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Abstract: To what extent can statistical language knowledge account for the effects of world knowledge in language comprehension? We address this question by focusing on a core aspect of language understanding: pronoun resolution. While existing studies suggest that comprehenders use world knowledge to resolve pronouns, the distributional hypothesis and its operationalization in large language models (LLMs) provide an alternative account of how purely linguistic information could drive apparent world knowledge effects. We addressed these confounds in two experiments. In Experiment 1, we found a strong effect of world knowledge plausibility (measured using a norming study) on responses to comprehension questions that probed pronoun interpretation. In experiment 2, participants were slower to read continuations that contradicted world knowledge-consistent interpretations of a pronoun, implying that comprehenders deploy world knowledge spontaneously. Both effects persisted when controlling for the predictions of GPT-3, an LLM, suggesting that pronoun interpretation is at least partly driven by knowledge about the world and not the word. We propose two potential mechanisms by which knowledge-driven pronoun resolution occurs, based on validation- and expectation-driven discourse processes. The results suggest that while distributional information may capture some aspects of world knowledge, human comprehenders likely draw on other sources unavailable to LLMs.

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs' semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous reviews of the nature and consequences of adult-child book reading have focused on seeking impacts of interactive reading on the acquisition of vocabulary and emergent literacy skills. In this systematic review we examined to what extent there has been systematic study of the effects of interactive reading on four less frequently studied developmental outcomes important to children's academic and life prospects: socio-emotional and socio-cognitive (SEL) skills, narrative skills, grammar, and world knowledge. We identified 67 studies of interactive reading that met the inclusion criteria and that examined the targeted outcomes, using either experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, or single-group intervention methods. We found that studies of effects on grammar and world knowledge outcomes were very sparsely represented; though narrative was often studied as an outcome, the wide variation in conceptualizing and assessing the construct hampered any clear conclusion about book-reading effects. The most robust research strand focused on SEL skill outcomes, though here too the outcome assessments varied widely. We speculate that better instrumented approaches to assessing vocabulary and emergent literacy have led to the persistent emphasis on these domains, despite robust evidence of only modest associations, and argue that work to develop sound shared measures of narrative and SEL skills would enable cross-study comparison and the accumulation of findings. In addition, we note that the various studies implicated different explanatory principles for the value of reading with children: specific interactional features (open-ended questions, following the child's lead, expanding child utterances) or content features (emotion-enhanced books, talk about mental states, science topics), raising another topic for more focused study in the future.

The present eye-tracking reading study investigated the real-time processing of the so-called Lifetime Effect, which involvesthe integration of temporal verb morphology and knowledge ofa referent’s lifetime (alive vs. dead). Critical stimuli containedfamous referents, meaning that their lifetime status is widelyknown. In addition, context sentences mentioned their lifetimestatus and occupation. Tense/aspect was manipulated in a fol-lowing target sentence to contain either the present perfect orthe simple future (e.g., She has performed / will perform...).For dead referents, the target sentence was infelicitous giventhe tense/aspectual marking; for living referents, the mark-ing was felicitous. This design permitted us to examine ef-fects of lifetime status conveyed via world knowledge and lin-guistic context on the processing of tense/aspect morphology.Eye-tracking reading times revealed longer total reading timesat the critical (verb) and post-critical regions for the presentperfect when following a deceased context, while the dead-simple future condition had shorter overall reading times thanany other condition. Naturalness ratings revealed the dead-simple future to be quickly and reliably rejected, while thedead-present perfect was deemed acceptable. However, thelatter was rated significantly lower than the living/present per-fect condition. Taken together, the results imply that worldknowledge and an immediate context defining a real-world ref-erent as being dead or alive can jointly modulate the processingof subsequent verb tense/aspect, but with striking differencesbetween the present perfect and simple future.

