The paper points to an apparent paradox in the science of language. It regards the semantics of nouns and consists of a set of together incompatible, but individually well confirmed propositions about the evolution and development of language, the semantics of word classes and the cortical realization of word meaning. Theoretical and empirical considerations support the view that the concepts e...

Computation with information described in natural language (NL) has intrinsic importance because much of human knowledge is described using these languages. Soft Computing approach to NL-Computation concerns with semantic imprecision of natural languages through the use of NL precisiation, generalized constraints and prototypical forms. NLs are basically systems for describing perceptions. NL p...

We report on an experimental study of the processing of noun-noun compounds by native and non-native speakers of English, based on Event-Related Potentials recorded during a maskprimed lexical decision task. Analysis was by generalised linear mixed-effect modelling and generalised additive mixed modelling. Non-native processing is found to display headedness effects induced by the mothertongue....

The ability to generate novel sentences depends on cognitive operations that specify the syntactic function of nouns, verbs, and other words retrieved from the mental lexicon. Although neuropsychological studies suggest that such operations rely on neural circuits distinct from those encoding word form and meaning, it has not been possible to characterize this distinction definitively with neur...

Previous studies have suggested that relational concepts are more mutable—more prone to change meaning in context— than entity concepts even when both relational and entity concepts are denoted by nouns (Asmuth & Gentner, 2005; Feist & Férez, 2007). However, relationality is a complex dimension, and is highly correlated with other factors such as imageability and abstractness. In the current re...

This study investigates the role played by prosody in the syntactic and semantic disambiguation of string identical Relative Clauses (RC) and Pseudo Relatives (PR) in Italian. While RCs are embedded within the Noun Phrase (NP) they modify, PRs sit in a higher position in the syntactic structure, standing in a sisterhood relation with the head Noun. A production study with 8 Italian speakers set...

Evidence from experimental studies of Spanish children's production of determiners reveals that they pay more attention to phonological cues present in nouns than to natural semantics when assigning gender to determiners (Pérez-Pereira, 1991). This experimental work also demonstrated that Spanish children are more likely to produce the correct determiner when given a noun with phonological cues...