Children acquire exact meanings for number words in distinct stages. First, they learn one, then two, and then three and sometimes four. Finally, children learn to apply the counting procedure to their entire count list. Although these stages are ubiquitous and well documented, the foundation of these meanings remains highly contested. Here we ask whether children assign preliminary meanings to...

Cross-species comparison of great ape gesturing has so far been limited to the physical form of gestures in the repertoire, without questioning whether gestures share the same meanings. Researchers have recently catalogued the meanings of chimpanzee gestures, but little is known about the gesture meanings of our other closest living relative, the bonobo. The bonobo gestural repertoire overlaps ...

Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Meanings are often assumed to combine via function application, which works well when constituent structure trees are used to guide semantic composition. However, we believe that the functional s...

Gernsbacher (1984) found that number of word meanings (polysemy) did not influence lexical decision time when it was operationalized as number of dictionary definitions. This finding supports her contention that subjects do not store all possible dictionary meanings for words in memory. The present experiments extended Gernsbacher's research by determining whether more psychologically valid mea...

Semantic theories of natural language associate meanings with utterances by providing meanings for lexical items and rules for determining the meaning of larger units given the meanings of their parts. Traditionally, meanings are combined via function composition, which works well when constituent structure trees are used to guide semantic composition. More recently, the functional structure of...

In acquiring word meanings, learners are often confronted by a single word form that is mapped to two or more meanings. For example, long after how to roller-"skate", one may learn that "skate" is also a kind of fish. Such learning of new meanings for familiar words involves two potentially contrasting processes, relative to new form-new meaning learning: 1) Form-based familiarity may facilitat...

Research investigating hemispheric asymmetries in meaning selection using homophonic homographs (e.g., bank), suggests that the left hemisphere (LH) quickly selects contextually relevant meanings, whereas the right hemisphere (RH) maintains a broader spectrum of meanings including those that are contextually irrelevant (e.g., Faust & Chiarello, 1998). The present study investigated cerebral asy...

OBJECTIVE A new grandparent identity measure is constructed that allows us to compare grandparent identity meanings with the meanings of other adult identities and to investigate the relationships between identities and well-being. METHODS Data were collected in 1997 from 203 older grandmothers and grandfathers living in a metropolitan area. Grandparent and parent identity meanings are measur...