IntroductionMood is a constant in our daily life and can permeate all levels of cognition. We examined whether and how mood influences the processing of discourse content that is relatively neutral and not loaded with emotion. During discourse processing, readers have to constantly strike a balance between what they know in long term memory and what the current discourse is about. Our general hypothesis is that mood states would affect this balance. We hypothesized that readers in a positive mood would rely more on default world knowledge, whereas readers in a negative mood would be more inclined to analyze the details in the current discourse.MethodsParticipants were put in a positive and a negative mood via film clips, one week apart. In each session, after mood manipulation, they were presented with sentences in discourse materials. We created sentences such as “With the lights on you can see...” that end with critical words (CWs) “more” or “less”, where general knowledge supports “more”, not “less”. We then embedded each of these sentences in a wider discourse that does/does not support the CWs (a story about driving in the night vs. stargazing). EEG was recorded throughout.ResultsThe results showed that first, mood manipulation was successful in that there was a significant mood difference between sessions. Second, mood did not modulate the N400 effects. Participants in both moods detected outright semantic violations and allowed world knowledge to be overridden by discourse context. Third, mood modulated the LPC (Late Positive Component) effects, distributed in the frontal region. In negative moods, the LPC was sensitive to one-level violation. That is, CWs that were supported by only world knowledge, only discourse, and neither, elicited larger frontal LPCs, in comparison to the condition where CWs were supported by both world knowledge and discourse.DiscussionThese results suggest that mood does not influence all processes involved in discourse processing. Specifically, mood does not influence lexical-semantic retrieval (N400), but it does influence elaborative processes for sensemaking (P600) during discourse processing. These results advance our understanding of the impact and time course of mood on discourse.

Temporal connectives play a crucial role in marking the sequence of events during language comprehension. Although existing studies have shown that sentence comprehension can be modulated by temporal connectives, they have mainly focused on languages with grammatical tense such as English. It thus remains unclear how temporal information is processed in tenseless languages. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how world knowledge is retrieved and integrated in sentences linked by zhiqian (before) and zhihou (after) in Mandarin Chinese (e.g., After/Before going to the countryside, Grandpa went to the city because the air there was fresh and pure). The critical words (e.g., fresh) were either congruent or incongruent with world knowledge. Relative to the after-congruent sentences, the after-incongruent sentences evoked a P600 on critical words and a negativity on sentence-final words, whereas relative to before-congruent sentences, before-incongruent sentences showed no significant difference on critical words but a sustained negativity on sentence-final words. Additionally, before-congruent sentences elicited a larger sustained positivity (P600) than after-congruent sentences. The results suggest that before is more difficult to process than after in Mandarin Chinese, supporting the iconicity account of temporal relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Real people sometimes appear in fiction, for example,Napoleon in War and Peace. Readers may also believe that aperson who never actually appears in a novel couldpotentially appear there. In two experiments, we find evidencethat readers think that a real person could appear in specificnovels and physically interact with a character. This effect ismagnified when the person and character share spatial andtemporal elements of their setting.

Abstract Background This study investigated the impact of handedness on a common spatial abilities task, the mental rotation task (MRT). The influence of a right-handed world was contrasted with people’s embodied experience with their own hands by testing both left- and right-handed people on an MRT of right- and left-hand stimuli. An additional consideration is the influence of matching the shape of the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one’s own hands. Two orthogonal hypothesis axes were crossed to yield four competing hypotheses. One axis contrasted (i) embodied experience versus (ii) world knowledge; the other axis contrasted (a) the match between the visual image of a hand on the screen and one’s own hand versus (b) the resemblance of the shape outline information from the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one’s own hands. Results Among people with mixed handedness, right-handers performed more accurately for left-hand stimuli, while left-handers had a trend for higher accuracy for right-hand stimuli. For people with extreme handedness, right-handers outperformed left-handers. Regardless of group, there was no significant variation in performance for left-hand stimuli, with only right-hand stimuli producing significant variation. Conclusions No hypothesis fully aligned with all the data. For left-hand stimuli, the consistent performance across groups does not provide support for embodied experience, while world knowledge might influence all groups similarly. Alternatively, the within-group variation for mixed-handed people supports embodied experience in the hand MRT, likely processed through visual-proprioceptive integration.

People all around the world learn different foreign languages for various reasons. As a result of globalization, need for knowing a language other than one’s native language became a necessity more than a need. Although there are thousands of languages used by millions of people in different geographies, some languages are more commonly used and preferred. English, which is used as a lingua franca in many fields including science, education and numerous branches of business, is one of these languages. Turkey, as a country that serves as a bridge between Asia and Europe, has gone through many reforms concerning foreign language teaching and today foreign languages are taught in every phase of education starting from early years of primary school and continues until students graduate from university. Although people have different reasons to learn a foreign language, it is very common among university students that most of them learn a foreign language for a better future as well as increasing their world knowledge in a fast-globalized world. In this study, it is aimed to analyze university prep class students’ views about role of English as a foreign language for enhancing their world knowledge and success in education and professional career. The results of the study reveal that students accept English as lingua franca and they are enthusiastic to learn it. Another finding underlines the need for ESP (English for Specific Purposes) courses expressed by prep students.

