Do infants learn their early words in semantic isolation? Or do they integrate new words into an inter-connected semantic system? In an infant-friendly adaptation of the adult lexical priming paradigm, infants at 18 and 24 months-of-age heard two words in quick succession. The noun-pairs were either related or unrelated. Following the onset of the target word, two pictures were presented, one of which depicted the target. Eye movements revealed that both age groups comprehended the target word. In addition, 24-month-olds demonstrated primed picture looking in two measures of comprehension: Named target pictures preceded by a related word pair took longer to disengage from and attracted more looking overall. The finding of enhanced target recognition demonstrates the emergence of semantic organisation by the end of the second year.

The application of cognitive science to literary scholarship in the form of a cognitive poetics offers the opportunity for accounting for many features of literary reading that have been rendered only in vague or impressionistic terms in the past. In this paper, an argument for cognitive poetics is made, with a focus on the affective and experiential phenomenon of resonance. This is modelled through cognitivist work on the field of attention and perception, to give a particularly literary-angled approach. The argument is exemplified with reference to a Shakespeare sonnet and then further demonstrated in a poem by Dylan Thomas, where the notion of a lacuna is developed to account for the phenomenon of “felt absence”. The paper concludes with observations on the role of cognitive poetics in relation to cognitive science, literary criticism, and in its own right.

Empirical research has shown that the processing of words and sentences is accompanied by activation of the brain's motor system in language users. The degree of precision observed in this activation seems to be contingent upon (1) the meaning of a linguistic construction and (2) the depth with which readers process that construction. In addition, neurological evidence shows a correspondence between a disruption in the neural correlates of overt action and the disruption of semantic processing of language about action. These converging lines of evidence can be taken to support the hypotheses that motor processes (1) are recruited to understand language that focuses on actions and (2) contribute a unique element to conceptual representation. This article explores the role of this motor recruitment in language comprehension. It concludes that extant findings are consistent with the theorized existence of multimodal, embodied representations of the referents of words and the meaning carried by language. Further, an integrative conceptualization of “fault tolerant comprehension” is proposed.

In this paper we bring together several lines of cross-linguistic research to demonstrate the role of prototypicality in young children's acquisition of the transitive construction. Much research has shown that young children are slow to form abstract constructions because they fail to see the more general applicability of syntactic markers such as word order and case marking. Here we attempt to explain this fact by investigating the nature of the language children do and do not hear, specifically, the reliability and availability of the linguistic cues they are exposed to. We suggest that constructions redundantly marked with multiple cues could have a special status as a nucleus around which the prototype forms—which makes it difficult for them to isolate the functional significance of each cue. The implications of this view for language acquisition are discussed within a usage-based framework.

Many long-standing predominant theories of cognition have viewed higher levels of processing, such as language and cognition, as free from the influence of lower levels of processing, such as action and perception. However, many recent experiments have found evidence that the delineation between traditional modules is not so clean or precise, with motor output and language comprehension interacting much more fluidly than traditional theories predict. Evidence for this account includes findings of systematic activation of motor cortex while processing action words, as well as functional consequences of language on action and of action on language. It is worth noting that this recent spate of interest in the embodiment of cognition is not without historical precedence. Here, we will review such evidence coming from previous decades of research on the interaction between language and action, in addition to exploring the empirical results of these more recent experiments and methodologies. It seems to be the case, as evidenced from research in cognitive neuroscience and modeling, that motor representations and actions can influence language processing in predictable ways. Not only is there continuous competition between simultaneously active representations in language processing, with multiple sources of information interacting immediately, this competition is apparent in the motor output produced as a response to language.

We demonstrate how a particular type of knowledge about objects, their spatial locations and thus how to direct actions toward them, contributes to the comprehension of language about those objects. In four experiments, participants judged if sentences were about normal objects (e.g., “The apple has a stem”) or odd objects (e.g., “The apple has an antenna”). The Normal response key was either on the left of a response box or on the right. The named objects were themselves either on the left or the right of the response box. We demonstrate a compatibility effect in which responding Normal to the side where the object was located was faster than responding Normal to the opposite side. Furthermore, this effect was equally strong for sentences describing states of the objects (as above) and sentences describing actions (e.g., “Touch the apple at the stem”); the compatibility effect was found when the objects were removed; the effect required compatibility between actions, not just spatial locations; and the effect was found in both English and German. The results are discussed in relation to how action systems are used in language comprehension.