Peter Indefrey

Ian FitzPatrick

For speaking, words in the lexicon are somehow activated from conceptual representations but we know surprisingly little about how this works precisely. Which of the attributes of the concept DOG (e.g. BARKS, IS WALKED WITH A LEASH, CARNIVORE, ANIMATE) have to be activated in a given situation to be able to select the word ‘dog’? Are there things we know about dogs that are always activated for naming and others that are only activated in certain contexts or even never? To date, investigations on lexical access in speaking have largely focused on the effects of distractor nouns on the naming latency of a target noun. We have learned that distractors from the same semantic category (e.g. ‘cat’) hinder naming, but associatively related distractors (‘leash’) may facilitate or hinder naming. However, associatively related words can have all kinds of semantic relationships to a target word, and, with few exceptions, the effects of specific semantic relationships other than membership in the same category as the target concept have not been systematically investigated. This special issue aims at moving forward towards a more detailed account of how precisely conceptual information is used to access the lexicon in speaking and what corresponding format of conceptual representations needs to be assumed.

Accessing Conceptual Representations for Speaking

Marianne Gullberg

Time is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and action. Alllanguages have developed rich means to express various facets oftime, such as bare time spans, their position on the time line, ortheir duration. This volume explores what we know about the neuraland cognitive representations of time that speakers can draw on inlanguage. Considers the role time plays as an essential element of humancognition and action, providing important insights to inform andextend current studies of time in language and in languageacquisition Examines the main devices used to encode time in naturallanguage, such as lexical elements, tense, and aspect, and draws onthe latest psychological and neurobiological findings Addresses a range of issues, including: the relationshipbetween temporal language, culture, and thought; the relationshipbetween verb aspect and mental simulations of events; thedevelopment of temporal concepts; time perception; the storage andretrieval of temporal information in autobiographical memory; andneural correlates of tense processing and sequence planning

Peter Indefrey

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