Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

Purpose: Speech recognition relies upon a listener's successful pairing of the acoustic--phonetic details from the bottom-up input with top-down linguistic processing of the incoming speech stream. When the speech is spectrally degraded, such as through a cochlear implant (CI), this role of top-down processing is poorly understood. This study…

Two experiments were undertaken to evaluate the influence of automatic semantic processing of pictures on word judgments. Results indicated that (1) perceptual factors influence responding in these types of tasks, (2) picture processing can facilitate word processing in some circumstances, and (3) incompatible background pictures can interfere…