Purpose: Adults recognize words that are acquired during childhood more quickly than words acquired during adulthood. This is known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. The AoA effect, according to the integrated account, manifests in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing and in tasks with arbitrary input-output mapping. Compound…

Naming semantically related images results in progressively slower responses as more images are named. There is considerable documentation in adults of this phenomenon, known as cumulative semantic interference. Few studies have focused on this phenomenon in children. The present research investigated cumulative semantic interference effects in…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

Perturbations to the speech articulators induced by frequently using an interfering object during infancy (i.e., pacifier) might shape children's language experience and the building of conceptual representations. Seventy-one typically developing third graders performed a semantic categorization task with abstract, concrete and emotional words.…

The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in "J Mem Lang" 33: 149-174, 1994) or the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in "J Mem Lang" 51(1), 1-22, 2004)…

The current study examined how morpho-semantic processing of derivational morphology develops from later childhood through adolescence to adulthood in Finnish. Finnish is a synthetic language rich both in derivation and inflection. It has been suggested that children gradually acquire the ability to process morphologically complex word structures.…

This study investigated the effects of the Arabic root in the visual word recognition process among young readers in order to explore its role in reading acquisition and its development within the structure of the Arabic mental lexicon. We examined cross-modal priming of words that were derived from the same root of the target…

We analyzed the differential processing of nouns and verbs in a lexical decision task. Moderate and high-frequency nouns and verbs were compared. The characteristics of our material were specified at the formal level (number of letters and syllables, number of homographs, orthographic neighbors, frequency and age of acquisition), and at the…

Learning a new word involves integration with existing lexical knowledge. Previous work has shown that sleep-associated memory consolidation processes are important for the engagement of novel items in lexical competition. In 3 experiments we used spaced exposure regimes to investigate memory for novel words and whether lexical integration can…

In the present study, the development of semantic categorization and its relationship with reading was investigated across Dutch primary grade students. Three Exemplar-level tasks (Experiment 1) and two Superordinate-level tasks (Experiment 2) with different types of distracters (phonological, semantic and perceptual) were administered to assess…

Word age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects reading. The mapping hypothesis predicts AoA effects when input--output mappings are arbitrary. In Spanish, the orthography-to-phonology mappings required for word naming are consistent; therefore, no AoA effects are expected. Nevertheless, AoA effects have been found, motivating the present investigation of…

The experiment investigated the benefit to second language (L2) sentence comprehension of priming word meanings with brief visual exposure to first language (L1) translation equivalents. Native English speakers learning Mandarin evaluated the validity of aurally presented Mandarin sentences. For selected words in half of the sentences there was…

We investigate how L1 phonology and semantics affect processing of interlingual homographs by manipulating language context before, and auditory input during, a visual experiment in the L2. Three experiments contained German-English homograph primes ("gift" = German "poison") in English sentences and was performed by German (L1) learners of…

Studies analyzing children's response time to detect word targets revealed that six-year-olds and younger children generally did not show the response time advantage for accented target words which adult listeners show, providing support for the argument that the processing advantage for accented words reflects the semantic role of accent as an…