Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

The aim of this study was to examine processing interactions between segmental (consonant, vowel) and suprasegmental (tone) dimensions of Mandarin Chinese. Using a speeded classification paradigm, processing interactions were examined between each pair of dimensions. Listeners were asked to attend to one dimension while ignoring the variation…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…

Research has shown that the comprehension of definite referring expressions (e.g., "the triangle") tends to be faster for "given" (previously mentioned) referents, compared with new referents. This has been attributed to the presence of given information in the consciousness of discourse participants (e.g., Chafe, 1994) suggesting that given is…

Using data on the pattern of occurrence of words embedded in the polysyllabic words of the English vocabulary, argues that recognition and segmentation of continuous speech appear to be based on competition between lexical hypotheses. It is concluded that lexical competition is an essential component of models of continuous speech recognition. (53…

This paper examines several ways in which the morphological structure of words might enter their lexical representation or processing. It addresses possibilities such as representational economy, efficiency of processing, and module-external motivations. (55 references) (MDM)

The definition of "orthographic neighbors" in word recognition research was analyzed in two experiments using a variety of the three-field technique. Only orthographically related pairs differing from the prime by the third or fourth letter showed inhibitory relatedness effects compared with unrelated word condition. Results suggest…

Reviews research that supports the view that readers strip prefixed words of their prefix and lexically assess the words on the basis of their stem. An experiment using real and nonword stems found that nonwords that are considered to be stem morphemes are treated as being more wordlike than those that are not. (36 references) (MDM)

Two experiments assessed the performance of subjects on prefixed nonwords resulting from the incorrect combination of a prefix and a real word in Italian. The results support the view that prefixes may be represented as units of access or representation in the mental lexicon. (41 references) (MDM)

The recognition of multimorphemic French words was investigated using a procedure that allowed the position of first fixation of the eye to be manipulated and gaze durations to be recorded. (37 references) (Author/LB)

Notes that prior assumptions that writing requires phonological mediation has been questioned due to the observation that on tasks requiring the production of spoken and written responses on the same naming attempt, some aphasic subjects produce different words. The data suggest that phonological and orthographic word forms can interact. (53…

The traditional view of the lexical system stipulates word-specific representations and separate pathways for regular and exception words, while an alternative approach views lexical knowledge as developing from general principles applied to mappings among distributed representations of written and spoken words and their meanings. In this study,…

Notes that, in Spanish, there is empirical support for the notion that, in visual word recognition, the syllables initially activate competing lexical candidates. Presents experiments intended to explore these inhibitory processes and discusses the applicability of the data to a dual-route model and the time course of syllabic processing. (55…

Examined the word-letter phenomenon using computational studies that focus on the contextual guidance of learning and processing in multistream nets. (32 references) (CK)

Investigated the time course of activation of the mental representations of word meanings in a series of three cross-modal priming experiments. The study interprets the data with respect to both localist and distributed implementations of the cohort model. Results indicate that if early competition among simultaneously activated meanings exists,…