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The intricate and tricky case of semantic analysis, especially of the enigmatic realm of nouns, the red thread of linguistics and literary exploration. This academic research explores the rich sphere of Russian literature in-depth to determine connections between function and the embodiment of theme through proper names. This research is aiming at studying the role of proper nouns in the literary masterpieces by focusing on the ideas of character development, thematic cohesiveness, and the narrative flow. This papers deals with profound significance of proper nouns as linguistics pointers that take you beyond their literal meaning to different levels of connotative value. It takes most of its ideas from the late linguistics and literary critique. This research gets down to serious business by cherry-picking and analysing a set of Russian masterpieces. An intensive method of semantic analysis was used by the study to properly identify and categorize all the structural features of proper nouns. Also, it conducts an examination of the usage of language by these instrumentalities so as to discover their common features and themes which lead to the invention of the main narrative. The results of this study add to our comprehension of proper noun semantics in Russian literature and provide us with a stepping-stone to broader discussions on the linguistic theory and literary studies. This cognitive effort exceeds the linguistic borders, as it takes into consideration the cultural and historical value of the proper nouns being presented. The report shows why it is necessary to reconsider the theoretical design to account for the distinctive linguistic and particular cultural features of the Russian literary heritage. This research is a step toward unravelling noun semantics' mystery and adds to the already existing linguistic aesthetics and cultural semiotics debates.

In this article Renata Love Jones and Patrick Proctor introduce the notion of pursuing language to engage in critical dialogue about the nature and focus of language and literacy education in multilingual and multicultural contexts. A persistent threat in language and literacy education is standardization that constrains how language and literacy are operationalized, which further limits how children can bring their unique communicative practices into schools and classrooms. In response, the authors describe pursuing language as a state of being responsive in our language and literacy instruction, with the goal of developing literacy skills through culturally affirming and anti-oppressive practices. They operationalize this pursuit of language in classroom contexts by delineating a framework of critical metalinguistic engagement. The article begins with a theory of languaging and goes on to unpack critical metalinguistic engagement by each of its component parts--critical, metalinguistic, and engagement--and concludes with an argument for being intentional about pursing language through relationships and dispositions that affirm language diversity in educational practice and research.

Phonosemantics is a school of thought which believes that each sound or phoneme carries a specific psychological impression allotted by nature. And these psychological impressions were used to evolve different languages. Work has been done on this ground, but there is still scope for further research into the subject. The paper presents a new hypothesis, explaining the psychological representations of all the important IPA alphabets. The paper proposes a model of psychological mind, on which all the basic phonemes are placed, enabling us to understand the basic relationship between psychological semantic values and their phonetic values. To prove the correctness of the allocation, the paper applies these semantic features to 245 words of different languages, along with some additional evidences. The paper resolves the confusion regarding the same name for different objects, different names for the same object, the question of arbitrariness, and other queries raised by modern linguists.

In "The Light of Day," Eric Ambler creates a dysphoric Istanbul through the opposition of East and West. However, its Turkish translation "Gün Isigi" by Adnan Semih Yazicioglu tends to create a very different narrative by transforming signs related to Istanbul and some Orientalist clichés. In this study, the image of the East as constructed by the West is analyzed through Edward Said's concept of "Orientalism" (1979). The novel is divided into segments to highlight the parts taking place in Istanbul, and the clash between East and West is analyzed through the concept of isotopy and the semiotic square (Greimas & Courtés, 1982). The author's perception of the city is treated through Sündüz Öztürk Kasar's (2012) concept of "watermark translation", defining the representations of Istanbul as a translation executed in the author's mind (p. 267). To highlight the traces of the translator as covert co-author and evaluate the consequences of this interference, the meaning transformations in the target text are analyzed using the "Systematics of Designification in Translation" by Öztürk Kasar (2020a, p. 160). In connection with this, the importance of placing semiotics in the instruction of literary translation is stressed, with an emphasis on the function of the comparative analysis of the source and target texts, which may provide translation and interpretation students with an awareness that can enable them to avoid unintended meaning transformations, as well as stand behind their translation decisions of all kinds, including intended meaning transformations.

Just as the adoption of eXtensible Business Reporting Language has standardized the exchange, transmission, and reporting of accounting and financial data, this paper proposes the eXtensible Computing Curriculum Reporting Language as a standard for the exchange, transmission, and reporting of computing curriculum information in hopes of achieving semantic comparability among the descriptions of the computing disciplines. This specificity in the extension of eXtensible Business Reporting Language to the computing disciplines in the form of eXtensible Computing Curriculum Reporting Language acknowledges the nascent and emergent nature of computing and the need to reconcile, semantically, between uses of computing terminology and concepts to achieve clarity. This paper provides a brief background on eXtensible Business Reporting Language and demonstrates how the same concept may be applied in computing curriculum reporting. This paper is related to efforts to support the Computing Curricula 2020 initiative of the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and represents the ongoing work of the Education Special Interest Group Standing Committee on Curricular Matters.

