The present study examined language production skills in Parkinson's disease (PD) patients. A unique cued sentence generation task was created in order to reduce demands on memory and attention. Differences in sentence production abilities according to disease severity and cognitive impairments were assessed. Language samples were obtained from 20…

Three experiments examined the processes mediating rat serial pattern learning for rule-consistent versus rule-violating pattern elements ("violation elements"). In all three experiments, rats were trained to press retractable levers in a circular array in a specific sequence for brain-stimulation reward (BSR). Experiment 1 examined the role of…

Spanish-English bilingual lexical organization was investigated using masked cognate and non-cognate priming with the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, three groups of bilinguals (Spanish dominant, English dominant and Balanced) and a single group of beginning bilinguals (Spanish) were tested with Spanish and English targets primed by…

In the present study, morphological structure processing of Chinese compounds was explored using a visual priming lexical decision task among 21 Hong Kong college students. Two compounding structures were compared. The first type was the subordinate, in which one morpheme modifies the other (e.g., [image omitted] ["laam4 kau4",…

This study examined morphological processing of inflected and derived words by children in Grades 4, 6, and 8. Participants were shown root forms and inflected, derived, and orthographic control items (e.g., "harm", "harmed", "harmful", or "harmony"), followed by a fragment completion task (e.g., completing "h a_ _"). Participants were equally…

The main objective of this article is to provide new evidence regarding the impact of bilingualism on the attentional system. We approach this goal by assessing the effects of bilingualism on the executive and orienting networks of attention. In Experiment 1, we compared young bilingual and monolingual adults in a numerical version of the Stroop…

On the basis of consistently finding significant overall costs to the ongoing task with a single salient target event, Smith, Hunt, McVay, and McConnell (2007) concluded that preparatory attentional processes are required for prospective remembering and that spontaneous retrieval does not occur. In this article, we argue that overall costs are not…

Objects are often remembered with their locations, which is an important aspect of event memory. Despite the well-known involvement of the hippocampus in event memory, detailed intrahippocampal mechanisms are poorly understood. In particular, no experimental evidence has been provided in support of the role of the dentate gyrus (DG) in…

In 3 experiments, we examined Perruchet, Cleeremans, and Destrebecqz's (2006) double dissociation of cued reaction time (RT) and target expectancy. In this design, participants receive a tone on every trial and are required to respond as quickly as possible to a square presented on 50% of those trials (a partial reinforcement schedule).…

Can simple motor actions affect how efficiently people retrieve emotional memories, and influence what they choose to remember? In Experiment 1, participants were prompted to retell autobiographical memories with either positive or negative valence, while moving marbles either upward or downward. They retrieved memories faster when the direction…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…

Bilinguals appear to have shared syntactic representations for similar constructions between languages but retain distinct representations for noncognate translation-equivalents (Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007). We inquire whether bilinguals have more integrated representations of cognate translation-equivalents. To investigate…

In laboratory experiments, infants are sensitive to patterns of visual features that co-occur (e.g., Fiser & Aslin, 2002). Once infants learn the statistical regularities, however, what do they do with that knowledge? Moreover, which patterns do infants learn in the cluttered world outside of the laboratory? Across 4 experiments, we show that…

In three experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that an inhibitory priming effect occurred when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme (/bagar/-/bagaj/). In contrast, a facilitatory priming effect was observed when the primes…

Task analysis in human performance technology is used to determine how human performance can be well supported with training, job aids, environmental changes, and other interventions. Early work by Miller (1953) and Gilbert (1969, 1974) addressed cue processing in task execution and recommended cue descriptions in task analysis. Modern task…