Introduction Mark Baker, in his 1983 paper remarked that "All seemingly intransitive verbs are not created equal." In this study we empirically test the theoretical claims regarding the difference between different intransitives, by testing whether there is an observable difference in the online processing of unaccusatives and unergatives. According to the Unaccusativity Hypothesis, there are two classes of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives and unergatives (Perlmutter 1978, Perlmutter and Postal 1984). Semantically, they differ in that the subject of unaccusative verbs, unlike the subject of unergatives, does not actively initiate or is not actively responsible for the action of the verb, but bears the semantic role of theme or patient, that is usually associated with the object. Syntactically, the single argument of unaccusatives is a direct object, while in unergatives it is the subject. Thus, Thanks to Nicoleta Bateman for running countless subjects in the Brain and Language Labora

Language comprehension is something that humans perform rapidly, effortlessly, and typically without conscious thought. However, underlying this reflexive behavior there exists a multitude of processes at each of a number of different levels of analysis (spanning from basic phoneme discrimination to speech segmentation,

The time for skilled readers to name a non-word increases as the number of letters increase, and also increases when the stimulus is degraded. These effects are known as the length effect and stimulus quality effect, respectively. Besner and Roberts (2002) reported that the joint effect of these two factors on RT are additive in skilled readers. They also reported that the leading computational model of basic processes in reading, Coltheart, Rastle, Perry, Langdon & Ziegler’s Dual Route Cascaded model (2001), produces an under additive interaction between these two factors. Besner and Roberts argued that this qualitative difference challenges DRC’s fundamental assumption of cascaded processing. They proposed that thresholding early processing in the model would allow the model to simulate the human results. The present work implements such a threshold at the letter level in DRC. The new model successfully reproduces the joint effects of letter length and stimulus quality seen in skilled readers.

There exists strong word association in natural language. Based on mutual information, this paper proposes a new MI-Trigger-based modeling approach to capture the preferred relationships between words over a short or long distance. Both the distance-independent(DI) and distancedependent (DD) MI-Trigger-based models are constructed within a window. It is found that proper MI-Trigger modeling is superior to word bigram model and the DD MI-Trigger models have better performance than the DI MI-Trigger models for the same window size. It is also found that the number of the trigger pairs in an MITrigger model can be kept to a reasonable size without losing too much of its modeling power. Finally, it is concluded that the preferred relationships between words are useful to language disambiguation and can be modeled et5ciently by the MI-Trigger-based modeling approach.

tulated to explain the RP effect on priming. Two processes have been proposed as accounts of the influence of RP. One is an expectancy process whereby subjects generate a likely identity for an upcoming target and the other is a semantic matching strategy in which subjects notice and use relationships between primes and targets to influence lexical decisions (Neely, 1991; Neely et al., 1989). Both processes are assumed to be consciously deployed strategies, and this assumption is supported by the finding that RP effects are typically absent when the SOA is less than 300 msec (e.g., Hutchison et al., 2001; Perea & Rosa, 2002;Stolz & Neely, 1995). This constraint has led Neely and colleagues to consider RP effects on semantic priming to be the "signature" of a consciously controlled strategy such as expectancy or semantic matching (e.g., Hutchison et al., 2001; Neely, 1991; Neely et al., 1989; but see Stolz & Neely, 1995). Accounts of semantic priming as a product of prospective influe

Why anticipatory processes correspond to cognitive abilities of living systems? To be adapted to an environment, behaviors need at least i) internal representations of events occurring in the external environment; and ii) internal anticipations of possible events to occur in the external environment. Interactions of these two opposite but complementary cognitive properties lead to various patterns of experimental data on semantic processing. How to investigate dynamic semantic processes? Experimental studies in cognitive psychology offer several interests such as: i) the control of the semantic environment such as words embedded in sentences; ii) the methodological tools allowing the observation of anticipations and adapted oculomotor behavior during reading; and iii) the analyze of different anticipatory processes within the theoretical framework of semantic processing. What are the different types of semantic anticipations? Experimental data show that semantic anticipatory processes involve i) the coding in memory of sequences of

The development of connectionist, or neural network, models has provided a new and promising way of understanding cognitive functions. Reading processes, particularly those associated with the identification of words, have been the subject of extensive study through computational modeling with connectionist systems. The general goal of this enterprise has been to develop a theory of skilled word recognition processes, including accounts of the development of that skill (Seidenberg & McClelland, 1989) and of neurological damage that leads to disorders of reading ability (Hinton & Shallice, 1991; Plaut, McClelland, Seidenberg, & Patterson, 1996; Plaut & Shallice, 1993). Connectionist models of these phenomena have come to rely on a division of labor between different sources of knowledge to account for successful and patterns of impaired word reading performance (e.g., Plaut et al., 1996). The general theme pursued in this chapter is the issue of how knowledge sources interact to bring about fluent word reading. The proposition that multiple knowledge sources interact in the process of identifying words has been of fundamental importance in the development of models of reading (e.g., Lesgold &