In this article we present the results of a qualitative investigation into the teaching and learning of Taylor series and local approximations. In order to perform a comparative analysis, two investigations are conducted: the first is historical and epistemological, concerned with the pedagogical evolution of semantics, syntax and semiotics; the second is a contemporary institutional investigation, devoted to the results of a review of curricula, textbooks and course handouts in Tunisia and the United States. Our results show that contemporary curricula emphasize the algebraic and analytic approaches to the theory but omit the graphical and numerical registers, which both played a large role in the historical development. We contend that by presenting a more historically accurate didactic approach, student learning can be enriched to give a deeper and more conceptually accurate understanding of the topic.

This paper argues that meaning-making with multimodal representations in science learning is always contextualized within a genre and, conversely, what constitutes an ongoing genre also depends on a multimodal coordination of speech, gesture, diagrams, symbols, and material objects. In social semiotics, a genre is a culturally evolved way of doing things with language (including non-verbal representations). Genre provides a useful lens to understand how a community's cultural norms and practices shape the use of language in various human activities. Despite this understanding, researchers have seldom considered the role of scientific genres (e.g., experimental account, information report, explanation) to understand how students in science classrooms make meanings as they use and construct multimodal representations. This study is based on an enactment of a drawing-to-learn approach in a primary school classroom in Australia, with data generated from classroom videos and students' artifacts. Using multimodal discourse analysis informed by social semiotics, we analyze how the semantic variations in students' representations correspond to the recurring genres they were enacting. We found a general pattern in the use and creation of representations across different scientific genres that support the theory of a mutual contextualization between genre and representation construction.

Translanguaging (TL) theory underscores individuals' agentive deployment of all semiotic resources to construct meaning, highlighting language as part of an integrated repertoire for communication. To explore the potential of pedagogical TL in Chinese vocabulary instruction, this paper focused on one Chinese Language Arts lesson from a larger study on TL pedagogies in a multiethnic Grade 3 Mandarin-English dual language bilingual education classroom in a U.S. public school. The teacher in this lesson provided an explicit instruction on word origins and knowledge and then students were encouraged to use their imagination to create visual narratives of different Chinese characters based on their orthography and semantics. We performed a fine-grained analysis of the teacher's instructional practice and a multimodal analysis of children's Chinese character art as a visual narrative. We found that the teacher engaged in TL practices, mobilizing a range of multimodal, multilingual and multisensory resources to facilitate the co-construction of meaning with students. We also saw that the students' word art design -- the crossing between linguistic and visual signs -- index their funds of knowledge and sociocultural values, which could potentially open up spaces for more critical discussions on the complex intersections of language, culture and beliefs.

This study tries to identify high school students' knowledge about the concept of proof, based on classroom discussion. The processes of discourses, both natural and prompted, are studied as they occur between students and teachers. The study employs discourse analysis as the qualitative research framework. Participants are 13 Science High School students from Izmir (Turkey) in 11th grade and two mathematics and geometry teachers. Data gathered consist of 53 filmed mathematics and geometry classes, recorded over three months, plus researchers' field notes. The focus of the study is on verbal discourse in the classroom between teachers and students. 18 recorded discourses were analyzed after transcription. The theoretical framework of the study is dependent on the social semiotics, with Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics model (SFL) used in the analysis. In the SFL model there are three main components; field of discourse, tenor of discourse, and mode of discourse. This study presents findings and analysis results based on the field of discourse. Emergent findings showed important effects of teacher-student in-class discourses (in terms of the structure, diversity, and pattern characteristics) on the students? learning about proof and knowledge constructions.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which early adolescent programmers embed meaning in their digital media created within an online programming community called Scratch. Design/methodology/approach: The author completed an 18-month descriptive case study with 5 early adolescent participants. The research design included a multimodal analytic analysis of participant artifacts and inductive analysis of semi-structured interviews and transcription frames. Findings: Participants embedded meaning to achieve four primary purposes, namely, to guide visitors through exhibits, to story, to engage in conversation and to game. To achieve each goal, the participants embedded unique semantic cues within specific Scratch structures. Research limitations/implications: Questions for how researchers in literacy and learning can further explore meaning-making within programming-as-writing are suggested. Practical implications: Connections to the supportive structures within Scratch are discussed in the context of programming-as-writing. Considerations regarding the use of Scratch to promote programming-as-writing are provided for educators. Originality/value: The findings in this study provide an introductory step toward an enhanced understanding of the ways in which youth embed meaning into digital media as they engage in programming-as-writing. Although coding has been researched within the context of computer science, the use of coding in multimodal composition should be explored as it relates to literacy practices.

The relevance of researching the issue of a specific cultural meaning for a word in a folklore text is based on its being insufficiently studied and due to the importance for solving the problem of the folklore language semantic features. Yakut nominations for dairy products, which are the key words in the language of the Sakha people's folklore, have not been an object of a special study yet. In this regard, this study aims to analyze the symbolic meanings and the semiotic functions of the Yakut food nominations and motivation for their metaphorization in the context of the mythopoetic worldview. The lexical analysis of a word is accompanied in this work with cultural and semiotic excursions into the field of material culture, ritual practices, customs, and so on; in other words, a linguistic sign is regarded in the context of other, non-linguistic, signs. The language semantics, in turn, allows interpreting and presenting seemingly disparate information and bizarre culture components in a single dynamic system. The advantage of the suggested approach is that the analysis of the vocabulary in the background of all the native speakers' cultural presupposition actualizes the cultural meaning of a word and its referent, potential semes and various connotations, providing a more accurate interpretation of both the word and the text as a whole.

