Language interacts with olfaction in exceptional ways. Olfaction is believed to be weakly linked with language, as demonstrated by our poor odor naming ability, yet olfaction seems to be particularly susceptible to linguistic descriptions. We tested the boundaries of the influence of language on olfaction by focusing on a non-lexical aspect of language (grammatical gender). We manipulated the g...

This thesis presents an initial investigation of the semantic-syntactic interface in a sub-group of children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI): the Grammatical (G)-SLI group. Previous research of this group has largely focused on their morphosyntactic abilities and more recently on the morpho-phonological interface. In contrast, the semantic ability of children with SLI in general is an a...

Readers actively construct representational models of meaning when reading text, and they do so by drawing on a range of kinds of information, from the specifi c linguistic forms of the sentences to knowledge about how the world works (Ferretti, Kutas, & McRae, 2007 ; Madden & Zwaan, 2003 ). The present set of studies focused on how grammatical aspect is integrated into a situation model and ho...

This comprehension study on aspectual form-to-meaning correspondences set out to see if the presence of aspect as morphological category in a language makes the acquisition of aspectual form-meaning pairs relatively easy in comparison to a language that lacks such an aspect category. In Polish, aspect is a grammatical category—all verbs are marked as perfective or imperfective—and tense is mark...

This study examined whether the degree of complexity of a grammatical component in a language would impact on its representation in the brain through identifying the neural correlates of grammatical morpheme processing associated with nouns and verbs in Chinese. In particular, the processing of Chinese nominal classifiers and verbal aspect markers were investigated in a sentence completion task...

The present study examines the role of Gal’perin’s Concept-based Instruction (CBI) as a pedagogical approach in teaching cognitive grammar-based (CG-based) concepts of tense and aspect to EFL students. Following the sociocultural theory of L2 Acquisition (SCT), arming L2 learners with scientific concepts can lead to L2 development by deepening their understanding and raising awareness of L2 str...

Temporal information is important in the construction of situation models, and many languages make use of perfective and imperfective aspect markers to distinguish between completed situations (e.g., He made a cake) and ongoing situations (e.g., He is making a cake). Previous studies in which the effect of grammatical aspect has been examined have shown that perfective sentences are often proce...