Special Issues of Language and Cognitive Processes – serie

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the processing of major East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. These languages, due to their salient differences in structure from European languages, provide challenging opportunities to explore both language-specific processes involved in comprehension and communication and the universality of theories developed from the study of European languages.This volume presents an exciting sample of the most recent research on the processing of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Topics range from written and spoken word processing to sentence and discourse comprehension. The authors include specialists working in major areas of language and cognitive processes from different parts of the world.

Until recently, much research in language comprehension operated under the assumption that comprehenders initially identified the syntactic structure of sentences they were hearing or reading without regard to the meanings of the words in the sentences. A significant amount of recent work has challenged that position, however, and there is now abundant evidence that lexical information plays a central role in sentence processing. The papers in this special issue reflect the increased status on lexical representations in sentence processing research. The authors approach the question of the precise role of lexical information in sentence comprehension from a variety of theoretical perspectives. They supplement experimental psycholinguistic research with work in neighboring fields, including concepts and categorization, theoretical linguistics, and computational modeling. The volume should be of interest to psycholinguistics, cognitive scientists, linguistics and computer scientists.

This collection of papers and abstracts stems from the third meeting in the series of Sperlonga workshops on Cognitive Models of Speech Processing. It presents current research on the structure and organization of the mental lexicon, and on the processes that access that lexicon. The volume starts with discussion of issues in acquisition and consideration of questions such as, 'What is the relationship between vocabulary growth and the acquisition of syntax?', and, 'How does prosodic information, concerning the melodies and rhythms of the language, influence the processes of lexical and syntactic acquisition?'. From acquisition, the papers move on to consider the manner in which contemporary models of spoken word recognition and production can map onto neural models of the recognition and production processes. The issue of exactly what is recognised, and when, is dealt with next - the empirical findings suggest that the function of something to which a word refers is accessed with a different time-course to the form of that something. This has considerable implications for the nature, and content, of lexical representations. Equally important are the findings from the studies of disordered lexical processing, and two papers in this volume address the implications of these disorders for models of lexical representation and process (borrowing from both empirical data and computational modelling). The final paper explores whether neural networks can successfully model certain lexical phenomena that have elsewhere been assumed to require rule-based processes.

Does darkness lead to happiness? Is there corn in the corner? These are questions that make - to some extent - semantically sense, but for researchers interested in the role of morphology in word processing they make morphologically sense as well. This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the 6th MOrphological PROcessing Conference MOPROC, which was organized in Turku, Finland and hosted researchers with a firm interest in questions like these. The special issue contains 13 articles that provide answers from different viewpoints, since it contains research on comprehension, production, and acquisition of morphology. Moreover, the articles present research in a number of languages with fundamentally different morphological systems. Apart from studies in West-Germanic languages (English and Dutch), the special issue contains studies in Romance languages (Spanish and Italian), in languages with very rich inflectional paradigms (Greek, Polish and Finnish) and in languages with non-concatenative morphology (Hebrew and Arabic). Moreover, it contains studies on all three major morphological classes: Inflections, derivations and compounds. Specific questions addressed in the volume deal with the time course with which morphemes come available, what factors facilitate their use, the role of orthographic and semantic transparency in complex word processing and how morphology should be incorporated in models of word processing. The chapters provide a wealth of empirical results obtained with state-of-the-art experimental paradigms. We hope that they will be an inspiration for further studies in morphological processing as much as we - living in Finland - hope that there is happiness in darkness.

Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions.In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference.The articles in this special issue tackle a number of key questions: What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody and intonation? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? How can this information be used to parse corpora, and how can corpora be used to test theories on prosody?

Speech recognition in ‘adverse conditions’ has been a familiar area of research in computer science, engineering, and hearing sciences for several decades. In contrast, most psycholinguistic theories of speech recognition are built upon evidence gathered from tasks performed by healthy listeners on carefully recorded speech, in a quiet environment, and under conditions of undivided attention. Building upon the momentum initiated by the Psycholinguistic Approaches to Speech Recognition in Adverse Conditions workshop held in Bristol, UK, in 2010, the aim of this volume is to promote a multi-disciplinary, yet unified approach to the perceptual, cognitive, and neuro-physiological mechanisms underpinning the recognition of degraded speech, variable speech, speech experienced under cognitive load, and speech experienced by theoretically relevant populations. This collection opens with a review of the literature and a formal classification of adverse conditions. The research articles then highlight those adverse conditions with the greatest potential for constraining theory, showing that some speech phenomena often believed to be immutable can be affected by noise, surface variations, or attentional set in ways that will force researchers to rethink their theory. This volume is essential for those interested in speech recognition outside laboratory constraints.