The implications of any linguistic and non-linguistic research can be always of paramount importance when carefully and cleverly integrated within the scope of any interdisciplinary field of translation study. The major goal of this paper, therefore, is to highlight and stress how a semiotic approach to the theory of meaning, in general, and to translation theory, in particular, can critically subsume the mere linguistic concerns of any prevalent semantic approach to translation. On the one hand, the former sets justifiable priorities that can more thoroughly cater for the dynamism of all textual, co-textual, extratextual, contextual and paratextual layers of the text as a fully-fledged sign within an overall sophisticated yet systematic macro order of signification; on the other hand, the latter usually may fumble and stumble whenever a text bears over-laden content of basic signifying elements that soar beyond the narrow limitations of lexical and sentential compositional structure. Thus, this paper advocates a strict semiotic approach to translation theory through which an array of semiotic annotations of the SLT must be aligned with and incorporated into basic morphosyntactic notations, semantic denotations and sociocultural connotations.

This paper explores linguistic and cultural complexity within immigration legal advice communication. Drawing from a linguistic ethnographic study, ethnographic and interactional data from two linked advice meetings about UK refugee family reunion processes are subject to deductive analysis using Risager's model of the language-culture nexus, within which the intersection of language(s) and culture(s) in a communicative event is conceptualised as a nexus of linguistic, languacultural, discursive, and other (non-linguistic) cultural resources and practices. The paper operationalises this intercultural communication theory in a new and exploratory way to investigate how cultural complexity is manifest, and interactionally managed, at different levels of meaning. The substantive analysis shows how a range of divergent resources, brought in by the different participants, are drawn upon and externalised as communicative practices in both legal advice meetings. Understanding is negotiated interculturally at different levels of meaning -- the linguistic, the languacultural, and the discursive -- in contrasting ways in each meeting. Methodologically, the paper argues that a strength of Risager's framework is that it supports a methodical and structured analysis of communicative events characterised by linguistic and cultural complexity, which can be linked to other discourse analytical approaches. The model's complexity, and its foregrounding of verbal over other semiotic modes, are highlighted as challenges for the analyst.

This paper presents findings from an eleven-year ethnographic study which describes how three children used different sign systems to become literate, to define who they are and to construct their literate identity. They each engaged with literacies in powerful and life transforming ways. Each child used multiple literacies to learn, understand and create meaning more fully, and use their motivated interest in a preferred literacy to scaffold their learning of another. In analysing this rich literacies use, I have come to understand that literacies are complex in their conception and use and that all sign systems (e.g. art, dance, reading, writing, videogaming, etc.) operate using common semiotic principles. Sign systems as literacies are multimodal, meaning-focused and motivated; they involve specific social and cultural practices which differ depending on site and community. During every literate act the children in this study made extensive use of the semantic, sensory, syntactic and pragmatic cuing systems to make meaning, regardless of the literacies used.

Multimedia educational applications convey meanings through several semiotic modes (e.g. text, image, sound, etc.). There is an urgent need for multimedia designers as well as for teachers to understand the meaning potential of these artifacts and discern the communicative purposes they serve. Towards this direction, a hermeneutic semiotic framework is proposed, which provides a controlled vocabulary for describing the logical meanings among the components that constitute multimedia representations. The framework in turn is implemented in the analysis of some multimedia materials in order to detect the types of their components and the logico-semantic relations identified among them. Using that framework, teachers would be equipped with visual literacy skills for reading the logical meanings of multimedia learning materials and multimedia designers would be able to design their own applications with respect to the logical meanings they want to promote through them.

This paper investigates the representation of social values and their ontogenetic development in English as a foreign language textbooks in Hong Kong. Adopting a social semiotic approach, it considers social values in textbooks as semantic categories which are constructed by complex semiotic discursive resources, and develops an explicit framework to model what values are selected and how the values are constructed. Analysis of 19 textbooks from Primary 1 to Secondary 4-6 shows that the social values change from the personal domain (e.g. good hygiene and healthy lifestyle), through the interpersonal domain (e.g. politeness and respect), to the altruistic concern for all mankind. The result also suggests that the textbooks are more concerned with the didactic education of good citizens than with cultivating children's critical thinking. The analytical framework and the findings can be used for the explicit instruction and critical analysis of social values in English language teaching.

Previous evidence has shown that word pairs that are either related in form (e.g., "ruc-berro"; donkey-watercress) or very closely semantically related (e.g., "ruc-caballo", donkey-horse) produce interference effects in a translation recognition task (Ferre et al., 2006; Guasch et al., 2008). However, these effects are not observed when the words have a less close semantic relation (e.g., "ruc-oso", donkey-bear). The lack of interference in less similar words could be due to the low level of activation of the corresponding semantic representations by the time the translation decision has to be made. The present experiments tested this possibility using the same materials as the previous studies but decreasing from 500 ms to 250 ms the presentation time of the word to be translated. Performance of highly proficient bilinguals of Spanish and Catalan was examined in two experiments. Catalan-Spanish translation direction was tested in Experiment 1 and Spanish-Catalan direction in Experiment 2. The results showed significant effects only with form and very close semantic relations, but not in the case of less closely semantically related words. The pattern of results was the same, regardless of translation direction and language dominance. (Contains 2 figures, 5 tables and 1 footnote.)

