were familiar with the verbs in our dataset. The younger (8-11) attributed an emotional character to the verbs le...

Dissociations of nouns and verbs following brain damage have been interpreted as evidence for distinct neural substrates underlying different aspects of the language system. Some neuroimaging studies have supported this claim by finding neural differentiation for nouns and verbs [Brain 122 (1999) 2337] while others have argued against neural specialisation [Brain 119 (1996) 159; Brain 124 (2001...

Neuroimaging studies have consistently indicated that semantic processing involves a brain network consisting of multimodal cortical regions distributed in the frontal, parietal, and temporal lobes. However, little is known about how semantic information is organized and processed within the network. Some recent studies have indicated that sensory-motor semantic information modulates the activa...

The ability to generate novel sentences depends on cognitive operations that specify the syntactic function of nouns, verbs, and other words retrieved from the mental lexicon. Although neuropsychological studies suggest that such operations rely on neural circuits distinct from those encoding word form and meaning, it has not been possible to characterize this distinction definitively with neur...

(1) Lexical representations tend to be arbitrary. Because it is difficult to write and test two-level systems that map between pairs of radically dissimilar forms, lexical representations in existing two-level analyzers tend to stay close to the surface forms. This is not a problem for morphologically simple languages like English because, for most words, inflected forms are very similar to the...

the existing literature on bantu verbal semantics demonstrated that inherent semantic content of verbs pairs directly with the selection of tense, aspect and modality formatives in bantu languages like chasu, lucazi, lusamia, and shiyeyi. thus, the gist of this paper is the articulation of semantic classification of verbs in kiswahili based on the selection of tam types. this is because the sem...

This study aimed to investigate the realizations of verbs’ syntactic and semantic features inmoves of applied linguistics research article introductions published in international andIranian local journals. To this end, a data of 30 research article introductions (15 published inIranian local journals and 15 in high impact international journals) was selected. The researcharticle introductions ...

The use of phrasal verbs is problematic for Iranian EFL learners. Accordingly, the present studyinvestigated the performance of Iranian intermediate and advanced EFL learners in separable andinseparable verbs. The total population of the study was one hundred female Iranian EFLlearners who studied English as foreign language in Kaj language institute in Qazvin, Iran. Theparticipants were all fe...

Verb-Noun compounds in English can be classified into endocentric compounds and exocentric ones. Among exocentric Verb-Noun compounds, two types of constructions are very common: ‘Verb + Object = Agent’ construction and ‘Verb + Object =Instrument’ construction. Based on the cognitive analysis of endocentric V+N compounds, this paper argues that exocentric V+N compounds can be analyzed in the sa...