Journal

Volume 6, Issue 2 (July 31, 2005)

4 articles

• Acquisition of an Adjunct Island inside There-Sentences
  by Min-Joo Kim
  J. CS. 2005, 6(2), 73-95;
  Abstract In the past two decades, how children acquire adjunct island constraints has been a focal topic of research in language development (e.g., Otsu 1981, Crain and Fodor 1984, Goodluck et al. 1992, de Villiers et al. 1990, Adul-Karim 2000). Previous studies are concerned primarily with children’s sensit... [Read more].
  Abstract In the past two decades, how children acquire adjunct island constraints has been a focal topic of research in language development (e.g., Otsu 1981, Crain and Fodor 1984, Goodluck et al. 1992, de Villiers et al. 1990, Adul-Karim 2000). Previous studies are concerned primarily with children’s sensitivity to extraction from adjunct islands with a phonologically overt marker such as a relative pronoun (e.g., which, who) and a temporal complementizer (e.g., when, after) (see, among others, Otsu 1981, Goodluck et al. 1992). The present study examines children’s knowledge of the Adjunct Island Constraint which is at work in a phonologically covert syntactic environment, namely, there-sentences with participial codas (e.g., *How was there a boy running?). A crosssectional experiment was conducted with 14 monolingual Englishspeaking children ages from 3 to 6, and also with 24 adult native speakers of English. The results show that participial codas constitute strong barriers both in child and adult grammars, lending support to the syntactic analyses that treat participial codas as adjunct islands (e.g., McNally 1997, Chomsky 2001), as opposed to predicates that are parts of small clauses(e.g., Stowell 1978, 1981). Another interesting finding is that younger children tend to give why interpretations to how questions. I offer a way of accounting for this phenomenon by pointing to the semantic versatility of how and its distributional parallel to why. [Collapse]
• A New Perspective on Representational Problems
  by Chris Eliasmith
  J. CS. 2005, 6(2), 97-123;
  Abstract I argue that current flaws in the methodology of contemporary cognitive science, especially neuroscience, have adversely affected philosophical theorizing about the nature of representation. To highlight these flaws, I introduce a distinction between adopting the animal’s perspective and the observe... [Read more].
  Abstract I argue that current flaws in the methodology of contemporary cognitive science, especially neuroscience, have adversely affected philosophical theorizing about the nature of representation. To highlight these flaws, I introduce a distinction between adopting the animal’s perspective and the observer’s perspective when characterizing representation. I provide a discussion of each and show how the former has been unduly overlooked by cognitive scientists, including neuroscientists and philosophers. I also provide a specific neuroscientific example that demonstrates how adopting the animal’s perspective can simplify the characterization of the representation relation. Finally, I suggest that taking this perspective seriously supports in a specific thesis regarding content determination: the statistical dependence hypothesis. [Collapse]
• Logics, Situations and Channels
  by Greg Restall
  J. CS. 2005, 6(2), 125-150;
  Abstract The notion of that information is relative to a context is important in many different ways. The idea that the context is small ? that is, not necessarily a consistent and complete possible world ? plays a role not only in situation theory, but it is also an enlightening perspective from which to vi... [Read more].
  Abstract The notion of that information is relative to a context is important in many different ways. The idea that the context is small ? that is, not necessarily a consistent and complete possible world ? plays a role not only in situation theory, but it is also an enlightening perspective from which to view other areas, such as modal logics, relevant logics, categorial grammar and much more. In this article we will consider these areas, and focus then on one further question: How can we account for information about one thing giving us information about something else? This is a question addressed by channel theory. We will look at channel theory and then see how the issues of information flow and conditionality play a role in each of the different domains we have examined. [Collapse]
• Different word order evokes different syntactic processing in Korean language processing by ERP study
  by Kyung Soon Shin, Young Youn Kim, Myung-Sun Kim, & Jun Soo Kwon
  J. CS. 2005, 6(2), 151-169;
  Abstract The goal of the present study is to investigate the Korean language processing by the event-related potentials (ERPs) during the congruent and incongruent conditions with semantic, syntactic and combined. The stimuli were presented visually, 180 of the sentences ended with an expected word (congruen... [Read more].
  Abstract The goal of the present study is to investigate the Korean language processing by the event-related potentials (ERPs) during the congruent and incongruent conditions with semantic, syntactic and combined. The stimuli were presented visually, 180 of the sentences ended with an expected word (congruent condition), 60 with semantic condition, 60 with syntactic condition and 60 with combined condition to 15 participants. The semantically incongruent condition has shown the N400, which was distributed in right fronto-central region, to the previous semantic studies administered with Indo-European (IE) languages. In syntactically incongruent condition, the P600 is followed by N400 component but no early left anterior negativity (ELAN) was detected which was caused by the structure difference. Doubly incongruent sentences evoked N400 and P600 components with faster latency and higher amplitude than syntactic conditions. The differences suggest that the syntactic integration is affected by the semantic processing, however, the semantic structure is independent of syntactic context in the absence of semantic anomalies. [Collapse]