Do the production and interpretation of patterns of plural forms in noun-noun compounds reveal the workings of innate constraints that govern morphological processing? The results of previous studies on compounding have been taken to support a number of important theoretical claims: first, that there are fundamental differences in the way that…

This work investigates how we process and represent event duration in on-line language comprehension. Specifically, it examines how events of different duration are processed and what type of knowledge underlies their representations. Studies 1-4 examined verbs and phrases in different contexts. They showed that durative events took longer to…

A principle of efficient language production based on information theoretic considerations is proposed: Uniform Information Density predicts that language production is affected by a preference to distribute information uniformly across the linguistic signal. This prediction is tested against data from syntactic reduction. A single multilevel…

For over 15 years, masked phonological priming effects have been offered as evidence that phonology plays a leading role in visual word recognition. The existence of these effects--along with their theoretical implications--has, however, been disputed. The authors present three sources of evidence relevant to an assessment of the existence and…

The stochastic interactive activation and competition (SIAC) model of perception is presented and tested using several data sets from previous research. The asymptotic predictions of the SIAC model are compared with those of the fuzzy logical model of perception (FLMP). Evidence favoring the FLMP is reviewed. (SLD)

All languages rely to some extent on word order to signal relational information. Why? We address this question by exploring communicative and cognitive factors that could lead to a reliance on word order. In Study 1, adults were asked to describe scenes to another using their hands and not their mouths. The question was whether this home-made…