This special issue on language production is based on a selection of contributions to the Second International Workshop on Language Production held in August 2005 in Maastricht. The volume is an overview of new directions within language production research and includes papers on word selection and its modelling, the production of pauses in sentence production, the interaction between spontaneous gestures and speech, and changes in language production behaviour in ageing.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the processing of major East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. These languages, due to their salient differences in structure from European languages, provide challenging opportunities to explore both language-specific processes involved in comprehension and communication and the universality of theories developed from the study of European languages.This volume presents an exciting sample of the most recent research on the processing of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Topics range from written and spoken word processing to sentence and discourse comprehension. The authors include specialists working in major areas of language and cognitive processes from different parts of the world.

Until recently, much research in language comprehension operated under the assumption that comprehenders initially identified the syntactic structure of sentences they were hearing or reading without regard to the meanings of the words in the sentences. A significant amount of recent work has challenged that position, however, and there is now abundant evidence that lexical information plays a central role in sentence processing. The papers in this special issue reflect the increased status on lexical representations in sentence processing research. The authors approach the question of the precise role of lexical information in sentence comprehension from a variety of theoretical perspectives. They supplement experimental psycholinguistic research with work in neighboring fields, including concepts and categorization, theoretical linguistics, and computational modeling. The volume should be of interest to psycholinguistics, cognitive scientists, linguistics and computer scientists.

This special issue presents an overview of recent research conducted in the field of language production. Its articles are based on talks presented at the first edition of the International Workshop on Language Production (Marseille, France, September 2004). The articles in the special issue deal with three different topics of general interest for models of language production: A. the general organizational principles of the language production system (representations, spread of activation, monitoring), B. several aspects of the lexical selection process and C. the representations and processes used during syntactic encoding.

Ten years ago, a group of researchers investigating the processing of morphological information met in the south of France to discuss how morphology affects word recognition, perception and production from a cross-linguistic perspective. This special issue is the fourth volume to expose the results of this on-going research effort. The volume begins with a comprehensive review of the nature of morphological priming, followed by a series of experimental papers that examine morphological processing in a variety of languages such as English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, and Spanish. The parallel monitoring of morphological processing in reading, speech perception and production, using a wide array of experimental methods such as masked priming, long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, and the recording of electrophysiological activity, provides converging evidence regarding the nature of morphemic representations in the various languages. The cross-linguistic perspective that characterizes the research effort of the present volume, as well as the previous ones, is used to investigate whether there are qualitative differences in the principles of lexical organization and lexical processing in different alphabetic orthographies that arise from qualitative differences in morphological structure.

This Special Issue encompasses studies of a wide range of developmental disorders, including Specific Language Impairment (SLI), reading disability, Williams Syndrome, hearing impairment and autistic disorder. Chiat contributes a theoretical analysis of the underlying nature of Specific Language Impairment, questioning whether it is appropriate to focus on a narrow domain of linguistic functioning, such as morphosyntax, and suggesting instead that we need to see how children are able to carry out mapping operations between the domains of phonology, syntax and semantics.Three papers focus primarily on aspects of grammatical morphology: Van der Lely and Ullman consider past tense morphology in children with SLI and Thomas et al use similar tasks with children with Williams Syndrome, questioning the theoretical interpretation of deficits that has previously been made. Volterra et al remind us that a focus solely on English-speaking children can be misleading - they uncover intriguing grammatical deficits in Italian-speaking people with Williams Syndrome, and note how these contrast with the pattern found in deaf individuals learning oral language.Dockrell et al and Nation et al both consider a relatively underinvestigated topic - children's naming errors, examining evidence for phonological and semantic bases to word-finding difficulties in contrasting groups: children with SLI in the case of Dockrell et al, and those with reading disability in the case of Nation et al. Traditionally, SLI and autistic disorder have been regarded as quite separate, but this view is questioned by Kjelgaard and Tager-Flusberg, who note intriguing parallels between the linguistic deficits found in these two syndromes. Finally, Evans et al investigate the neglected topic of how gesture is integrated with speech in conveying information, noting that these modes of expression may diverge in children with SLI.Overall, the research reported in this Special Issue emphasises the importance of studying how language difficulties manifest in development, and show that there are many different routes to language acquisition, some more efficient than others.