World knowledge enters into pragmatic utterance interpretationin complex ways, and may be defeasible in light of speakers’utterances. Yet there is to date a surprising lack of systematicinvestigation into the role of world knowledge in pragmaticinference. In this paper, we show that a state-of-the-artmodel of pragmatic interpretation greatly overestimates the influenceof world knowledge on the interpretation of utteranceslike Some of the marbles sank. We extend the model to capturethe idea that the listener is uncertain about the backgroundknowledge the speaker is bringing to the conversation. Thisextension greatly improves model predictions of listeners’ interpretationand also makes good qualitative predictions aboutlisteners’ judgments of how ‘normal’ the world is in light of aspeaker’s statement. Theoretical and methodological implicationsare discussed.

Temporal connectives play a crucial role in marking the sequence of events during language comprehension. Although existing studies have shown that sentence comprehension can be modulated by temporal connectives, they have mainly focused on languages with grammatical tense such as English. It thus remains unclear how temporal information is processed in tenseless languages. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine how world knowledge is retrieved and integrated in sentences linked by zhiqian (before) and zhihou (after) in Mandarin Chinese (e.g., After/Before going to the countryside, Grandpa went to the city because the air there was fresh and pure). The critical words (e.g., fresh) were either congruent or incongruent with world knowledge. Relative to the after-congruent sentences, the after-incongruent sentences evoked a P600 on critical words and a negativity on sentence-final words, whereas relative to before-congruent sentences, before-incongruent sentences showed no significant difference on critical words but a sustained negativity on sentence-final words. Additionally, before-congruent sentences elicited a larger sustained positivity (P600) than after-congruent sentences. The results suggest that before is more difficult to process than after in Mandarin Chinese, supporting the iconicity account of temporal relations.

Reading comprehension is a very complex process that depends on a number of cognitive and metacognitive skills and processes, the crucial ones being inference skills. The paper presents the results of a study that aimed to identify the inference skills of young learners of English as a foreign language in comprehending a narrative text (a comic strip). The participants were 90 young learners aged 11, drawn from a state primary school in Serbia. The post-reading reflection protocol was used to collect qualitative data on the participants' inference skills, while quantitative data were collected by means of a reading task. The results indicate that successful readers applied a variety of inference skills, flexibly combining local inferences (referential, case and antecedent causal inferences) with global inferences (superordinate goal, thematic, and character emotional reaction inferences), and monitoring their comprehension while reading. By contrast, less successful readers relied mainly on local inferences, not monitoring their understanding, which resulted in poor scores in the reading test. The study highlights the need for integrating the development of young English language learners' inference skills into reading programmes.

