Cognates have served as a useful tool for investigating the bilingual lexicon in many studies, but very little research has been carried out on different types of cognates, specifically, partial cognates and their role in cross-linguistic effect. The present study examines cognate effect in the speech production and acceptability judgment of two…

This study was designed to examine whether infants acquiring languages that place a differential emphasis on nouns and verbs, focus their attention on motions or objects in the presence of a novel word. An infant-controlled habituation paradigm was used to teach 18- to 20-month-old English-, French-, and Japanese-speaking infants' novel words for…

In some theories of sentence comprehension, linguistically relevant lexical knowledge, such as selectional restrictions, is privileged in terms of the time-course of its access and influence. We examined whether event knowledge computed by combining multiple concepts can rapidly influence language understanding even in the absence of selectional…

Suggests that thematic roles might best be viewed as verb-specific concepts and that this conceptual/world knowledge is computed and used immediately in online language processing. Discusses results in relation to other recent treatments of thematic roles as well as constraint-based and garden path models. (68 references) (Author/CK)

Examines the development of children's understanding of the difference between "want" and "need" in two different experiments. The first experiment required the children to respond verbally in choosing between the two concepts; the second required them to give an object to one of two characters who had made a request using…

Three studies are presented, each of which is a comparison of the acquisition of an aspect of the French verb system by three groups of speakers. The speakers are: young Anglophones learning French as a second language in an early French immersion program in Montreal; young monolingual Francophones attending elementary French language schools in…