Spoken word access processes are the mental processes which underlie our ability to recognise spoken words. They are the perceptual processes which take the sequence of buzzes, bursts and chirps that make up the raw speech signal and convert them into a sequence of words. This edited volume contains articles and short reports which examine these processes. These papers are based on presentations at the workshop Spoken Word Access Processes (SWAP), held in Nijmegen in May 2000. They cover the major issues that the field is now concerned with, and thus provide a snapshot of the current state of the SWAP art. Core representational issues about spoken words are addressed: the form of the representations which are used to access the mental lexicon; how phonological information is coded in the lexicon; and how morphological and semantic information about each word is stored. The main components of the lexical access process are also discussed: competition between candidate words; computation of goodness-of-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of continuous speech into words; whether there is feedback from the lexicon to earlier stages of processing; and the relationship of form-based processes to the processes responsible for deriving interpretations of utterances. This collection should be essential reading for those working in this or related areas of psycholinguistics. An introductory article is included which makes this research more accessible to students in cognitive psychology and phonetics, and to specialists in other fields of psychology and linguistics.

Concepts lie at the heart of our mental life, supporting a myriad of cognitive functions - including thinking and reasoning, object recognition, memory, and language comprehension and production. The nature of concepts and their representation in the mind and brain has been studied from many different perspectives and so provides valuable opportunities for integrative, interdisciplinary discussions.This special issue on conceptual representation contains invited papers from leading researchers across the range of cognitive science disciplines, addressing the nature of semantic and conceptual representation in the mind and brain. Contributions include both empirical reports and theoretical reviews, from the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy and linguistics.

This Special Issue is the third volume produced by a group of researchers who convene every two years to discuss the role of morphology in word recognition.

This collection of papers and abstracts stems from the third meeting in the series of Sperlonga workshops on Cognitive Models of Speech Processing. It presents current research on the structure and organization of the mental lexicon, and on the processes that access that lexicon. The volume starts with discussion of issues in acquisition and consideration of questions such as, 'What is the relationship between vocabulary growth and the acquisition of syntax?', and, 'How does prosodic information, concerning the melodies and rhythms of the language, influence the processes of lexical and syntactic acquisition?'. From acquisition, the papers move on to consider the manner in which contemporary models of spoken word recognition and production can map onto neural models of the recognition and production processes. The issue of exactly what is recognised, and when, is dealt with next - the empirical findings suggest that the function of something to which a word refers is accessed with a different time-course to the form of that something. This has considerable implications for the nature, and content, of lexical representations. Equally important are the findings from the studies of disordered lexical processing, and two papers in this volume address the implications of these disorders for models of lexical representation and process (borrowing from both empirical data and computational modelling). The final paper explores whether neural networks can successfully model certain lexical phenomena that have elsewhere been assumed to require rule-based processes.

This special issue presents an overview of recent research conducted in the field of language production. Its articles are based on talks presented at the first edition of the International Workshop on Language Production (Marseille, France, September 2004). The articles in the special issue deal with three different topics of general interest for models of language production: A. the general organizational principles of the language production system (representations, spread of activation, monitoring), B. several aspects of the lexical selection process and C. the representations and processes used during syntactic encoding.

This special issue on language production is based on a selection of contributions to the Second International Workshop on Language Production held in August 2005 in Maastricht. The volume is an overview of new directions within language production research and includes papers on word selection and its modelling, the production of pauses in sentence production, the interaction between spontaneous gestures and speech, and changes in language production behaviour in ageing.

Ten years ago, a group of researchers investigating the processing of morphological information met in the south of France to discuss how morphology affects word recognition, perception and production from a cross-linguistic perspective. This special issue is the fourth volume to expose the results of this on-going research effort. The volume begins with a comprehensive review of the nature of morphological priming, followed by a series of experimental papers that examine morphological processing in a variety of languages such as English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, and Spanish. The parallel monitoring of morphological processing in reading, speech perception and production, using a wide array of experimental methods such as masked priming, long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, and the recording of electrophysiological activity, provides converging evidence regarding the nature of morphemic representations in the various languages. The cross-linguistic perspective that characterizes the research effort of the present volume, as well as the previous ones, is used to investigate whether there are qualitative differences in the principles of lexical organization and lexical processing in different alphabetic orthographies that arise from qualitative differences in morphological structure.