Background: This study investigated the impact of handedness on a common spatial abilities task, the mental rotation task (MRT). The influence of a right-handed world was contrasted with people's embodied experience with their own hands by testing both left- and right-handed people on an MRT of right- and left-hand stimuli. An additional consideration is the influence of matching the shape of the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one's own hands. Two orthogonal hypothesis axes were crossed to yield four competing hypotheses. One axis contrasted (i) embodied experience versus (ii) world knowledge; the other axis contrasted (a) the match between the visual image of a hand on the screen and one's own hand versus (b) the resemblance of the shape outline information from the hand stimuli with the proprioception of one's own hands. Results: Among people with mixed handedness, right-handers performed more accurately for left-hand stimuli, while left-handers had a trend for higher accuracy for right-hand stimuli. For people with extreme handedness, right-handers outperformed left-handers. Regardless of group, there was no significant variation in performance for left-hand stimuli, with only right-hand stimuli producing significant variation. Conclusions: No hypothesis fully aligned with all the data. For left-hand stimuli, the consistent performance across groups does not provide support for embodied experience, while world knowledge might influence all groups similarly. Alternatively, the within-group variation for mixed-handed people supports embodied experience in the hand MRT, likely processed through visual-proprioceptive integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The instrument–subject alternation is a cross-linguistic phenomenon in which a verb’s semantic argument with an instrument thematic role can be expressed syntactically not only as an adverbial phrase but also as a subject instead of an agentive subject. Using Hungarian examples, the present paper attempts to work out an account of the alternation that has the following advantageous features. First, by means of a pragmatically oriented weaker notion of causation (Koenig et al. 2008: 214) a solid basis is assumed to determine which verbs alternate and which verbs do not. Second, syntactic alternations are not treated as lexical or constructional phenomena (as are in lexical or constructional approaches, respectively). However, they fit a lexical-constructional approach (Bibok 2008) which naturally extends to lexical pragmatics (Bibok 2010). *** Az eszköz–alany alternáció olyan, több nyelvben is megfigyelhető jelenség, amikor az ige eszköz thematikus szerepű szemantikai argumentuma szintaktikailag nemcsak határozóként fejeződhet ki, hanem alanyként is – az ágensi alany helyébe lépve. A jelen tanulmány a váltakozás olyan lexikai pragmatikai magyarázatát vázolja magyar példákat használva, amely a következő előnyös tulajdonságokkal jellemezhető. Először, az okozás különböző fogalmainak megkülönböztetésével és köztük egy pragmatikai orientáltságú gyengébb okozás (Koenig et al. 2008: 214) bevezetésével biztosabb alapon határozhatjuk meg, melyik ige vesz részt az adott alternációban és melyik nem. Másodszor, a szintaktikai alternációk nem pusztán lexikai jelenségek (szemben a lexikai megközelítéssel), nem is csupán konstrukcionálisak (szemben a konstrukciós megközelítéssel), hanem legmegfelelőbben a lexikai-konstrukciós keretben (Bibok 2008) értelmezhetők. Ez a keret természetes módon illeszkedik a lexikai pragmatikába (Bibok 2010).

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round, which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity.

Previous event-related potential (ERP) studies comparing affirmative and negative sentences revealed an N400 for semantically mismatching final words, resulting in a larger N400 for false relative to true affirmative sentences and an opposite effect for negative sentences. Hence, the N400 was independent of the presence of a negation. However, the true negative as well as the false affirmative condition often contained entities or features from different semantic categories and thereby with weak feature overlap, such as e.g., A cat is (not) a saw or Fears are (not) round , which were then compared to true affirmative and false negative sentences containing entities with stronger feature overlap and partially even hyponomy relations, e.g., A cat is (not) an animal or Planets are (not) round. Employing world-knowledge variations, in the current study, we investigate whether increasing the feature overlap between the entities of all conditions leads to similar ERP-patterns as in the previous studies. For this purpose, we use sentences of the following type: George Clooney is (not) an actor vs. George Clooney is (not) a singer where both target words describe a similar profession and thereby function as alternatives to each other. However, in line with the previous studies, we find a truth by polarity interaction, namely, the N400 ERPs are significantly larger for false compared to true affirmative sentences, whereas the effect for negative sentences shows a reversed, though not significant, trend. Overall, the ERP-data suggest that the integration of a negation with the information in its scope is neither fully incremental nor fully delayed, which might be linked to the use of cohyponyms and to the increased feature overlap between alternatives (e.g., actor, singer). Additionally, questionnaire-based rating data show that affirmative sentences are perceived as more natural than negative sentences, and, moreover, that true sentences are perceived as more natural than false sentences, independent of their polarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous reviews of the nature and consequences of adult-child book reading have focused on seeking impacts of interactive reading on the acquisition of vocabulary and emergent literacy skills. In this systematic review we examined to what extent there has been systematic study of the effects of interactive reading on four less frequently studied developmental outcomes important to children's academic and life prospects: socio-emotional and socio-cognitive (SEL) skills, narrative skills, grammar, and world knowledge. We identified 67 studies of interactive reading that met the inclusion criteria and that examined the targeted outcomes, using either experimental, quasi-experimental, correlational, or single-group intervention methods. We found that studies of effects on grammar and world knowledge outcomes were very sparsely represented; though narrative was often studied as an outcome, the wide variation in conceptualizing and assessing the construct hampered any clear conclusion about book-reading effects. The most robust research strand focused on SEL skill outcomes, though here too the outcome assessments varied widely. We speculate that better instrumented approaches to assessing vocabulary and emergent literacy have led to the persistent emphasis on these domains, despite robust evidence of only modest associations, and argue that work to develop sound shared measures of narrative and SEL skills would enable cross-study comparison and the accumulation of findings. In addition, we note that the various studies implicated different explanatory principles for the value of reading with children: specific interactional features (open-ended questions, following the child's lead, expanding child utterances) or content features (emotion-enhanced books, talk about mental states, science topics), raising another topic for more focused study in the future. • Most book reading studies have addressed vocabulary and literacy outcomes. • 67 studies have examined effects on four generally neglected developmental outcomes. • Grammar and world knowledge outcomes were investigated in only few studies. • Narrative and SEL measures varied widely, reducing comparability across studies. • Interactional and/or content features were hypothesized predictors of outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent findings have shown that information about changes in an object's environmental location in the context of discourse is stored in working memory during sentence comprehension. However, in these studies, changes in the object's location were always consistent with world knowledge (e.g., in “The writer picked up the pen from the floor and moved it to the desk,” the floor and the desk are both common locations for a pen). How do people accomplish comprehension when the object-location information in working memory is inconsistent with world knowledge (e.g., a pen being moved from the floor to the bathtub)? In two visual world experiments, with a “look-and-listen” task, we used eye-tracking data to investigate comprehension of sentences that described location changes under different conditions of appropriateness (i.e., the object and its location were typically vs. unusually coexistent, based on world knowledge) and antecedent context (i.e., contextual information that did vs. did not temporarily normalize unusual coexistence between object and location). Results showed that listeners' retrieval of the critical location was affected by both world knowledge and working memory, and the effect of world knowledge was reduced when the antecedent context normalized unusual coexistence of object and location. More importantly, activation of world knowledge and working memory seemed to change during the comprehension process. These results are important because they demonstrate that interference between world knowledge and information in working memory, appears to be activated dynamically during sentence comprehension.

