Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…

Word-segmentation, that is, the extraction of words from fluent speech, is one of the first problems language learners have to master. It is generally believed that statistical processes, in particular those tracking "transitional probabilities" (TPs), are important to word-segmentation. However, there is evidence that word forms are stored in…

Enhanced serial recall for linguistically familiar material is usually attributed to a process of item redintegration. The possibility tested here is that familiarity influences memory at the sequence level by enhancing the fluency with which items may be assembled into sequences. Experiment 1 showed that with practice, serial recall of nonwords…

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a…

The "weaker links" hypothesis proposes that bilinguals are disadvantaged relative to monolinguals on speaking tasks because they divide frequency-of-use between two languages. To test this proposal, we contrasted the effects of increased word use associated with monolingualism, language dominance, and increased age on picture naming times. In two…

When people perform a recognition memory task, they may avail themselves of different forms of information. For example, they may recall specific learning episodes, or rely on general feelings of familiarity. Although subjective familiarity is often valid, it can make people vulnerable to memory illusions. Research using verbal materials has shown…

In two experiments, naive participants took turns telling each other to click on a target picture while gaze was monitored. Critical trials included a "contrast" picture that differed from the target only in size. In both experiments, the timing of speakers' fixations on the contrast predicted whether the contrast was encoded in a phrase with a…

Infants prefer to listen to happy speech. To assess influences of speech affect on early lexical processing, 7.5- and 10.5-month-old infants were familiarized with one word spoken with happy affect and another with neutral affect and then tested on recognition of these words in fluent passages. Infants heard all passages either with happy affect…