Introduction: This paper presents an analysis of the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS) compared with other alternatives for thesaurus representation in the Semantic Web. Method: Based on functional and structural changes of thesauri, provides an overview of the current context in which lexical paradigm is abandoned in favour of the conceptual paradigm. Likewise are described briefly various initiatives for the representation of thesauri using RDF vocabularies and hence for application to the Semantic Web, with particular attention to SKOS. Analysis and Results: This brief comparison will allow us to know some highlights of these proposals to raise those transcendental aspects in a model representing thesauri. SKOS includes the main proposal of this model, which organizes the concepts into diagrams and libraries. The notions of descriptors and non-descriptors terms are replaced by the association to the concepts of preferred and alternative labels and may be defined hierarchical or associative relationships between concepts. SKOS also provides for the establishment of correspondence relations between concepts belonging to different conceptual schemes. Conclusions: In accordance with the extent to which this series of requirements is fulfilled, we propose and defend the SKOS option as the best alternative for the development of multiple applications focusing on the use of thesauri in Web-based information services and systems, highlighting the advantages of this model over others proposed and in consideration of the user perspective in management, search and information query operations. (Contains 8 tables and 9 figures.)

Educational research has shown the importance of adopting a multimodal approach to pedagogy by combining, integrating, and organizing diverse semiotic resources for learning. As aesthetic content and forms are significant aspects of multimodality, arts integration is crucial to achieve multimodal knowledge practices. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for analysing, discussing, and designing arts-integrated processes of teaching and learning. The framework integrates a social semiotic theory of multimodality and the Legitimation Code Theory of Semantics as a methodology through which teachers may avoid segmental learning practices in favour of an arts-integrated cumulative pedagogy. In this way, multimodal approaches to text and context relate to a social realist view on knowledge building, where boundaries between knowledge practices are weakened and meaning is condensed through processes of cumulative learning.

The issue of meaning is undoubtedly significant in translation theory. Based on Catford's and Nida's view on meaning in translation, this paper aims at explore linguistic school's contribution to the theoretical description of meaning. With Nida's semantic studies as a focus, it argues that Nida's semantic studies represent an important stage and carry the linguistic school's theoretical studies of meaning in translation a step forward. (Contains 4 footnotes, 2 figures and 1 table.)

Contextual synonym is a linguistic phenomenon often applied but rarely discussed. This paper is to discuss the semantic relationships between contextual synonyms and the requirements under which words can be used as contextual synonyms between each other. The three basic relationships are embedment, intersection and non-coherence. The requirements are discussed in the course of the discussion on the three relationships. (Contains 6 figures.)

Four experiments are reported to study lexical access in picture naming. Interference was found when semantically related word primes were presented, but no effect was obtained using picture primes (Experiment 1). In Experiments 2a, 2b and 3, we introduced a new technique: Double-priming. The technique requires naming a picture target after presentation of two stimuli: a preprime stimulus and a picture prime. The results showed that the presentation of a semantically related preprime word slowed picture naming (Experiments 2a and 3). The interference was not due to the single effect of the preprime nor to the prime's lexical processing since related primes by themselves (Experiment 1), and primes preceded by unrelated word preprimes (Experiment 2b and 3) did not produce the effect. This pattern of results suggests that lexical access in picture naming involves two types of processes. The first is excitatory and semantic in nature; the second involves competitive lexical selection. (Contains 5 tables, 1 figure and 3 footnotes.)

Willingness to communicate (WTC) in a second language class has been shown to be transient and situation-dependent. Previous studies mostly elicited data from learners' self-reports through interviews or diaries, and the data analyses were largely confined to the medium of language, marginalizing other semiotic resources such as gesture or movement. The nature of human communication, however, is multimodal, which entails the processing of different semiotic resources. Drawing on a systemic functional multimodal discourse analysis approach, this study investigates the dynamics of WTC in the English as a foreign language classroom in China. The researchers collected data through videotaping English lessons, stimulated recall interviews, and learning journals. Their analyses involved two teaching scenarios videotaped in one class period, which were rated respectively with high WTC and low WTC by four participating students in stimulated recall interviews. These scenarios were transcribed and annotated using Multimodal Analysis Video software to identify the use of semiotic resources, including language, gesture, and gaze. The discourse semantic features of the two scenarios were analyzed and compared, and subtle differences were presented and discussed. This study's findings highlight the need for language teachers to recognize and orchestrate multimodal semiotic resources to enhance students' WTC and classroom participation.

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of association with "other" words (e.g., they both tend to occur with words like "deliver," "truck," "package"). In contrast to these computational results, artificial language learning experiments suggest that distributional statistics "alone" do not facilitate learning of linguistic categories. However, experiments in this paradigm expose participants to entirely novel words, whereas real language learners encounter input that contains some known words that are semantically organized. In three experiments, we show that (a) the presence of familiar semantic reference points facilitates distributional learning and (b) this effect crucially depends both on the presence of known words and the adherence of these known words to some semantic organization.

