Mass and count in language and cognition : some evidence from language comprehension

In linguistics and the philosophy of language, the mass/count distinction has traditionally been regarded as a bi-partition on the nominal domain, where typical instances are nouns like "beef" (mass) vs."cow" (count). In the present paper, we argue that this partition reveals a system that is based on both syntactic features and conceptual features, and present experimental evidence suggesting that the discrimination of the two kinds of features has a psychological reality

The mental representations of light verbs

The Light Verb Construction gives us a window into the mental lexicon: John takes a cup -> agent=John, theme = a cup John takes a walk -> agent = John, theme=

Argument structure in nominalizations : the case of the light verb construction in German

The predicate associated with the verb fails to express its full argument structure, while the predicate associated with the nominalization preserves its original argument structure

Purified Water: A CLoser Look at Bottled Waters and Their Claims

The claims made by three bottled water manufacturers were checked through a series of tests. CHA ™ (by Abundant Life CHA ™ Water Company in Chattanooga, TN), Penta ® (by Bio-hydration Research Lab, Inc.), and Mountain Fresh superoxygenated water (Collegedale, TN) were the subject of this study. Three tests were done on these samples: pH level, dissolved oxygen, and osmosis rate test. The pH level test confirmed the claim that CHA ™ water is alkaline (pH = 9.6); the other samples tested had pH levels ranging from 6.5 to 7.6. The dissolved oxygen test compared the oxygen concentration of several water samples to that of Mountain Fresh superoxygenated water. Mountain Fresh superoxygenated water did not always give higher oxygen levels than other water samples such as tap water. On two different days the Mountain Fresh superoxygenated water purchased had levels that were less that 5% higher than tap water. On the occasions in which samples of Mountain Fresh superoxygenated water showed higher levels of oxygen, the levels of oxygen were only two times greater than tap water. The osmosis test showed that Penta ® and RO water were the fastest at diffusing through the membrane of an egg. But Penta ® and RO water were merely faster than CHA ™ and tap water. While Penta ® diffused an average of 4.03 grams of water in the first 30 minutes of the test, tap water diffused 3.6 grams of water. These tests show that perhaps the claims, with the exception of the alkalinity of CHA ™ water, made by the manufacturers have been exaggerated

Vocabulary acquisition through playful activities in the English classroom

Treball final de Màster Universitari en Professor/a d'Educació Secundària Obligatòria i Batxillerat, Formació Professional i Ensenyaments d'Idiomes. Codi: SAP419. Curs acadèmic 2014-2015This didactic unit is intended to improve and expand vocabulary acquisition for first grade students of secondary level, through the use of playful activities in the classroom. An interesting point in order to motivate and engage students is the use of games in the English classroom. In this way, they feel comfortable and have a good opportunity to speak in the foreign language without paying much attention to their pronunciation or grammar mistakes as it occurs in a spontaneous way. Vocabulary acquisition is the basis for learning any language so that, throughout this paper, there will be considered aspects that ensure the assimilation of the contents raised when implementing theoretical framework such as guidelines to develop a playful activity or the cognitive development of learners in the first grade of the secondary level

Slower-than-normal syntactic processing in agrammatic Broca's aphasia: Evidence from Dutch

Studies of agrammatic Broca's aphasia reveal a diverging pattern of performance in the comprehension of reflexive elements: offline, performance seems unimpaired, whereas online—and in contrast to both matching controls and Wernicke's patients—no antecedent reactivation is observed at the reflexive. Here we propose that this difference characterizes the agrammatic comprehension deficit as a result of slower-than-normal syntactic structure formation. To test this characterization, the comprehension of three Dutch agrammatic patients and matching control participants was investigated utilizing the cross-modal lexical decision (CMLD) interference task. Two types of reflexive-antecedent dependencies were tested, which have already been shown to exert distinct processing demands on the comprehension system as a function of the level at which the dependency was formed. Our hypothesis predicts that if the agrammatic system has a processing limitation such that syntactic structure is built in a protracted manner, this limitation will be reflected in delayed interpretation. Confirming previous findings, the Dutch patients show an effect of distinct processing demands for the two types of reflexive-antecedent dependencies but with a temporal delay. We argue that this delayed syntactic structure formation is the result of limited processing capacity that specifically affects the syntactic system

Copula Distinction and Constrained Variability of Copula Use in Iberian and Mexican Spanish

Spanish has two copulas, ser and estar, which are often translated as English ‘be’. Here, we study their differences by investigating their contrastive distributional patterns in combination with adjectival predicates. Specifically, we test the processing predictions of a presupposition-based analysis (Deo et al. 2016) that accounts for a wide range of distributional patterns of the copulas. This analysis has the advantage that it explains the variable copulas’ uses observed across Spanish varieties. Our focus is on Iberian and Mexican Spanish. The presupposition-based analysis establishes a clear-cut distinction between the two copulas: estar presupposes the contingency of the prejacent, ser does not. Accordingly, the use of estar requires that the common ground contextually entails that its prejacent is contingent. If the common ground does not imply the contingency of the prejacent, this new information would need to be accommodated by the hearer. We hypothesize that estar predications, when presented in isolation with adjectival predicates that show a preference to appear with ser, will engender a processing cost as a result of adding to the common ground the proposition that the prejacent holds contingently. This hypothesis is tested in two studies, an acceptability questionnaire and a self-paced reading. The results show that when the context does not explicitly support estar’s presupposition, sentences are scored lower (study 1, acceptability questionnaire) and read slower (study 2, self-paced reading) by both Iberian and Mexican speakers. In addition, the data provide experimental evidence for the ‘constrained’ variability across Spanish dialects. The results suggest that Mexican speakers are able to accommodate the contingency-presupposition of estar without relying on explicit contextual cues to a larger extent than Iberian speakers. Altogether, the data support an analysis of copula distinction in Spanish that takes into account the contingency-presupposition of estar and the variability in copula use across Spanish dialects