How Wide the Divide? - Theorizing 'Constructions' in Generative and Usage-Based Frameworks.

What is the nature and function of mental representations in cognitive science, and in human language in particular? How do they come into existence and interact, and how is the information attributed to them stored in and retrieved from the human mind? Some theories treat constructions as primitive entities used for structure-building, central in both production and comprehension, while other theories only admit construction-like entities as devices to map the structure into semantics or to relate them to specific morphophonological exponents. In this positional piece, we seek to elucidate areas of commonality across what have traditionally been divergent approaches to the role of constructions in language. Here we outline a robust specification of the differences in how chunks of structure containing information are treated in the two main approaches, and we seek to offer a path toward a more unified theoretical stance.

First-language influence on second language speech perception depends on task demands.

While listening to non-native speech, second language users filter the auditory input through their native language. We examined how bilinguals perceived second language (L2 English) sound sequences that conflicted with native-language (L1 Spanish) constraints across three experiments with different task demands. We used the L1 Spanish phonotactic constraint (i.

Investigating the effects of phonological neighbors on word retrieval and phonetic variation in word naming and picture naming paradigms.

Phonological neighbors have been shown to affect word processing. Prior work has shown that when a word with an initial voiceless stop has a contrasting initial voiced stop neighbor, Voice Onset Times (VOTs) are longer. Higher phonological neighborhood density (PND) has also been shown to facilitate word retrieval latency, and be associated with longer VOTs.

Making Room for Second Language Phonotactics: Effects of L2 Learning and Environment on First Language Speech Perception.

Language-specific restrictions on sound sequences in words can lead to automatic perceptual repair of illicit sound sequences. As an example, no Spanish words begin with /s/-consonant sequences ([#sC]), and where necessary (e.g.

Mental Transformation Skill in Young Children: The Role of Concrete and Abstract Motor Training.

We examined the effects of three different training conditions, all of which involve the motor system, on kindergarteners' mental transformation skill. We focused on three main questions. First, we asked whether training that involves making a motor movement that is relevant to the mental transformation-either concretely through action (action training) or more abstractly through gestural movements that represent the action (move-gesture training)-resulted in greater gains than training using motor movements irrelevant to the mental transformation (point-gesture training).

Bilingual deaf readers' use of semantic and syntactic cues in the processing of English relative clauses.

Eye fixation measures were used to examine English relative clause processing by adult ASL-English bilingual deaf readers. Participants processed subject relative clauses faster than object relative clauses, but expected animacy cues eliminated processing difficulty in object relative clauses. This brings into question previous claims that deaf readers' sentence processing strategies are qualitatively different from those of hearing English native speakers.

How children explore the phonological network in child-directed speech: A survival analysis of children's first word productions.

We explored how phonological network structure influences the age of words' first appearance in children's (14-50 months) speech, using a large, longitudinal corpus of spontaneous child-caregiver interactions. We represent the caregiver lexicon as a network in which each word is connected to all of its phonological neighbors, and consider both words' local neighborhood density (), and also their embeddedness among interconnected neighborhoods ( and ). The larger-scale structure reflected in the latter two measures is implicated in current theories of lexical development and processing, but its role in lexical development has not yet been explored.