In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…

Contradictory data have been obtained about the processing of singular and plural nouns in Dutch and English. Whereas the Dutch findings point to an influence of the base frequency of the singular and the plural word forms on lexical decision times (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997), the English reaction times depend on the surface frequency of…

The Gricean Maxim of Quantity is believed to govern linguistic performance. Speakers are assumed to provide as much information as required for referent identification and no more, and listeners are believed to expect unambiguous but concise descriptions. In three experiments we examined the extent to which naive participants are sensitive to the…

This study inspected the processes of verifying the current discourse constituent against the referents that it passively cues during reading. It seemed plausible that, after understanding "The customer ate pancakes," the processes of fully understanding "The waiter implied that the customer ate eggs" might resemble those of intentionally…

According to parallel distributed processing (PDP) models of visual word recognition, the speed of semantic coding is modulated by the nature of the orthographic-to-semantic mappings. Consistent with this idea, an ambiguity disadvantage and a relatedness-of-meaning (ROM) advantage have been reported in some word recognition tasks in which semantic…

The role of interference effects in sentence processing has recently begun to receive attention, however whether these effects arise during encoding or retrieval remains unclear. This paper draws on basic memory research to help distinguish these explanations and reports data from an experiment that manipulates the possibility for retrieval…

In three experiments, we tested the hypothesis that those errors in immediate serial recall (ISR) that are attributable to phonological confusability share a locus with segmental errors in normal speech production. In the first two experiments, speech errors were elicited in the repeated paced reading of six-letter lists. The errors mirrored the…

Describes a study of how the interdependence of speech and gesture is realized in the course of motor planning and execution. Do the two systems operate interactively or do they operate in a ballistic or independent fashion? Four experiments showed that, for deictic expressions, the ballistic view is very nearly correct. (SED)

The location of phonological phrase boundaries was shown to affect lexical access by English-learning infants of 10 and 13 months of age. Experiments 1 and 2 used the head-turn preference procedure: infants were familiarized with two bisyllabic words, then presented with sentences that either contained the familiarized words or contained both…

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a…

Four experiments examined the nature of forgetting and the processing--storage relationship during performance on a prevalent working memory task, the reading span test. Using two different presentation paradigms, Experiments 1 and 2 replicated Towse, Hitch, and Hutton's (1998, 2000) finding that the Short-Final lists, which presented a long…

This paper investigates how people resolve syntactic category ambiguities when comprehending sentences. It is proposed that people combine: (a) context-dependent syntactic expectations (top-down statistical information) and (b) context-independent lexical-category frequencies of words (bottom-up statistical information) in order to resolve…

Presents three studies which examined adults' and preschoolers' sensitivity to implicit causality in interpersonal verbs. Findings suggest that the scenes concerning the causes and consequences of interpersonal events can readily be activated in the process of understanding these verbs. This finding holds true for both preschoolers and adults.…

Two experiments investigated naming performance for items with and without digraphs. Both experiments compared performance for Regular Consistent, Regular Inconsistent and Exception words. Experiment 1 also compared nonwords with Non-Existent Bodies to those with existing Consistent and Inconsistent Bodies. Naming was slower for nonwords…