Understanding and the Norm of Explanation

I propose and defend the hypothesis that understanding is the norm of (the speech act of) explanation. On this proposal, an explanation should express understanding. I call this the understanding account of explanation. The understanding account is supported by social and introspective observations. It is also supported by the relationship between knowledge and understanding, on the one hand, and assertion and explanation, on the other.     

To what extent is Goddard's theory about associations and emotionally arousing stimuli?: Comment on Goddard, 1991

This comment notes that in arguing for his US-US associative theory of habituation to emotionally arousing stimuli, Goddard (1991) cites, as supportive evidence, experiments that, in fact, are either not associative, or do not involve emotionally arousing (or unconditional) stimuli. Such an overelastic use of these basic terms brings into some question whether Goddard's theory is genuinely testable, i.e., open to refutation through contrary evidence.     

Syllable-internal structure and the sonority hierarchy: Differential evidence from lexical decision,naming, and reading

Treiman (1983) and others have argued that spoken syllables are best characterized not as linear strings of phonemes, but as hierarchically organized units consisting of an onset (initial consonant or consonant cluster) and a rime (the vowel and any following consonants) and that the rime is further divided into a peak or nucleus (the vowel) and a coda (the final consonants). It has also been argued that the sonority (or vowel-likeness) of the consonant closest to the peak, which is a function of its phonetic class, may have an effect on the strength of boundaries determined by the hierarchical division of the syllable (e.g., Treiman, 1984). We examined the evidence for syllable-internal structure and for sonority in two experiments that employed visually presented stimuli and lexical decision, naming, and reading tasks. Our results provide support for the breakdown of the rime into a peak and a coda and for an effect of the sonority of the postvocalic consonant on that break. This pattern occurred only in our lexical decision tasks, so the effect is assumed to be postlexical. We did not find an effect of the onset-rime boundary, perhaps because of an unanticipated effect of word frequency. Our results are discussed in terms of phonological coding in short-term memory.