This study examines the challenges of analyzing texts that are multimodal--that is, combining more than one mode of communication, such as written text, images, video, and/or audio--and considers the theoretical and practical implications of two very different approaches. The more common current approach, which adapts the work of Halliday and Saussure, is criticized for failing to account for critical differences in the ways that language, both written and spoken, and other modes of signification convey meaning and consequently rely on linguistic structures in the analysis of images. A second approach, based in Peirce's triadic approach to semiotic analysis, which allows Saussurean modes of interpretation in its final stages, is proposed and demonstrated through the analysis of two news videos about the Occupy Wall Street movement produced by CNN and Al Jazeera. In conclusion, the implications of the two approaches for how literacy and multimodality are defined and analyzed are considered.

The "bullied" gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, intersex and otherwise Queer (GLBTIQ) student is a fairly recent figure in the sexuality education research literature. GLBTIQ students have previously been problematised by sex education research in a range of different ways and have been the subjects of varying methodological interventions. This paper explores how the different ways in which GLBTIQ students have been constructed by research, have been to some extent interdependent on the research questions behind the inquiries and the methodologies and methods employed to explore them. To achieve this, the paper draws on a Foucaultian view of research as discursive and the GLBTIQ subject as an entry point for considering different research discourses. It reviews constructions of GLBTIQ students in past, recent and emerging research projects through post-structuralist reflection on the key research reports, studies and peer-reviewed journal articles that have shaped the field of contemporary research. Rather than asserting a dichotomy between sex education research that contributes to constructions of the "deviant homosexual student" and studies that contribute to "bullying victim" tropes, the paper considers both the usefulness and limitations of the many different types of inquiries being pursued and the diverse constructions of GLBTIQ students they offer. Future research approaches for particular contexts and audiences are identified.

From the field of developmental psycholinguistics and from conceptual development theory there is evidence that excessive linguistic "code-switching" in early school education may pose some hazards for the learning of young multilingual children. In this article the author addresses the issue, invoking post-Piagetian and neo-Vygotskian ideas on children's cognitive development and its interplay with language in an argument for a linguistically "stable" pedagogy that prepares learners for the world of written language in which they have to express most of their learning in school. She argues that language development, literacy learning, and the development of concepts are intertwined phenomena in a child's development and that semantically and semiotically unambiguous and systematic classroom communication is therefore vital for learning success in the early grades when the foundations for cognitive academic language proficiency are laid. She calls for longitudinal research of young children's learning, investigating how language hybrids in classroom communication may impact it. Taking cognisance of linguistics theory that posits language as fluid, she hypothesizes that if language use, in mixed code, is excessive, it may lead to cognitive instability and insecure academic discourse. (Contains 2 figures and 3 endnotes.)

The authors of this current study compared the memory performance of adolescent students with specific reading disabilities (RD) with that of typical adolescent readers on a newly developed verbal learning test, the "Bergen-Tucson Verbal Learning Test" (BTVLT). This multiple trial test was designed to measure memory acquisition, retention, retrieval, and forgetting rates, as well as the ability to organize and retrieve the information from memory according to the phonological (surface) and semantic (lexical) features of words. A total of 20 participants with RD and 20 control participants (mean age = 15.2 years) were matched for age, gender, and ethnicity. Results indicated that the RD group learned significantly fewer list items and did so at a slower rate than the control group. Although the participants with RD were equally able to retain information once learned, they did demonstrate inefficient elaborative rehearsal strategies. They also recalled fewer words in both the semantic and phonetic cued-recall conditions, but the effect size was significantly greater in the latter. Taken together, the data suggest that students with RD have less efficient rehearsal and encoding mechanisms but typical retention. Retrieval also appears typical except under conditions that require information to be recalled based on phonetic codes. (Contains 6 tables and 2 figures.)

Just as syntax differentiates coherent sentences from scrambled word strings, the comprehension of sequential images must also use a cognitive system to distinguish coherent narrative sequences from random strings of images. We conducted experiments analogous to two classic studies of language processing to examine the contributions of narrative structure and semantic relatedness to processing sequential images. We compared four types of comic strips: (1) Normal sequences with both structure and meaning, (2) Semantic Only sequences (in which the panels were related to a common semantic theme, but had no narrative structure), (3) Structural Only sequences (narrative structure but no semantic relatedness), and (4) Scrambled sequences of randomly-ordered panels. In Experiment 1, participants monitored for target panels in sequences presented panel-by-panel. Reaction times were slowest to panels in Scrambled sequences, intermediate in both Structural Only and Semantic Only sequences, and fastest in Normal sequences. This suggests that both semantic relatedness and narrative structure offer advantages to processing. Experiment 2 measured ERPs to all panels across the whole sequence. The N300/N400 was largest to panels in both the Scrambled and Structural Only sequences, intermediate in Semantic Only sequences and smallest in the Normal sequences. This implies that a combination of narrative structure and semantic relatedness can facilitate semantic processing of upcoming panels (as reflected by the N300/N400). Also, panels in the Scrambled sequences evoked a larger left-lateralized anterior negativity than panels in the Structural Only sequences. This localized effect was distinct from the N300/N400, and appeared despite the fact that these two sequence types were matched on local semantic relatedness between individual panels. These findings suggest that sequential image comprehension uses a narrative structure that may be independent of semantic relatedness. Altogether, we argue that the comprehension of visual narrative is guided by an interaction between structure and meaning. (Contains 9 figures and 4 tables.)

