Mind maps are often used to help readers process texts, but their effectiveness is empirically under-investigated. This study explores whether the use of mind maps presented either before or after the text can prime successful selective processing strategies related to the text topic structure. Differences in performance outcomes (i.e., memory and…

When reasoning about time, English-speaking adults often invoke a "mental timeline" stretching from left to right. Although the direction of the timeline varies across cultures, the tendency to represent time as a line has been argued to be ubiquitous and primitive. On this hypothesis, we might predict that children also spontaneously…

The statistical structure of a given language likely drives our sensitivity to words' morphological structure. The current work begins to investigate to what degree morphological processing effects observed in visual word recognition can be attributed to statistical regularities between orthography and semantics in English, without any prior…

New linguistic information must be integrated into our existing language system. Using a novel experimental task that incorporates a syntactic priming paradigm into artificial language learning, we investigated how new grammatical regularities and words are learned. This innovation allowed us to control the language input the learner received,…

We report on two experiments that investigated the acquisition of the Tagalog symmetrical voice system, a typologically rare feature of Western Austronesian languages in which there are more than one basic transitive construction and no preference for agents to be syntactic subjects. In the experiments, 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old Tagalog-speaking…

The goal of this study was to examine hemispheric asymmetries in episodic memory for discourse. Access to previously comprehended information is essential for mapping incoming information to representations of "who did what to whom" in memory. An item-priming-in-recognition paradigm was used to examine differences in how the hemispheres represent…

Numbers are ubiquitous in life. At the same time, the symbols for numbers are highly abstract and their visual appearance does not carry any direct relation to their magnitude. This poses an important question for researchers interested in how numbers are mentally processed. Whereas research on numeric cognition suggests that culturally based…

Bilingual speakers must acquire the phonemic inventory of 2 languages and need to recognize spoken words cross-linguistically; a demanding job potentially made even more difficult due to dialectal variation, an intrinsic property of speech. The present work examines how bilinguals perceive second language (L2) accented speech and where…