Recent findings have shown that information about changes in an object's environmental location in the context of discourse is stored in working memory during sentence comprehension. However, in these studies, changes in the object's location were always consistent with world knowledge (e.g., in "The writer picked up the pen from the floor and moved it to the desk," the floor and the desk are both common locations for a pen). How do people accomplish comprehension when the object-location information in working memory is inconsistent with world knowledge (e.g., a pen being moved from the floor to the bathtub)? In two visual world experiments, with a "look-and-listen" task, we used eye-tracking data to investigate comprehension of sentences that described location changes under different conditions of appropriateness (i.e., the object and its location were typically vs. unusually coexistent, based on world knowledge) and antecedent context (i.e., contextual information that did vs. did not temporarily normalize unusual coexistence between object and location). Results showed that listeners' retrieval of the critical location was affected by both world knowledge and working memory, and the effect of world knowledge was reduced when the antecedent context normalized unusual coexistence of object and location. More importantly, activation of world knowledge and working memory seemed to change during the comprehension process. These results are important because they demonstrate that interference between world knowledge and information in working memory, appears to be activated dynamically during sentence comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este trabajo se intenta estudiar la intervención del conocimiento de mundo y del conocimiento lingüístico -semántico- durante el proceso de comprensión de relaciones causales y contracausales. Nuestra hipótesis inicial: las relaciones causales son más sencillas de procesar que las relaciones contracausales. Nuestro objetivo específico: verificar esta hipótesis en cuatro condiciones. Por un lado, se evaluó cómo se comprende una relación causal o contracausal entre dos eventos pertenecientes a un dominio de conocimiento "cotidiano" y a un dominio científico, sobre el cual los informantes no tienen conocimiento previo. Por el otro, se verificó qué rol cumplen las partículas conectivas con contenido semántico específico -causal y contracausal- en esos dos tipos de texto.The aim of this article is to study the role of world knowledge and linguistic -semantic- knowledge during the comprehension process of casual and contracasual relations. Our initial hypothesis: causal relations are easier to process than contracasual relations. Our specific objective: to verify this hypothesis in four conditions. Firstly, it was evaluated how people comprehend a casual or contracasual relation between two events that belong either to an "everyday" knowledge domain either to a scientific domain, over which the subjects do not have previous knowledge. Secondly, it was verified which role connectives with specific semantic content -causal and contracausal- take in those two texts types.