The metamemory approach to memory confidence was extended and elaborated to deal with semantic memory tasks. The metamemory approach assumes that memory confidence is based on the products and processes of a completed memory task, as well as metamemory beliefs that individuals have about how their memory products and processes relate to memory accuracy. In two experiments participants were asked deceptive and nondeceptive questions involving geographical information. In both experiments, as predicted by the metamemory approach to memory confidence, there was a positive confidence/accuracy relationship for nondeceptive items and a negative relationship for deceptive items. Experiment 2 used items that constrained the memory strategies (e.g., hierarchical reasoning about spatial location) used by the participants. The results supported the hypothesis that the participants were aware of the levels of memory accuracy associated with the different strategies and used that information to generate their memory confidence judgments. (Contains 3 tables.)

Individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) report difficulty integrating simultaneously presented visual and auditory stimuli (Iarocci & McDonald, 2006), albeit showing enhanced perceptual processing of unisensory stimuli, as well as an enhanced role of perception in higher-order cognitive tasks (Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (EPF) model; Mottron, Dawson, Soulieres, Hubert, & Burack, 2006). Individuals with an ASD also integrate auditory-visual inputs over longer periods of time than matched typically developing (TD) peers (Kwakye, Foss-Feig, Cascio, Stone & Wallace, 2011). To tease apart the dichotomy of both extended multisensory processing and enhanced perceptual processing, we used behavioral and electrophysiological measurements of audio-visual integration among persons with ASD. 13 TD and 14 autistics matched on IQ completed a forced choice multisensory semantic congruence task requiring speeded responses regarding the congruence or incongruence of animal sounds and pictures. Stimuli were presented simultaneously or sequentially at various stimulus onset asynchronies in both auditory first and visual first presentations. No group differences were noted in reaction time (RT) or accuracy. The latency at which congruent and incongruent waveforms diverged was the component of interest. In simultaneous presentations, congruent and incongruent waveforms diverged earlier (circa 150 ms) among persons with ASD than among TD individuals (around 350 ms). In sequential presentations, asymmetries in the timing of neuronal processing were noted in ASD which depended on stimulus order, but these were consistent with the nature of specific perceptual strengths in this group. These findings extend the Enhanced Perceptual Functioning Model to the multisensory domain, and provide a more nuanced context for interpreting ERP findings of impaired semantic processing in ASD. (Contains 2 tables and 7 figures.)

The objective of our study is to introduce a fully automated, computational linguistic technique to quantify semantic relations between words generated on a standard semantic verbal fluency test and to determine its cognitive and clinical correlates. Cognitive differences between patients with Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment are evident in their performance on the semantic verbal fluency test. In addition to the semantic verbal fluency test score, several other performance characteristics sensitive to disease status and predictive of future cognitive decline have been defined in terms of words generated from semantically related categories (clustering) and shifting between categories (switching). However, the traditional assessment of clustering and switching has been performed manually in a qualitative fashion resulting in subjective scoring with limited reproducibility and scalability. Our approach uses word definitions and hierarchical relations between the words in WordNet[R], a large electronic lexical database, to quantify the degree of semantic similarity and relatedness between words. We investigated the novel semantic fluency indices of mean cumulative similarity and relatedness between all pairs of words regardless of their order, and mean sequential similarity and relatedness between pairs of adjacent words in a sample of patients with clinically diagnosed probable (n=55) or possible (n=27) Alzheimer's disease or mild cognitive impairment (n=31). The semantic fluency indices differed significantly between the diagnostic groups, and were strongly associated with neuropsychological tests of executive function, as well as the rate of global cognitive decline. Our results suggest that word meanings and relations between words shared across individuals and computationally modeled via WordNet and large text corpora provide the necessary context to account for the variability in language-based behavior and relate it to cognitive dysfunction observed in mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer's disease. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

Both taxonomic and thematic semantic relations have been studied extensively in behavioral studies and there is an emerging consensus that the anterior temporal lobe plays a particularly important role in the representation and processing of taxonomic relations, but the neural basis of thematic semantics is less clear. We used eye tracking to examine incidental activation of taxonomic and thematic relations during spoken word comprehension in participants with aphasia. Three groups of participants were tested: neurologically intact control participants ("N" = 14), individuals with aphasia resulting from lesions in left hemisphere BA 39 and surrounding temporo-parietal cortex regions ("N" = 7), and individuals with the same degree of aphasia severity and semantic impairment and anterior left hemisphere lesions (primarily inferior frontal gyrus and anterior temporal lobe) that spared BA 39 ("N" = 6). The posterior lesion group showed reduced and delayed activation of thematic relations, but not taxonomic relations. In contrast, the anterior lesion group exhibited longer-lasting activation of taxonomic relations and did not differ from control participants in terms of activation of thematic relations. These results suggest that taxonomic and thematic semantic knowledge are functionally and neuroanatomically distinct, with the temporo-parietal cortex playing a particularly important role in thematic semantics. (Contains 3 tables and 3 figures.)

