In experiments investigating the processing of true and false negative sentences, it is often reported that polarity interacts with truth-value, in the sense that true sentences lead to faster reaction times than false sentences in affirmative conditions whereas the same does not hold for negative sentences. Various reasons for this difference…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

Using the blocked-translation paradigm with healthy participants, we examined Crutch and Warrington's hypothesis that concrete and abstract concepts are organized by distinct principles: concrete concepts by semantic similarities and abstract ones by associations. In three experiments we constructed two types of experimental blocking (similar…

This dissertation uses the processing of anaphoric relations to probe how linguistic information is encoded in and retrieved from memory during real-time sentence comprehension. More specifically, the dissertation attempts to resolve a tension between the demands of a linguistic processor implemented in a general-purpose cognitive architecture and…

Event-related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an…

One of the questions frequently asked in second language (L2) lexical research is how L2 learners' patterns of lexical organization compare to those of native speakers (NSs). A growing body of research addresses this question by using word association (WA) tests. However, little research has been done on the role of language proficiency in the…

Examines the effects of having both a semantic and a superficial perceptual category for organizing lists of words in free recall. Discusses the effect of individual difference characteristics, such as personality characteristics of the subject, on the results. (EKN)

Four experiments are reported in which relations of semantic distance to response latencies in similarity judgments, to reaction times in a same-different classification task, and to proximity of recall in a free recall task were investigated. (Author/RM)

A study is reported in which pairs of synonyms, antonyms, coordinates, and super super-subordinates were presented dichotically to university students. After each pair the subject reported what he heard. In one condition the two members of a pair were presented simultaneously, and in another they were presented sequentially. (Author/RM)

Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have…

Nonverbal context is important in the language acquisition process. The present study compares different amounts and ordering of pictorial context with respect to their effect on learning word-referent relations in a second language. Twenty-five monolingual English-speaking high school students were shown twenty Spanish sentences and pictures of…