Previous research suggests that on-line access to lexically-stored verb argument structures is relatively preserved in some people with aphasia[9] (PWAs), despite their increased difficulty in producing verbs as compared to nouns[2]. Accessing lexically-stored argument structures facilitates prediction and integration of verbal arguments relative to lexically unspecified adjuncts[1,8,10]. The anticipatory processing of verbal arguments has also been shown to be affected by event-related plausibility constraints, based in world knowledge[4]. While access to world knowledge and argument structure is preserved in many PWAs, how and when these resources interact during verb-argument processing among PWA has not been investigated. The current study examined how argument status and event plausibility affect on-line processing of locative event participants via a modified visual-world task[6]. PWAs (n=9) and age-matched neurotypical adults (ONs, n=16) listened to a partial sentence and were instructed to click on the image that “best finished” the sentence. Stimuli were sentences ending with a locative phrase truncated at the preposition: “The boy is turning twelve, so his friends are bringing/ meeting him excitedly to/at …” The incomplete locative phrase was either an argument or an adjunct (location is an argument of “bring” but an adjunct of “meet”). Accompanying images depicted the agent and theme of the sentence, an unrelated distractor, and a location target, either plausible (a fair) or implausible (a bar). Proportions of gazes to the location target were analyzed in 100ms bins during the 2 seconds following the offset of the pronoun (“him.”) ONs showed clear early (100-200ms, 300-700ms) and late (1100-1800ms, 1900-2000ms) plausibility effects (circled in Fig. 1a), as well as early (200-300ms) and late (1300-1400ms) effects of argument status on target gazes (see arrows, Fig. 1a) and a late interaction effect of argument status and plausibility (1100-1200ms, see asterisk, Fig. 1a). Early effects of plausibility and argument status for ONs were truly anticipatory, appearing while the sentence was still on-going. Plausibility effects on target gaze were more limited in PWA, appearing at two points following pronoun offset (500-600ms and 1000-1100ms, circled in Fig. 1b). Conversely, argument effects were more widespread for PWAs, although they emerged later (700-900ms and 1000-1100ms, see arrows, Fig. 1b). PWAs also showed a much later interaction effect between plausibility and argument status (at 1800ms, see asterisk, Fig. 1b). These results suggest that older adults rely more on event-related plausibility than on argument status during the processing of locative event participants, and that these effects interact late in processing. The effect of argument status is more prevalent but delayed in PWAs compared to ONs, and the interaction of plausibility and argument status is also present but delayed. This pattern is compatible with findings suggesting that PWAs access verbs’ lexical representations during sentence comprehension[9] and that this access may affect linguistic performance[5], but that lexical access is delayed in PWAs when compared to age-matched controls[7,11]. This slowed lexical access can lead to impairments in syntactic comprehension[3]. The current results indicate that similar effects may also be present in verb-argument prediction and the processing of semantic roles.

We examine the influence of factual and perceived world knowledge on global citizenship identification. Perceived world knowledge directly predicted global citizenship identification, while factual world knowledge did not (Study 1). Students' factual (Study 1) and perceived (Study 2) world knowledge predicted students' normative environment (degree that valued others prescribe being a global citizen) and global awareness (perceived knowledge of the world and one's connection to the world), which then predicted global citizenship identification, and identification with global citizens predicted endorsement of pro-social values and behaviours (e.g., intergroup empathy, valuing diversity). Overall, the results highlight the indirect influence of factual and direct influence of perceived world knowledge on students' felt connection with global citizens.

Charles Travis has been forcefully arguing that meaning does not determine truth-conditions for more than two decades now. To this end, he has devised ingenious examples whereby different utterances of the same prima facie non-ambiguous and non-indexical expression type have different truth-conditions depending on the occasion on which they are delivered. However, Travis does not argue that meaning varies with circumstances; only that truth-conditions do. He assumes that meaning is a stable feature of both words and sentences. After surveying some of the explanations that semanticists and pragmaticians have produced in order to account for Travis cases, I propose a view which differs substantially from all of them. I argue that the variability in the truth-conditions that an utterance type can have is due to meaning facts alone. To support my argument, I suggest that we think about the meanings of words (in particular, the meanings of nouns) as rich conceptual structures; so rich that the way in which a property concept applies to an object concept is not determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