We investigated the association between yes/no sentence comprehension and dysfunction in anterior and posterior left-hemisphere cortical regions in acute stroke patients. More specifically, we manipulated whether questions were Nonreversible (e.g., Are limes sour?) or Reversible (e.g., Is a horse larger than a dog?) to investigate the regions associated with semantic and syntactic processing. In addition, we administered lexical tasks (i.e., Picture-Word Verification, Picture Naming) to help determine the extent to which deficits in sentence processing were related to deficits in lexical processing. We found that errors on the lexical tasks were associated with ischemia in posterior-temporal Brodmann Areas (BA 21, 22, 37) and inferior parietal regions (BA 39, 40). Nonreversible question comprehension was associated with volume of tissue dysfunction, while Reversible question comprehension was associated with posterior regions (BA 39, 40) as well as one anterior region (BA 6). We conclude that deficits in Nonreversible questions required extensive dysfunction that affected language processing across multiple levels, while Reversible question comprehension was associated with regions involved in semantics as well as working memory that indirectly influenced syntactic processing. Overall, this suggests that yes/no question comprehension relies on multiple regions and that the importance of certain regions increases in relation to semantic, phonological, and syntactic complexity. (Contains 3 tables and 4 figures.)

An event-related brain potentials (ERP) experiment was carried out to investigate how and when accentuation influences temporally selective attention and subsequent semantic processing during on-line spoken language comprehension, and how the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing changed with the degree of accentuation. Chinese spoken sentences were used as stimuli. The critical word in the carrier sentence was either semantically congruent or incongruent to the preceding sentence context. Meanwhile, the critical word was de-accented (DeAccent), generally accented (Accent), or greatly accented (GreatAccent). Results showed that, relative to semantically congruent words, the semantically incongruent word elicited a parietal-occipital N400 effect in the Accent condition and a broadly distributed N400 effect in the GreatAccent condition; however, no significant N400 effect was found in the DeAccent condition. Further onset analysis found that the N400 effect in the GreatAccent condition started around 50ms earlier than that in the Accent conditions. In addition, in the GreatAccent condition, the incongruent words also elicited an early negative effect in the window latency of 110-190ms after the acoustic onset of the critical word. The results indicated that, during on-line speech processing, accentuation can rapidly modulate temporally selective attention and consequently influence the depth or the speed of subsequent semantic processing; the effect of accentuation on attention allocation and semantic processing can change with the degree of accentuation gradually. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)

Humans have special abilities in processing hierarchical, recursive structures. Here we investigated how an upcoming word embedded in a hierarchical structure is semantically integrated into the prior representation during sentence comprehension. Participants read Chinese sentences with a complex verb argument structure "subject noun+verb+numeral+classifier+object noun", in which the object noun was constrained by the classifier in a local structure and by the verb in a higher-level structure. The semantic congruence between the classifier and the noun, between the verb and the noun, and between the verb and the classifier was manipulated individually or simultaneously to create a local mismatch (i.e., with classifier-noun mismatch), a sequential mismatch (with verb-classifier and classifier-noun mismatches) or a triple mismatch (with verb-classifier, classifier-noun, and verb-classifier mismatches) condition. Event-related potentials locked to the object noun showed increased N400 and late negativity responses over the local mismatch, the sequential mismatch and the triple mismatch conditions. The local mismatch additionally elicited a posterior positivity effect on the object noun. The verb-classifier mismatch elicited a right N400-like effect followed by a posterior positivity (P600) effect on the classifier. The N400 effects demonstrate that the semantic process at a higher syntactic level can proceed in face of the failure of semantic processes at lower levels when no structural re-interpretation is available, and that the semantic congruence between earlier sentence constituents can affect the integration of the upcoming word in the hierarchical structure. The P600 effects suggest the immediate triggering of a co-ordination process across syntactic levels whereas the late anterior negativity effects suggest the initiation of a second-pass semantic re-interpretation process. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)

An impairment for verbs has been described in patients with Parkinson's disease (PD), suggesting that a disruption of frontal-subcortical circuits may result in dysfunction of the neural systems involved in action-verb processing. A previous study suggested that deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) during verb generation may affect the ability to select from many competing lexical alternatives. In this study, 12 PD patients who had undergone bilateral STN DBS and completed an 8-year follow-up and 14 matched normal controls were administered action and object naming tasks and verb and noun reading tasks. Their responses were recorded using a microphone, resulting in a signal that marked the onset of the verbal response and allowed to measure response times (RTs). Accuracy was scored manually. Results: Overall performance in naming (independently of stimulation): In naming task controls were faster and more accurate than PD patients. In both groups, performance (accuracy and RTs) was worse on action naming than object naming. PD patients were significantly slower than controls in naming actions. Effect of stimulation: Compared with the OFF stimulation condition, in ON stimulation condition PD patients showed improved performance on object and action naming tasks (increased accuracy, faster RTs), with a decreased number of semantic errors. Some evidence also emerged that action naming in the ON stimulation condition improved more than object naming. On noun and verb reading tasks, although accuracy was at ceiling in both groups and no significant difference was observed in RTs for nouns and verbs, PD patients were slower than controls. Conclusions: Our findings suggest that STN DBS may improve lexical search in PD patients. We hypothesize that STN stimulation may facilitate the motor components involved in naming and reading tasks (increased speed of speech onset), resulting in shorter RTs in both naming and reading and, to some extent, in increased accuracy in naming due to fewer omissions (no response within the 7500ms time limit). However, to account for greater accuracy in naming due to decreased number of semantic errors in the ON stimulation condition, we hypothesize that STN stimulation restores the activity of the corticostriatal circuits involved in selection processes of a target word among different alternatives. (Contains 4 tables and 3 figures.)

