Chance favors the prepared mind, said Louis Pasteur. Sometimes, significant breakthroughs occur when we creatively integrate new information, leading to a creative insight or an Aha! moment, while at other times when we fail to use a clue, we remain stuck in our habitual thinking patterns. In this study, we hypothesized that the brain's transient…

In this study, we investigated the accuracy of first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' intuitive judgments of phrasal frequency and collocation strength, and examined the linguistic influences that give rise to these judgments. L1 and L2 speakers of English judged 180 adjective-noun collocations as (a) high frequency, medium…

Sleep fosters the generation of explicit knowledge. Whether sleep also benefits implicit intuitive decisions about underlying patterns is unclear. We examined sleep's role in explicit and intuitive semantic coherence judgments. Participants encoded sets of three words and after a sleep or wake period were required to judge the potential…

There is considerable evidence that incidental vocabulary acquisition through reading accounts for a large portion of the growth in word knowledge for both first (L1) and second (L2) language acquirers. In this paper, we evaluate the Markov Estimate of Semantic Association (MESA) technique for detecting small, incremental gains in vocabulary…