proposed that the traditional role of the mental lexicon in language processing can largely be replaced by a theoretical model of schematic event knowledge founded on dynamic context-dependent variables. We evaluate Elman's approach and propose an alternative view, based on dual coding theory and evidence that modality-specific cognitive representations contribute strongly to word meaning and language performance across diverse contexts which also have effects predictable from dual coding theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In linguistics, context carries tremendous importance in disambiguation of meanings as well as in understanding the actual meaning of words. Therefore, understanding the context becomes an important task in the area of applied linguistics, computational linguistics, lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, as well as in other areas of linguistics as context triggers variation of meaning and supplies valuable information to understand why and how a particular word varies in meaning when used in a piece of text. Keeping this question in mind, I have made an attempt here to understand the nature, type, and role of context in the act of meaning disambiguation of words used in a language. In contrast to the observation of earlier scholars, I have identified four types of context that can help us to understand the actual meaning of a word. At certain situations, although reference to the local context appears to be the most suitable proposition, reference to other contexts also becomes equally important to decipher the actual meaning of a word in a natural language text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper focuses on the role of context in meaning construction. My starting point is the assumption that context is a dynamic construct that appears in different formats in language use both as a repository and/or trigger of knowledge. Consequently, context has both a selective and a constitutive role. Unlike several current theories of meaning (e.g. ) claiming that meaning construction is mostly dependent on situational context, I will argue that meaning values of words encoding prior contexts of experience play as important a role in meaning construction as situational context. These two sides of world knowledge (encoded and current) exist dialectically and relationally. Actual situation context is viewed through prior context, and their encounter creates a third space. According to this approach meaning is the result of the interplay of prior experience and current experience, which are both socio-cultural in nature. Prior experience is encapsulated in the meaning values of lexical items that make up the utterances used by the interlocutors, and current experience is represented in the actual situation context in which communication takes place, and which is interpreted (often differently) by the interlocutors. Meaning formally expressed in the linguistic interactional context is created on-the-spot, and is the result of the interaction and mutual influence of the private contexts represented in the language of the interlocutors and the actual situational context interpreted by the interlocutors. In speech communication people attempt to fit their language to a situational context that their language, in turn, helped to create in the first place. This reciprocity means that language both creates context and is created by it (cf. Goodwin and Duranti, 1992; Gee, 1999). The dynamic model of meaning (DMM) is put forward as an attempt to give equal importance to message and actual situational context in meaning construction as described above, and blend the external and internal approaches to context. The model considers the communicative process as a structured whole, as something viewed from different perspectives. It applies Sciabarra''s understanding of dialectics to context according to which dialectics is “the ‘art of context-keeping,’ because it counsels us to grasp the full context of any object through techniques of abstraction and integration. By examining an object from different vantage points and on different levels of generality, we achieve a more comprehensive grasp of its antecedent conditions, interrelationships, and tendencies ()”. The paper starts with a brief introduction to the cognitive approach followed by a discussion of different ways of understanding context. Then the DMM is presented, and it is demonstrated how the model can be used to explain the dialectics of context, word meaning, and utterance meaning. The paper ends with a section that discusses how the application of the DMM may affect our understanding of some major issues in pragmatics. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Existing search engines––with Google at the top––have many remarkable capabilities; but what is not among them is deduction capability––the capability to synthesize an answer to a query from bodies of information which reside in various parts of the knowledge base.In recent years, impressive progress has been made in enhancing performance of search engines through the use of methods based on bivalent logic and bivalent-logic-based probability theory. But can such methods be used to add nontrivial deduction capability to search engines, that is, to upgrade search engines to question-answering systems? A view which is articulated in this note is that the answer is “No.” The problem is rooted in the nature of world knowledge, the kind of knowledge that humans acquire through experience and education.It is widely recognized that world knowledge plays an essential role in assessment of relevance, summarization, search and deduction. But a basic issue which is not addressed is that much of world knowledge is perception-based, e.g., “it is hard to find parking in Paris,” “most professors are not rich,” and “it is unlikely to rain in midsummer in San Francisco.” The problem is that (a) perception-based information is intrinsically fuzzy; and (b) bivalent logic is intrinsically unsuited to deal with fuzziness and partial truth.To come to grips with fuzziness of world knowledge, new tools are needed. The principal new tool––a tool which is briefly described in this note––is Precisiated Natural Language (PNL). PNL is based on fuzzy logic and has the capability to deal with partiality of certainty, partiality of possibility and partiality of truth. These are the capabilities that are needed to be able to draw on world knowledge for assessment of relevance, and for summarization, search and deduction. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]