Purpose: This study examined whether 2-year-olds are better able to acquire novel verb meanings when they appear in varying linguistic contexts, including both content nouns and pronouns, as compared to when the contexts are consistent, including only content nouns. Additionally, differences between typically developing toddlers and late talkers…

Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false. Successful counterfactual comprehension therefore requires people to keep in mind both an imagined hypothetical world and the presupposed real world. "Counterfactual transparency," that is, the degree to which a context makes it easy to determine…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

Most second language (L2) learners are aware of the importance of vocabulary, and this awareness usually directs their attention to learning new words. By contrast, learners do not often recognise unfamiliar idioms if all the compositional parts look familiar to them such as "turn the corner" or "carry the day." College-level…

Recent cognitive research has revealed better source memory performance for familiar relative to novel stimuli. Here we consider two possible explanations for this finding. The source memory advantage for familiar stimuli could arise because stimulus novelty induces attention to stimulus features at the expense of contextual processing, resulting…

One widely acknowledged way to improve our memory performance is to repeatedly study the to be learned material. One aspect that has received little attention in past research regards the context sensitivity of this repetition effect, that is whether the item is repeated within the same or within different contexts. The predictions of a…

The present study investigated the effect of context on the strategies the EFL learners utilized to process idioms. To do so, ten Iranian intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to two groups who then attended a think-aloud session. The 5 subjects in the first group were exposed to an animated cartoon including 23 unfamiliar idioms while…

The results of the study reported in this article found that primary-aged students used context knowledge in three broad ways: (1) to rationalise the data or their interpretations; (2) in taking a critical stance toward the data; and (3) in ways that were not necessarily productive or pertinent in addressing the task at hand. When teaching…

A surprising validation of expectation experienced during a recognition test induces the perception of discrepancy and a feeling of familiarity. The authors investigated whether that perception also affects memory performance when it is experienced in the original encounter with a stimulus. Target words were presented in a study phase, half in…

Research using the visual paired comparison task has shown that visual recognition memory across changing contexts is dependent on the integrity of the hippocampal formation in human adults and in monkeys. The acquisition of contextual flexibility may contribute to the change in memory performance that occurs late in the first year of life. To…