The authors argue against a purely behavioral definition of praise as verbal reinforcement in favor of the view that praise may serve to undermine, enhance, or have no effect on children's intrinsic motivation, depending on a set of conceptual variables. Provided that praise is perceived as sincere, it is particularly beneficial to motivation when it encourages performance attributions to contr...

The paper presents an analysis of Hungarian sentence articulation driven by discourse-semantic functions such as topic and focus, hence the information structure of the utterance. In this paper extensions of the standard LTAG framework are proposed to represent the information structure driven positions in simple sentences. The elementary trees are generated by the meta-grammar, using the XMG t...

Mand training is an essential component of verbal behavior training for any individual who lacks this skill. The current study replicates and extends, with some procedural differences, the work of Hall and Sundberg (1987) by using an interrupted chain procedure to teach mands for missing items to children with autism. The participants were 3 children with autism, ranging between 5 and 8 years o...

Melissa Bowerman’s research in argument structure and verbal semantics in language acquisition has had a profound influence on the study of argument structure, including my own work. I hope to return to her the favor in a small way by contributing this outline of an analysis of verbal semantics and argument linking that offers a way of representing some of the results of Bowerman’s research. In...

Current views of semantic memory share the assumption that conceptual representations are based on multimodal experience, which activates distinct modality-specific brain regions. This proposition is widely accepted, yet little is known about how each modality contributes to conceptual knowledge and how the structure of this contribution varies across these multiple information sources. We used...

juxtaposition of words is a linguistic phenomenon that exists in all languages and is not specific to a language and means common relationship of one word with other certain words in a language. juxtaposition of words is one of the most important issues of semantics because of its important role in determining meaning of many words and combinations. this verbal phenomenon is one of distinguishi...

This work presents a theory of linguistic representation that attempts to capture the syntactic structure of verbs and their arguments. My framework is based on the assumption that the proper representation of argument structure is event structure. Furthermore, I develop the hypothesis that event structure is syntactic structure, and argue that verb meanings are compositionally derived in the s...

Is it possible to reason by means of images? If it is, then with what kind of images can we organize thoughts? How can the rules governing the relations between images be established? Could these relations be as complex and productive as those defined within the grammar of the verbal language? The basic construction of any language, especially a developed one, is a structure of formal rules whi...