From as early as 6 months of age, human children distinguish between motion patterns generated by animate objects from patterns generated by moving inanimate objects, even when the only stimulus that the child observes is a single point of light moving against a blank background. The mechanisms by which the animate/inanimate distinction are made are unknown, but have been shown to rely only upo...

We investigate whether semantic information related to object categories can be obtained from human fMRI BOLD responses with Formal Concept Analysis (FCA). While the BOLD response provides only an indirect measure of neural activity on a relatively coarse spatiotemporal scale, it has the advantage that it can be recorded from humans, who can be questioned about their perceptions during the expe...

Comparatively little is known about how semantic properties (such as animacy) and syntactic properties (such as word order) affect production of complex sentences. Relative clauses were elicited using a picture description task that manipulated head noun animacy in both English (which has head-first relative clauses and Japanese (head-final relative clauses). Participants of both languages prod...

0749-596X/$ see front matter 2012 Elsevier Inc http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jml.2012.03.006 ⇑ Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (P.C. Gordon). Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and...