This article examines how semantic memory processes influence the items that are considered by decision makers in memory-based preferential choice. Experiments 1A through 1C ask participants to list the choice items that come to their minds while deliberating in a variety of everyday choice settings. These experiments use semantic space models to…

In typical development, listeners can use semantic content of verbs to facilitate incremental language processing--a skill that is associated with existing language skills. Studies of children with ASD have not identified an association between incremental language processing in semantically-constraining contexts and language skills, perhaps…

Children and adults use established global knowledge to generate real-time linguistic predictions, but less is known about how listeners generate predictions in circumstances that semantically conflict with long-standing event knowledge. We explore these issues in adults and 5- to 10-year-old children using an eye-tracked sentence comprehension…

Traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) are heterogeneous in nature and commonly result in deficits to multiple areas of cognition including memory, linguistic processing, and executive functioning. For individuals with TBI, returning to everyday activities can be a challenge with their quality of life reduced by a variety of impairments including…

Research on Japanese reading has generally indicated that processing of the logographic script Kanji primarily involves whole-word lexical processing and follows a semantics-to-phonology route, while the two phonological scripts Hiragana and Katakana (collectively called Kana) are processed via a sub-lexical route, and more in a…

What is the relation between factual conditionals: "If A happened then B happened," and counterfactual conditionals: "If A had happened then B would have happened?" Some theorists propose quite different semantics for the two. In contrast, the theory of mental models and its computer implementation interrelates them. It…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

In 2 experiments, eye tracking methodology was used to assess on-line lexical, syntactic and semantic processing in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In Experiment 1, lexical identification was examined by manipulating the frequency of target words. Both typically developed (TD) and ASD readers showed normal frequency effects, suggesting that the…

Research utilizing morphological priming has found that L2 speakers show facilitation from derived L2 primes, which could suggest morphological processing during derived L2 word recognition. However, the process of L2 derived word recognition is still poorly understood, with some arguing that the observed priming effects may not be morphological…

Toddlerhood is marked by advances in several lexico-semantic skills, including improvements in the size and structure of the lexicon and increased efficiency in lexical processing. This project seeks to delineate how early changes in vocabulary size and vocabulary structure support lexical processing (Experiment 1), and how these three skills…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

Semantic illusions are recognition errors that occur when an individual fails to notice that information contradicts their prior knowledge (Barton & Sanford, 1993; Erickson & Mattson, 1981). For example, after hearing the question, "If a plane crashes while flying over state lines, where should the survivors be buried?" many…

An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van…

The current study investigated language development of children residing in institutional care (IC) in Russia, compared to peers raised by biological family care (BFC). We used standardized behavioral testing (Preschool Language Scale-5, McArthur CDI), and an event-related potential picture-word matching paradigm. Children in IC significantly…