The proposals that (a) nonword repetition and word learning both rely on phonological storage and (b) both are multiply determined are two of the major foci of Gathercole's (2006) Keynote Article, which marshals considerable evidence in support of each. In my view, the importance of these proposals cannot be overstated: these two notions go to the…

Dijkstra and van Heuven have made an admirable attempt to develop a new model of bilingual memory, the BIA+. Their article presents a clear and well-reasoned theoretical justification of their model, followed by a description of their model. The BIA+ is, as the name implies, an extension of the Bilingual Interactive Activation (BIA) model…

Presents study designed to further evaluate the nature of spoken-language comprehension under conditions of varying perceptual load by manipulating different comprehension conditions. Investigates effects of subsidiary task paradigms on course of simultaneous comprehension processing. Argues that these can only be used when accompanied with probes…

Proposes an alternative model of language comprehension regarding how people understand idioms in which literal meanings are systematically used to constrain the use and variation of conventional idioms and to generate novel idiom variance. Presents three experiments on how people process variant idioms. (SR)

Proposes a model to account for the uses to which the individual puts formulaic language, and specifically, what determines the choice for that person of a holistic or analytic processing strategy at any given moment. Formulaic language is used to describe a phenomenon that encompasses various types of wordstrings that appear to be stored and…

Reports lexical priming effects for two inconsistently spelled segments in Italian words. Finds that Italian, despite its regular orthography, is not spelled purely nonlexically. Argues that a dual-route model of spelling production can be applied to Italian. (NH)

Presents principles of dialog cooperativity derived from a corpus of task-oriented spoken human-machine dialog. Analyzes the "corpus" to produce a set of dialog design principles intended to prevent users from having to initiate clarification and repair metacommunication that the system would not understand. Proposes a "more…

We present a new model for lexical decision, REM-LD, that is based on REM theory (e.g., Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997). REM-LD uses a principled (i.e., Bayes' rule) decision process that simultaneously considers the diagnosticity of the evidence for the 'WORD' response and the 'NONWORD' response. The model calculates the odds ratio that the presented…

Consistent with converging experimental evidence, we assume that foveal information is initially split across the two cerebral hemispheres. We have previously presented the SERIOL model of letter-position coding, which specifies how the resulting two halves of a letter string are integrated into an abstract representation of letter order. This…

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The…

In textbooks, foreign (second) language reading proficiency is often evaluated through comprehension questions. In case, authentic texts are used as reading material, such questions should be prepared by teachers. However, preparing appropriate questions may be a very demanding task for teachers. This paper introduces a method for automatically…

Discusses the cognitive processes involved in constructing linear orderings from pairwise relationships of information items. Examines the effects that sentence types used in presenting information have on these processes, and tests two models designed to clarify the acquisition of spatial knowledge and the processing of locative and comparative…

Investigated the processes of lexical retrieval during the production of adjectival noun phrases. Argues that the existence of a frequency effect for the noun during noun phrase production restricts the various combinations of assumptions that speech production models can hold simultaneously. Possible implications of the additivity of the effects…

Hypothesizes a resonance process in which concepts and propositions in the discourse resonate in response to related elements in the current sentence, initiating a process that makes available a subset of the information in the representation. Reviews research; presents explicit assumptions about the discourse representation; and describes results…

Presents results from a self-paced reading experiment in Japanese investigating attachment preferences for relative clauses to three ensuing potential nominal heads. Results are discussed in light of two types of parsing models. (Author/VWL)