A scientific theory is judged by its ability to provide a principled explanation of less straightforward facts that lie at the margins of the data normally discussed and captured by other theories. To the extent that those data naturally follow from the new proposal, that theory is successfull in defining a new paradigm. Mixed Categories, by Irina Nikolaeva and Andrew Spencer, is an excellent example ...

This article attempts to make sense of the speaker in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s «Wandrers Nachtlied II» and Rainer Maria Rilke’s «Herbst». It starts from the observation that the utterance in both poems combines a rhetorical function with a space-creating function, and that both functions participate in the poem’s organization as a communicative act in decisive ways. My conclusion is that the ...

The study of the brains’ oscillatory activity has been a standard technique to gain insights into human neurocognition for a relatively long time. However, as a complementary analysis to ERPs, only very recently has it been utilized to study bilingualism and its neural underpinnings. Here, we provide a theoretical and methodological starter for scientists in the (psycho) linguistics and neurocognition ...

The Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen publisheda book after each of his five expeditions: about the Northwest Passage, 1903-1907 (1907), the Northeast Passage,1918-1920 (1921), the South Pole expedition, 1910-1912 (1912) and about the two attempts of reaching the North Pole(1925, 1926). In addition he published an autobiography in 1927, the year before he disappeared while flying on arescue ...

We conducted a close replication of the seminal work by Marcus and colleagues from 1999, which showed that after a brief auditory exposure phase, 7-month-old infants were able to learn and generalize a rule to novel syllables not previously present in the exposure phase. This work became the foundation for the theoretical framework by which we assume that infants are able to learn abstract representations ...

Most of the literature devoted to the study of deverbal nominalizations concentrates on the complex event reading (La concentración de partículas tiene lugar a temperatura ambiente, ‘The concentration of particles takes place at room temperature’) and the object reading (El paciente tenía concentraciones de calcio en el hombro, ‘The patient had calcium concentrations in the shoulder’), while ...

Entrenchment and schematisation are the two most important cognitive processes in language acquisition. In this article, the role of the two processes, operationalised by token and type frequency, in the production of overgeneralised verb forms in Croatian preschool children is investigated using a parental ques tionnaire and computational simulation of language acquisition. The participants ...