Most printed Chinese words are compounds built from the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, there is a poor understanding of how individual characters contribute to the recognition of compounds. Using a megastudy of Chinese word recognition (Tse et al., 2017), we examined how the lexical decision of existing and novel Chinese compounds was…

Item memory and source memory are different aspects of episodic remembering. To investigate metamemory differences between them, the authors assessed systematic differences between predictions of item memory via Judgments of Learning (JOLs) and source memory via Judgments of Source (JOSs). Schema-based expectations affect JOLs and JOSs…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

Working memory allows us to hold specific pieces of information in an active and easily retrieved state, but what happens to that information during an unexpected interruption between study and test? To answer this question, we used a surprise trial paradigm in which an unexpected event precedes a probe of the observer's memory for a search…

An often overlooked but fundamental issue for any comprehensive model of visual-word recognition is the representation of diacritical vowels: Do diacritical and nondiacritical vowels share their abstract letter representations? Recent research suggests that the answer is "yes" in languages where diacritics indicate suprasegmental…

This research investigated how word production is influenced by six feature-based semantic variables (number of semantic features, intercorrelational density, number of near semantic neighbors, semantic similarity, typicality, and distinctiveness). We simultaneously investigated effects of the six semantic variables on spoken picture naming in a…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

Previous research in alphabetic languages has shown that both position (external, internal) and distance (adjacent, nonadjacent) modulate letter position encoding during reading. To examine the generality of this pattern for a comprehensive model of word recognition and reading, we examined these effects during Chinese reading (i.e., an unspaced…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

While most research on scalar implicature has focused on the lexical scale "some" vs "all," here we investigated an understudied scale formed by two syntactic constructions: categorizations (e.g., "Wilma is a nurse") and comparisons ("Wilma is like a nurse"). An experimental study by Rubio-Fernandez et al.…

Eye tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) have complementary advantages in the study of reading processes. We used eye tracking to extend ERP evidence of Helder et al. (2020) that word-to-text integration at the beginnings and ends of sentences is primarily determined by local text factors (antecedents in a previous sentence) but that…

The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…

Word spacing is important in guiding eye movements during spaced alphabetic reading. Chinese is unspaced and it remains unclear as to how Chinese readers segment and identify words in reading. We conducted two parallel experiments to investigate whether the positional probabilities of the initial and the final characters of a multicharacter word…

Learning part names, such as hands of a clock, can be a challenge for children because of the whole object assumption; that is, a child will assume that a given label refers to the whole object (e.g., a clock) rather than the object part (e.g., hands of a clock). We examined the effect of gaze shifting and deliberate pointing on learning part…

In the traditional conception of working memory for word lists, phonological codes are used primarily, and semantic codes are often discarded or ignored. Yet, other evidence indicates an important role for semantic codes. We carried out a preplanned set of four experiments to determine whether phonological and semantic codes are used similarly or…