Similar, and similar concepts.

This paper analyzes English symmetrical predicates such as collide and match. Its point of departure is an analysis of the concept 'similar' from Tversky (1977) that appears to show that similarity is psychologically asymmetrical. One basis for this claim from Tversky is that the sentences North Korea is similar to Red China and Red China is similar to North Korea are assessed as differing in meaning by experimental subjects; this seems to imply that the symmetrical entailment (R x, y <--> R y, x) fails for this concept.

Automatic access of lexical information in Broca's aphasics: against the automaticity hypothesis.

A number of recent articles have claimed that the language comprehension impairments of so-called agrammatic patients can be characterized as being due to problems with the automatic access of semantic and/or syntactic information from the lexicon. We describe three experiments, all using tasks which probe the immediate and automatic access of lexical information and compare the performance of agrammatic patients with that of an anomic and a fluent patient. We find no evidence in support of the automaticity hypothesis as an explanatory account of the language deficits of agrammatic aphasics.

The processing of simple and complex words in an agrammatic patient: evidence from priming.

We report the case of an aphasic patient. D.E.

Automatic access to lexical semantics in aphasia: evidence from semantic and associative priming.

We report the auditory lexical decision performance of four patients, all of whom are clinically diagnosed as Broca's aphasics. In a task that separates associative from semantic priming, all four patients show significant priming effects and no interaction with type of relatedness. We find no evidence to support some of the current accounts of these patients' linguistic difficulties in terms of an impairment in automatic processing routines.