Our study investigates the process of topic comprehension in comparative sentences and the relationship between this process and the word order of topic and vehicle. Our experiment used a meaningfulness decision task with three conditions: no-vehicle sentence (e.g. a word hurts someone), vehicle-after-topic sentence (e.g. a word, like a weapon, hurts someone), and vehicle-before-topic sentence ...

is sentence has two meanings that depend on how she is semantically interpreted. On one meaning, she refers to the same individual that Sally does. On this interpretation, we say that she is “coreferent” with Sally. On the other interpretation, she refers to some female individual that isn’t Sally. On this interpretation we say that she and Sally are “disjoint in reference.” One way of expressi...

Children acquiring French at first use just one form of each verb, where the meaning identifies only the event-type. How and when do they add additional forms, with the appropriate meanings? In this paper, we explore the information available to children from adult reformulations of these early verb-form uses, and show how adult construals contribute to children’s learning to distinguish betwee...

The term chunk, denoting a unit, and the related term chunking, denoting a mechanism to construct that unit, are familiar terms within psychology and cognitive science. The Oxford English Dictionary provides several definitions for “chunk.” First, “a thick, more or less cuboidal, lump, cut off anything,” or, colloquially, “a large or substantial amount.” The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides ...

Shepard’s notion of “internalisation” is better interpreted as a simile than a metaphor. A fractal encoding model of visual perception is sketched, in which image elements are transformed in such a way as to maximise symmetry with the current input. This view, in which the transforming system embodies what has been internalised, resolves some problems raised by the metaphoric interpretation.

First of all, sam1 doesn’t seem to have any at-issue meanings: the truth-conditions of sentences (1)-(4) will stay the same if we omit “sam” from them. But sam1 does seem to have more than one non-at-issue meaning: a presupposition and a conventional implicature. In this paper I will try to provide evidence for these two meanings, will discuss how they should be represented and how they are der...

In order to equip medical students with all the necessary skills in dealing with patients to provide optimal treatment, the need for the use of real patients in educational settings has become prominent. But all the required skills cannot be practiced on real patients due to patients’ safety and well-being. Thus, the use of standardized patients (SPs) or simulated patients (SiPs) as a substitut...