Numerous developmental findings suggest that infants and toddlers engage predictive processing during language comprehension. However, a significant limitation of this research is that associative (bottom-up) and predictive (top-down) explanations are not readily differentiated. Following adult studies that varied predictiveness relative to…

Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between "apple," "juicy," and "pear." These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become…

Research has shown that adults' lexical-semantic representations are surprisingly malleable. For instance, the interpretation of ambiguous words (e.g., bark) is influenced by experience such that recently encountered meanings become more readily available (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013). However, the mechanism underlying this word-meaning priming effect…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between processing lexical and speaker-specific information in spoken word recognition. The specific question is whether repetition and semantic/associative priming is reduced when the prime and target are produced by different speakers. In Experiment 1, the prime and target were repeated…

Current models of word-meaning access typically assume that lexical-semantic representations of ambiguous words (e.g., 'bark of the dog/tree') reach a relatively stable state in adulthood, with only the relative frequencies of meanings and immediate sentence context determining meaning preference. However, recent experience also affects…

The effect of speaker variability on accessing the form and meaning of spoken words was evaluated in two short-term priming experiments. In the repetition priming experiment, participants listened to repeated or unrelated prime-target pairs, in which the prime and target were produced by the same speaker or different speakers. The results showed…

Mediated priming refers to the faster word recognition of a target (e.g., milk) following presentation of a prime (e.g., pasture) that is related indirectly via a connecting "mediator" (e.g., cow). Association strength may be an important factor in whether mediated priming occurs prospectively (with target activation prior to its presentation) or…

The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an event-related potential (ERP) norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a…

Word association responses in first-language (L1) Spanish and second-language (L2) English were investigated by means of response latencies and types of associative response produced. The primary aims were to establish whether (a) some response types are produced more often or faster than others, (b) participants' L2 response time profiles mirror…