This study investigated whether potential emotional cues for drinking activate alcohol concepts in young drinkers. Participants were 84 university freshmen with high or low levels of anxiety sensitivity (AS). A verbal priming task measured activation (i.e., priming) of alcohol concepts (e.g., beer) by positive and negative mood phrases. Time to read alcohol target words was the dependent measur...

It has been claimed that verb processing (as opposed to noun processing) is subserved by specific neural circuits in the left prefrontal cortex. In this study, we took advantage of the unusual grammatical characteristics of clitic pronouns in Italian (e.g., lo and la in portalo and portala 'bring it [masculine]/[feminine]', respectively)-the fact that clitics have both nominal and verbal charac...

Nicholas and Joseph (this volume) identify a class of previously unnoticed compounds of the form V+V in modern Greek, and establish some significant descriptive generalizations about them. They argue that V+V compounds are true morphological compound words, the verbal analogs of nominal dvandva compounds, and not syntactic phrases or verb clusters. The existence of such compounds in Greek is in...

Many studies have documented what listeners understand when uncertainty is communicated to them verbally. Yet we still know little about the factors that will influence speakers’ choice of a probability phrase over another when they wish to communicate uncertain facts. Using a legal setting, we showed that the quantitative meaning and the directionality of the verbal probability chosen were aff...

This paper presents results of an experiment integrating information from valency dictionary of Polish into a mention detection system. Two types of information is acquired: positions of syntactic schemata for nominal and verbal constructs and secondary prepositions present in schemata. The syntactic schemata are used to prevent (for verbal realizations) or encourage (for nominal groups) constr...

Verbal Phraseological Units are phrases made up of two or more words in which at least one of the words is a verb that plays the role of the predicate. One of the characteristics of this type of expression is that its global meaning rarely can be deduced from the meaning of its components. The automatic recognition of this type of linguistic structures is a very important task, since they are a...

In sentence production, grammatical advance planning scope depends on contextual factors (e.g., time pressure), linguistic factors (e.g., ease of structural processing), and cognitive factors (e.g., production speed). The present study tests the influence of the availability of multiple syntactic alternatives (i.e., syntactic flexibility) on the scope of advance planning during the recall of Du...