This article argues that Vygotsky’s choice of word meaning as the basic unit of analysis for cultural psychology connects him to a German psycholinguistic tradition—exemplified in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and J. G. Herder—distinct from the Marxist tradition. While later commentators criticize Vygotsky’s reliance on word meaning, arguing that it cannot explain the formation of consciousness, t...

We report psycholinguistic norms for 305 French idiomatic expressions (Study 1). For each of the idiomatic expressions, the following variables are reported: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. In addition, we have collected comprehension times for each idiom (Study 2). The psycholinguist...

Identifying clear and unequivocal psycholinguistic effects for lexical retrieval tasks has been the aim of a significant proportion of recent research activity. Debates have erupted concerning the existence or otherwise of particular effects on particular lexical tasks. Here, it is suggested that the reason for these debates is that researchers exercise choice in what variables they consider in...

Fluency in a second language (L2) involves a quintessentially cognitive processing system that operates quickly and effectively. The perceived importance of researching fluency through a psycholinguistic lens has motivated the related L2 research to resort to current cognitive speaking-specific models. This study, drawing on Levelt’s (1999a) psycholinguistic model, probed the deficiency sources...

Language loss is a pressing concern for many of the world's languages. A major obstacle to the early diagnosis of language loss and to the assessment of language maintenance efforts is the absence of an easy-to-use psycholinguistic measure of language strength. We have developed a series of simple psycholinguistic tasks that exploit the fact that the relative strength of two languages is reflec...

Within both psycholinguistic theories of parsing and formal theories of syntax, a distinction between arguments and adjuncts is central to some theories, while minimized or denied by others. Even for theories that deem the argument/adjunct distinction important, the exact nature of the distinction has been difficult to characterize. In this paper, we review the psycholinguistic evidence for an ...

The overall goal of our work is to build a dependency grammar-based human sentence processor for Hindi. As a first step towards this end, in this paper we present a dependency grammar that is motivated by psycholinguistic concerns. We describe the components of the grammar that have been automatically induced using a Hindi dependency treebank. We relate some aspects of the grammar to relevant i...

From psycholinguistic and lexical semantic aspect, the semantic transparency of 2000 nominal English and Chinese high frequent compounds in the corpus have been analyzed, and related with word frequency. The result showed that in both languages, the number of Transparent-Transparent and Partially-Transparent compounds is larger than that of Opaque-Opaque compounds. Moreover, the relationship be...