Mark Koranda and Maryellen MacDonald recently presented a poster at this year’s CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. To learn more about their work, read the full abstract or view the poster. Short abstract. Investigations in the origin of word order preferences using a ‘silent gesture’ paradigm assume gesture descriptions contain separable language-like constituents such…
Abstract Can some black-white differences in reading achievement be traced to differences in language background? Many African American children speak a dialect that differs from the mainstream dialect emphasized in school. We examined how use of alternative dialects affects decoding, an important component of early reading and marker of reading…
Abstract Functional neuroimaging and Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) theory, both introduced to cognitive science in the 1980s, led to influential research programmes that have proceeded in parallel with little mutual influence. The PDP approach advanced specific claims about the nature of neural representations that, perhaps surprisingly, have gone largely untested…
Abstract The fields of language production and verbal memory have relatively little contact. I argue that utterance planning for language production has substantial memory maintenance demands and that utterance planning provides the maintenance and ordering processes for short-term verbal memory tasks. There has already been some movement toward this view.…
Abstract Three experiments used homophones as a test case to examine the roles of phonology and morphology in the spelling process. We introduced university students to novel meanings of spoken forms, for example, presenting /fid/ as a rare word for a type of furniture. We asked whether participants avoided spelling…
Abstract This study was designed to examine the relationships among minority dialect use, language ability, and young AAE-speaking children’s understanding and awareness of MAE. 83 4- to 8-year-old African American English-speaking children participated in two experimental tasks. One task evaluated their awareness of differences between Mainstream American English (MAE) and African…
