Introduction to the Special Edition on Language and Cognition: Patterns of Linguistic Knowledge and Processing as a ‘Big Box Modules’ Mechanism

I am pleased to introduce this collection of scholarly articles focused on various issues concerning language and cognition. This edition is special in light of the fact that it bears on one of most important questions regarding the interface problems explored with respect to underlying knowledge as well as real-time interpretations. In particular, the papers published here address the theme of how speakers and hearers of various languages such as Cayuga, English, Japanese, and Korean interpret and structure morphological forms and categories in the real-time and underlying mechanisms, including bound morphemes associated with sub-syllabic units, verb modals, gender features, and numerical classifiers, on one hand, and free morphemes such as nouns and verbs, on the other. In their paper “The role of sub-syllabic units in the visual word recognition of Korean monosyllabic words: A masked priming study,” Kim & Bolger (2016) report on evidence for a left-branching model of subsyllabic structure in visual word recognition in Korean using a masked priming paradigm. It was found in their study that Korean-speaking subjects preferred a left-branching body-coda sub-syllabic structure to a right branching onset-rime structure when processing monosyllabic words in written language. No preference was observed, on the other hand, for larger sub-syllabic units beyond the phoneme, this finding seemingly suggesting