Patients with letter-by-letter alexia may have residual access to lexical or semantic representations of words despite severely impaired overt word recognition (reading). Here, we report a multilingual patient with severe letter-by-letter alexia who rapidly identified the language of written words and sentences in French and English while he had great difficulty in reading them, judging their lexical status or extracting semantic information. Lexical decision was strongly influenced by the orthographic structure of stimuli: whereas he easily determined the lexical status of illegal nonwords (e.g., "rsdo"), he had random performance with legal pseudowords (e.g., "binus"). When asked to determine the language of meaningless letter trigrams with high frequency in the English or French orthography (e.g., "oth" or "iqu") his performance was significantly above chance. In contrast, similarly to healthy participants his language decision was at chance with low-frequency trigrams. These findings suggest that written language identification relies on sublexical processing of orthographic rules specific to each language. (Contains 3 figures and 2 tables.)

Semantic priming is typically enhanced by target degradation in both lexical decision and pronunciation tasks. Using these tasks, we examined this priming x target degradation interaction when the prime and target were related via symmetrical (SYM) associations (e.g., "east west"), as in previous research, or for the first time via forward asymmetrical (FA) prime-to-target associations (e.g., "keg beer") or backward asymmetrical (BA) target-to-prime associations (e.g., "small shrink") of the same strength as those in the SYM pairs. For both clear and degraded targets, SYM priming was equal to the sum of FA and BA priming, with BA priming being equivalent to FA priming except for clear targets in pronunciation, which as in previous research failed to yield significant overall BA priming. An analysis of the full reaction time (RT) distribution showed that (a) except for BA priming for clear targets in pronunciation, all priming effects were significant even for the fastest RTs, (b) priming effects were greater for degraded than clear targets for the BA and SYM pairs for the fastest RTs but more so for the longest RTs, and (c) priming effects were equal for degraded and clear targets for FA pairs throughout the RT distribution. For RT bins for which the RTs for degraded and clear unrelated targets were matched, RTs in the related priming condition were faster for degraded related targets than clear related targets. These findings suggest that the Priming x Target Degradation interaction typically observed for SYM related pairs is mediated by a retrospective prime-retrieval mechanism that depends on a backward target-to-prime association and is strategically engaged for degraded targets so that semantic information can compensate for the deficient bottom-up processing of a degraded target. They also provide strong evidence for the psychological reality of the general distinction between retrospective and prospective processing mechanisms, a distinction that has been receiving considerable recent interest in research on attentional control and memory. (Contains 7 tables and 1 figure.)

What are the processes underlying word recognition in the toddler lexicon? Work with adults suggests that, by 5-years of age, hearing a word leads to cascaded activation of other phonologically, semantically and phono-semantically related words (Huang & Snedeker, 2010; Marslen-Wilson & Zwitserlood, 1989). Given substantial differences in children's sensitivity to phonological and semantic relationships between words in the first few years of life (Arias-Trejo & Plunkett, 2010; Newman, Samuelson, & Gupta, 2009; Storkel & Hoover, 2012), the current set of experiments investigated whether children younger than five also show such phono-semantic priming. Using a picture-priming task, Experiments 1 and 2 presented 2-year-olds with phono-semantically related prime-target pairs, where the label for the prime image is phonologically related (Experiment 1--onset CV overlap, Experiment 2--rhyme VC overlap) to a semantic associate of the target label. Across both experiments, toddlers recognised a word faster when this was preceded by a phono-semantically related prime relative to an unrelated prime. Overall, the results provide strong evidence that word recognition involves cascaded processing of phono-semantically related words by 2-years of age. (Contains 2 tables and 1 figure.)

Five experiments were conducted to examine how unsuccessful retrieval influences learning and subsequent memory. We used a cued-recall paradigm that produces many unsuccessful retrieval attempts (followed by feedback) and allows comparisons to be made between later memory for these trials and trials that only required reading or studying the pairs. On "read" trials participants studied cue-target pairs that were either weakly associated (DOOR-EXIT) or unrelated but identical in length (DOOR-SHOE). On "test" trials participants were given only the cue (either without [Exps. 1-3] or with [Exps. 4-5] prior experience with the pair items) and asked to guess the target which they were told was either semantically related or identical in length to the cue; then they received the correct cue-target pair to study. Unsuccessful retrieval attempts (i.e., guessing) relative to studying benefited retention for weakly associated pairs but impaired retention for unrelated pairs. This pattern of results occurred regardless of study duration (Experiments 1A and 1B), level of processing of the cue (Experiment 2), whether relatedness was manipulated between or within subjects (Experiment 5), and when guessing involved episodic as opposed to semantic retrieval (Experiments 4 and 5). However, this pattern was partly mediated by the ability to retrieve incorrect guesses during a final cued-recall test which may provide a link between the cue and target (Experiment 3). The current study demonstrates that unsuccessful retrieval attempts with immediate feedback not only enhance, but also can impair learning. This effect is robust and depends on elaborative semantic activation related to the answer and the effectiveness of incorrect guesses as mediating cues. (Contains 2 tables and 5 figures.)