This Special Issue encompasses studies of a wide range of developmental disorders, including Specific Language Impairment (SLI), reading disability, Williams Syndrome, hearing impairment and autistic disorder. Chiat contributes a theoretical analysis of the underlying nature of Specific Language Impairment, questioning whether it is appropriate to focus on a narrow domain of linguistic functioning, such as morphosyntax, and suggesting instead that we need to see how children are able to carry out mapping operations between the domains of phonology, syntax and semantics.Three papers focus primarily on aspects of grammatical morphology: Van der Lely and Ullman consider past tense morphology in children with SLI and Thomas et al use similar tasks with children with Williams Syndrome, questioning the theoretical interpretation of deficits that has previously been made. Volterra et al remind us that a focus solely on English-speaking children can be misleading - they uncover intriguing grammatical deficits in Italian-speaking people with Williams Syndrome, and note how these contrast with the pattern found in deaf individuals learning oral language.Dockrell et al and Nation et al both consider a relatively underinvestigated topic - children's naming errors, examining evidence for phonological and semantic bases to word-finding difficulties in contrasting groups: children with SLI in the case of Dockrell et al, and those with reading disability in the case of Nation et al. Traditionally, SLI and autistic disorder have been regarded as quite separate, but this view is questioned by Kjelgaard and Tager-Flusberg, who note intriguing parallels between the linguistic deficits found in these two syndromes. Finally, Evans et al investigate the neglected topic of how gesture is integrated with speech in conveying information, noting that these modes of expression may diverge in children with SLI.Overall, the research reported in this Special Issue emphasises the importance of studying how language difficulties manifest in development, and show that there are many different routes to language acquisition, some more efficient than others.

Spoken word access processes are the mental processes which underlie our ability to recognise spoken words. They are the perceptual processes which take the sequence of buzzes, bursts and chirps that make up the raw speech signal and convert them into a sequence of words. This edited volume contains articles and short reports which examine these processes. These papers are based on presentations at the workshop Spoken Word Access Processes (SWAP), held in Nijmegen in May 2000. They cover the major issues that the field is now concerned with, and thus provide a snapshot of the current state of the SWAP art. Core representational issues about spoken words are addressed: the form of the representations which are used to access the mental lexicon; how phonological information is coded in the lexicon; and how morphological and semantic information about each word is stored. The main components of the lexical access process are also discussed: competition between candidate words; computation of goodness-of-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of continuous speech into words; whether there is feedback from the lexicon to earlier stages of processing; and the relationship of form-based processes to the processes responsible for deriving interpretations of utterances. This collection should be essential reading for those working in this or related areas of psycholinguistics. An introductory article is included which makes this research more accessible to students in cognitive psychology and phonetics, and to specialists in other fields of psychology and linguistics.

Concepts lie at the heart of our mental life, supporting a myriad of cognitive functions - including thinking and reasoning, object recognition, memory, and language comprehension and production. The nature of concepts and their representation in the mind and brain has been studied from many different perspectives and so provides valuable opportunities for integrative, interdisciplinary discussions.This special issue on conceptual representation contains invited papers from leading researchers across the range of cognitive science disciplines, addressing the nature of semantic and conceptual representation in the mind and brain. Contributions include both empirical reports and theoretical reviews, from the fields of cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, philosophy and linguistics.

This special issue samples the state of the art in research that attempts to describe the functional units that intervene between low-level perceptual processes and access to whole-word representations in long-term memory during visual word recognition. The different articles in this special issue cover various candidates for such processing units, defined in terms of orthographic, phonological, or morphological information. The most obvious candidate in terms of orthographic information is the individual letter. One article examines the way in which a word's component letters are combined in the correct order during early orthographic processing. At a slightly higher level of representation, several articles provide a focus on the role of syllabic representations in the processing of polysyllabic words, and examine the extent to which such syllabic representations are orthographic or phonological in nature. One article provides evidence concerning the role of interfixes in the processing of compound words, thus addressing the issue of how morphological representations exert their influence on the word recognition process. Altogether, the papers included in this special issue report a series of challenging findings that cannot be ignored by current computational models of visual word. Evidence is provided in favour of more flexible orthographic coding schemes that are typically used in models of visual word recognition. The syllabic effects that are reported call for a syllabic level of representation that is absent in the vast majority of computational models, and the effects of paradigmatic analogy in processing morphologically complex words should help limit the possible ways of representing morphological information in the visual word recognition system.

