For teaching of collocations no resource exists that comprehensively ranks collocations in terms of usefulness for learners. Towards developing a method to produce such a resource, we define a collocation's utility in terms of its unpredictability; the inability of a student to derive the meaning of the collocation from her semantic knowledge of its constituent words. We conduct an experiment c...

As spoken language unfolds over time the speech input transiently activates multiple candidates at different levels of the system - phonological, lexical, and syntactic - which in turn leads to short-lived between-candidate competition. In an fMRI study, we investigated how different kinds of linguistic competition may be modulated by the presence or absence of a prior context (Tyler 1984; Tyle...

Learning takes time, namely, one needs to be exposed to contingency relations between stimulus dimensions in order to learn, whereas intentional control can be recruited through task demands. Therefore showing that control can be recruited as a function of experimental instructions alone, that is, adapting the processing according to the instructions before the exposure to the task, can be take...

The journal editors and the Department of English Studies at the Universitat Jaume I wish to pay tribute to our colleague, friend and teacher, Dr. Xavier Campos Vilanova who passed away earlier this year. Xavier showed a passionate enthusiasm for the study of the history of the English language and literature, but also for everything he did. From taking photographs, researching on the meaning o...

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared sentences featuring verbs in idiomatic phrases with control sentences in which the same verbs were meant literally. Participants made lexical decisions about nouns that were associated with either the verb’s litera...

Sentences with embedding are more complex than sentences without embedding, because they contain more syntactic layers in their phrasal architecture. Until now, neuroimaging studies tested embedded sentences that also included syntactic movement. To explore which cortical areas are specifically involved in the processing of syntactic layers, we used embedded sentences that did not include synta...

There is a profusion of labels used for the phenomenon of multiword units (MU’s), yet they are notoriously underrepresented in handbooks of both grammatical and dictionary type alike. After an illustration of both, problems of criteria which delimit MU’s are raised up, together with an number of open issues and necessity of a functional approach is stressed. As three major issues, stableness, t...