The animacy effect refers to the memory advantage of words denoting animate beings over words denoting inanimate objects. Remembering animate beings may serve important evolutionary functions, but the cognitive mechanism underlying the animacy effect has remained elusive. According to the richness-of-encoding account, animate words stimulate…

Interpreting a sentence can be characterized as a rational process in which comprehenders integrate linguistic input with top-down knowledge (e.g., plausibility). One type of evidence for this is that comprehenders sometimes reinterpret sentences to arrive at interpretations that conflict with the original language input. Does this reflect a…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

This study traced different types of distractor effects in the picture-word interference (PWI) task across repeated naming. Starting point was a PWI study by Kurtz et al. (2018). It reported that naming a picture (e.g., of a duck) was slowed down by a distractor word phonologically related to an alternative picture name from a different taxonomic…

Network analyses of the phonological mental lexicon show that words are clustered into communities and phonologically dissimilar words can be connected to each other through distant paths. Here we investigate whether behavioral traces of the large-scale structure of the phonological lexicon can be obtained. Participants listened to pairs of spoken…

Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different…

We studied the role of discourse coherence relations on structure formulation in sentence production by examining whether a connective, an essential signal of coherence relations, modulates the tendency for speakers to reuse sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). We further examined three possible modulating factors: the type of…

Using eye-tracking, we examined whether overspecification hinders or facilitates referent selection and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual display while their…

The Chinese writing system is different from English in that individual words both comprise one to four characters and are not separated by clear word boundaries (e.g., interword spaces). These differences raise the question of how readers of Chinese know where to move their eyes to support efficient lexical processing? The widely accepted…

Antilocality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the antilocality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. To test whether the principles of…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

The question of whether lexical decomposition is driven by semantic transparency in the lexical processing of morphologically complex words, such as compounds, remains controversial. Prior research on compound processing has predominantly examined visual processing. Focusing instead on spoken word word recognition, the present study examined the…

Arai et al. (2007) showed that structural priming in the comprehension of English dative sentences only occurred when the verb was repeated between prime and target, suggesting a lexically-dependent mechanism of structure prediction. However, a recent study in Mandarin comprehension found abstract (verb-independent) structural priming and such…

How quantifiers are represented in the human mind is still a topic of intense debate. Seminal studies have addressed the issue of how a subclass of quantifiers, that is, number words, is spatially coded displaying the Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes (SNARC) effect; yet, none of these studies have explored the spatial representation…

The phenomenological experience of lexical retrieval often involves repeated, active attempts to retrieve phonologically and/or semantically related information. However, the influence of these multiple retrieval attempts on subsequent lexical retrieval is presently unknown. We investigated the influence of passively viewing or actively retrieving…