We report 3 experiments that examined whether presentation of a spoken word creates an attentional bottleneck associated with lexical processing in the absence of a response to that word. A spoken word and a visual stimulus were presented in quick succession, but only the visual stimulus demanded a response. Response times to the visual stimulus…

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based…

Background: Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy, is very common in daily language use. Its underlying cognitive processes are sometimes viewed as lying at the interface of language and thought. Williams syndrome, which is a rare genetic developmental disorder, provides an opportunity to study this interface because individuals with…