The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…

The broader aim of this study is the corpus-based investigation of the written language production process. To this end, temporal markers have been keylog recorded alongside the writing processes to exploit pauses to segment the speech product into linear units of performance. However, identifying these pauses requires selecting the relevant…

One approach to understanding how the human cognitive system stores and operates with quantifiers such as "some," "many," and "all" is to investigate their interaction with the cognitive mechanisms for estimating and comparing quantities from perceptual input (i.e., nonsymbolic quantities). While a potential link…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

We tested two accounts of the cognitive process underlying the N400 event-related potential component: one that it reflects meaning-based processing and one that it reflects the processing of specific words. The experimental design utilized separable Persian phrasal verbs, which form a strongly probabilistic, long-distance dependency, ideal for…

Language learning is influenced by both neural development and environmental experiences. This work investigates the influence of early bilingual experience on the neural mechanisms underlying speech processing in 4-month-old infants. We study how an early environmental factor such as bilingualism interacts with neural development by comparing…

Analysis of linguistic abilities that are concurrently impaired in individuals with language deficits allows identification of a shared underlying mechanism. If any two linguistic abilities are mediated by the same underlying mechanism, then both abilities will be absent if this mechanism is broken. Clustering techniques automatically arrange…

Novelty seeking has been found to affect creative performance, but its impact on the temporal dynamics of creative information processing remains unclear. Creative information is identified by two key indicators--novelty and appropriateness. To explore the effect of novelty seeking on the temporal processing of novelty and appropriateness, a…

There is ample evidence that individual-level cognitive mechanisms active during language learning and use can contribute to the evolution of language. For example, experimental work suggests that learners will reduce case marking in a language where grammatical roles are reliably indicated by fixed word order, a correlation found robustly in the…

Background and Aim: Recently, there has been a lot of interest surrounding the term gestalt language processor (GLP) which is associated with Natural Language Acquisition (NLA): a protocol intended to support the language development of autistic people. In NLA, delayed echolalia is presumed raw source material that GLPs use to acquire language in…

One of the basic tenets of predictive theories of language processing is that of misprediction cost. Post-N400 positive event-related potential (ERP) components are suitable for studying misprediction cost but are not adequately described, especially in older adults, who show attenuated N400 ERP effects. We report a secondary analysis of a…

Background: Over the past few decades, the process and methodology of automatic question generation (AQG) have undergone significant transformations. Recent progress in generative natural language models has opened up new potential in the generation of educational content. Objectives: This paper explores the potential of large language models…

Classical quantifiers (like "all," "some," and "none") express relationships between two sets, allowing us to make generalizations (like "no elephants fly"). Devices like these appear to be universal in human languages. Is the ubiquity of quantification due to a universal property of the human mind or is it…

Semantic composition in language must be closely related to semantic composition in thought. But the way the two processes are explained differs considerably. Focusing primarily on propositional content, language theorists generally take semantic composition to be a truth-conditional process. Focusing more on extensional content, cognitive…

We studied the role of discourse coherence relations on structure formulation in sentence production by examining whether a connective, an essential signal of coherence relations, modulates the tendency for speakers to reuse sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). We further examined three possible modulating factors: the type of…