Investigated the influence of morphologically complex and simple words on the production of morphologically complex and simple picture names in five picture-word interference studies. Two variants of picture-word interference were employed to separate morphological from semantic and phonological effects. (Author/VWL)

Presents model describing adult learning of morphosyntax in a novel language where frequency and regularity are factorially combined. Accuracy and latency data show frequency effects for both regular/irregular forms early in acquisition process; as learning progresses, frequency effect on regular items diminishes but remains for irregular items.…

In two masked priming experiments with Chinese characters, orthographic priming effects were observed in lexical decision and naming tasks despite the fact that the primes were phonologically unrelated to the target characters. Data suggest that the recovery of lexical information for Chinese characters does not depend on the prior activation of…

Investigated whether: (1) the role of phonological and orthographic activation differs during semantic processing of Korean Hangul and Hanja and (2) proficiency in Korean Hanja would affect the way phonology is used in comprehension of Hanja characters. Overall, results indicate both language proficiency and script difference can affect the…

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples…

This paper presents a discussion of the constraints imposed on lexicalisation during production by language-specific patterns, such as whether words exist in a language to describe a given event and whether language-specific syntactic and phonological information correlates with semantic properties. First, we introduce in broad strokes relevant…

Presents a model of high-dimensional context space, the Hyperspace Analogue to Language (HAL), with a series of simulations modelling human empirical results. Proposes that HAL's context space can be used to provide a basic categorization of semantic and grammatical concepts; model certain aspects of morphological ambiguity in verbs; and provide…

In three experiments, readers were presented with garden-path sentences containing reciprocal verbs, and their eye movements were monitored. Results demonstrate that information from the reciprocal verb influenced the earliest stages of syntactic processing. (29 references) (Author/CK)

Reports a reanalysis of the data on surface and deep anaphors reported by Tanenhaus and Carlson and two experiments based on the reanalysis. The parallelism effects for deep anaphors were eliminated following short passives but not full passives. The results support the claim that deep and surface anaphors access different types of…

Studied "pre-ambiguity" plausibility information, information about verb argument structure frequencies, and "post-ambiguity" constraints in undergraduates. All three types of constraints were helpful in the resolution of ambiguities. Ambiguity resolution becomes more difficult as the competitor interpretations becomes stronger. Study items are…

When presented with stimuli that contain illegal consonant clusters, Japanese listeners tend to hear an illusory vowel that makes their perception conform to the phonotactics of the language. Assesses an alternate hypothesis that this illusion is due to a top-down lexical effect. (Author/VWL)

Twenty-four children with dyslexia (aged 7;7 to 12;1) and twenty-four age-matched controls named pictures aloud while hearing nonsense syllables either phonologically related (i.e., part of) or unrelated to the target picture name. Compared with controls, dyslexics had slower reaction times overall and, for low frequency items, the degree of…

Reviews the eye-movement paradigm and refers to recent experiments applying the paradigm to issues of spoken word recognition (e.g., lexical competitor effects), syntactic processing, reference resolution, focus, as well as issues in cross-modality integration that are central to evaluating the modularity hypothesis. (Seven references) (Author/CK)

Notes that speech intelligibility has traditionally been measured by presenting words mixed in noise to listeners for identification at different signal-to-noise ratios. The words are produced in isolation or in sequence contexts where the predictability of specific items can be varied. Emphasizes that the technique provides valuable data about…

Two experiments with French university students investigated whether the visual recognition of short prefixed and suffixed words was affected by their morphological structure. Results indicated that encoding times were sensitive to the lexical status of the unit, with a significant benefit occurring only when the subword unit corresponded to the…