Publications by authors named "E M Conwell"

Article Synopsis
  • Natural languages have systematic relationships between verbs and their argument structures, while artificial language studies often ignore these links by randomizing verb meanings and structures.
  • Adult learners in these studies can recognize patterns, but those using natural languages incorporate more than just statistical data.
  • In a study comparing two conditions, participants exposed to a meaningful relationship between verb meanings and sentence structures performed better in producing and judging grammar than those in a condition based solely on statistical patterns.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Apparently homophonous sequences contain acoustic information that differentiates their meanings (Gahl, 2008; Quené, 1992). Adults use this information to segment embedded homophones (e.g.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Children's ability to learn words with multiple meanings may be hindered by their adherence to a one-to-one form-to-meaning mapping bias. Previous research on children's learning of a novel meaning for a familiar word (sometimes called a ) has yielded mixed results, suggesting a range of factors that may impact when children entertain a new meaning for a familiar word. One such factor is repetition of the new meaning (Storkel & Maekawa, 2005) and another is the acoustic differentiation of the two meanings (Conwell, 2017).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) is a well-known demonstration of the role of motor activity in the comprehension of language. Participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences by producing movements toward the body or away from the body. The ACE is the finding that movements are faster when the direction of the movement (e.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Acquisition of an argument structure may be affected by the diversity of lexical types that appear in that structure (Conwell et al., 2011; Yang, 2016). Seventy-two 5- and 6-year-old English-speaking children completed a learning study where they were exposed to a novel argument structure and then tested on their ability to comprehend it.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF