There is a general consensus in theories of human speech recognition that humans engage in predictive processing during online speech processing. There are also claims that predictive processing indicates the operation of a predictive coding (PC) mechanism (Rao & Ballard, 1999). Formally, PC is a generative model where top-down signals consist…

Reading development involves several changes in orthographic processing. A key question is, "how does the coding of letters develops in children learning to read?" Masked priming effects of transposition and substitution primes have been taken to index the importance of letter position and identity coding. Somewhat contradicting results…

Novel phonotactic constraints can be acquired by hearing or speaking syllables that follow a novel constraint. When learned from hearing syllables, these newly learned constraints generalize to syllables that were not experienced during training. However, generalization of phonotactic learning to novel syllables has never been persuasively…

Cognitive processes and mechanisms underlying different forms of priming were investigated using a diffusion model approach. In a series of 6 experiments, effects of prime-target associations and of a semantic and affective categorical match of prime and target were analyzed for different tasks. Significant associative and categorical priming…

Cross-language priming is a widely used experimental paradigm in psycholinguistics to study how bilinguals' two languages are represented and organized. Researchers have observed a number of interesting patterns from the priming effects of both translation equivalents and semantically related word pairs across languages. In this study, we…

In a syntactic priming paradigm, three- and four-year-old children and adults described transitive events after hearing thematically and lexically unrelated active and short passive prime descriptions. Both groups were more likely to produce full passive descriptions ("the king is being scratched by the tiger") following short passive primes ("the…

Combining regulatory focus theory (Higgins, 1997) and novelty categorization theory (Forster, Marguc, & Gillebaart, 2010), we predicted that novel stimuli would be more positively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security and that familiar stimuli would be more negatively evaluated when focused on growth as compared with security.…

How people process and represent magnitude has often been studied using number comparison tasks. From the results of these tasks, a comparison distance effect (CDE) is generated, showing that it is easier to discriminate two numbers that are numerically further apart (e.g., 2 and 8) compared with numerically closer numbers (e.g., 6 and 8).…

In the present article, we report 3 experiments using the odd-man-out variant of the implicit priming paradigm, aimed at determining the role played by phonological information during the handwriting process. Participants were asked to write a small set of words learned in response to prompts. Within each block, response words could share initial…

Visual word identification requires readers to code the identity and order of the letters in a word and match this code against previously learned codes. Current models of this lexical matching process posit context-specific letter codes in which letter representations are tied to either specific serial positions or specific local contexts (e.g.,…

To compare abstract structural and lexicalist accounts of syntactic processes in sentence formulation, we examined the effectiveness of nonidiomatic and idiomatic phrasal verbs in inducing structural generalizations. Three experiments made use of a syntactic priming paradigm in which participants recalled sentences they had read in rapid serial…