This Special Issue is the third volume produced by a group of researchers who convene every two years to discuss the role of morphology in word recognition.

When we speak, we often spontaneously produce gestures. Such gestures are an integral part of face-to-face verbal communication. The relationship between speech and gesture is the theme of this Special Issue. The articles cover a wide range of issues: cultural differences, language and gesture development, cognitive development, bilingualism, foreign language learning, persuasion, and "common grounds" between the speaker and the addressee. The Special Issue is of interest not only to those who study the multimodal nature of communication, but also to those who seek new insights into psycholinguistic issues, using gesture as the "window" into the speaker's mind.

Prosody is the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, which encodes information that is not encoded by the syntax or words of an utterance. Prosody is critical for parsing speech, constructing syntactic structure, and building a representation of the conversational discourse model, among other linguistic functions.In 2008, researchers from linguistics, psychology and computer science gathered at the inaugural meeting of the conference on Experimental and Theoretical Approaches to Prosody at Cornell University. The papers in this volume represent the cutting edge of the prosody work presented at that conference.The articles in this special issue tackle a number of key questions: What type of information about syntax, semantics, and context is reflected in prosody and intonation? How much of that information can a listener retrieve from the signal? How does this information facilitate language processing in online conversations? How can this information be used to parse corpora, and how can corpora be used to test theories on prosody?

Does darkness lead to happiness? Is there corn in the corner? These are questions that make - to some extent - semantically sense, but for researchers interested in the role of morphology in word processing they make morphologically sense as well. This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the 6th MOrphological PROcessing Conference MOPROC, which was organized in Turku, Finland and hosted researchers with a firm interest in questions like these. The special issue contains 13 articles that provide answers from different viewpoints, since it contains research on comprehension, production, and acquisition of morphology. Moreover, the articles present research in a number of languages with fundamentally different morphological systems. Apart from studies in West-Germanic languages (English and Dutch), the special issue contains studies in Romance languages (Spanish and Italian), in languages with very rich inflectional paradigms (Greek, Polish and Finnish) and in languages with non-concatenative morphology (Hebrew and Arabic). Moreover, it contains studies on all three major morphological classes: Inflections, derivations and compounds. Specific questions addressed in the volume deal with the time course with which morphemes come available, what factors facilitate their use, the role of orthographic and semantic transparency in complex word processing and how morphology should be incorporated in models of word processing. The chapters provide a wealth of empirical results obtained with state-of-the-art experimental paradigms. We hope that they will be an inspiration for further studies in morphological processing as much as we - living in Finland - hope that there is happiness in darkness.

The ever-expanding repertoire of neurocognitive methods has provided an unprecedented opportunity to investigate language production. The research reported in this volume demonstrates the usefulness of these methods for advancing our understanding of the neural bases of language production. Through the investigation of language production in different output modalities (spoken and manual) and different speakers (monolinguals and bilinguals), contributions to this volume attempt to define universal neural mechanisms for language production. Examining the interface between language production and comprehension, the studies in this volume also shed light on brain mechanisms that have general functions in language processing.

Speech recognition in ‘adverse conditions’ has been a familiar area of research in computer science, engineering, and hearing sciences for several decades. In contrast, most psycholinguistic theories of speech recognition are built upon evidence gathered from tasks performed by healthy listeners on carefully recorded speech, in a quiet environment, and under conditions of undivided attention. Building upon the momentum initiated by the Psycholinguistic Approaches to Speech Recognition in Adverse Conditions workshop held in Bristol, UK, in 2010, the aim of this volume is to promote a multi-disciplinary, yet unified approach to the perceptual, cognitive, and neuro-physiological mechanisms underpinning the recognition of degraded speech, variable speech, speech experienced under cognitive load, and speech experienced by theoretically relevant populations. This collection opens with a review of the literature and a formal classification of adverse conditions. The research articles then highlight those adverse conditions with the greatest potential for constraining theory, showing that some speech phenomena often believed to be immutable can be affected by noise, surface variations, or attentional set in ways that will force researchers to rethink their theory. This volume is essential for those interested in speech recognition outside laboratory constraints.