Language helps people communicate and think. Precise and accurate language would seem best suited to achieve these goals. But a close look at the way people actually talk reveals an abundance of apparent imprecision in the form of metaphor: ideas are ‘light bulbs’, crime is a ‘virus’, and cancer is an ‘enemy’ in a ‘war’. […]

Abstract Grammatical categories represent implicit knowledge, and it is not known if such abstract linguistic knowledge can be continuously grounded in real-life experiences, nor is it known what types of mental states can be simulated. A former study showed that attention bias in peripersonal space (PPS) affects reaction times in grammatical congruency judgments of nominal […]

Abstract This article describes a left-corner parser implemented within a cognitively and neurologically motivated distributed model of memory. This parser’s approach to syntactic ambiguity points toward a tidy account both of surprisal effects and of locality effects, such as the parsing breakdowns caused by center embedding. The model provides an algorithmic-level (Marr, 1982) account of […]