The vast majority of word meanings are learned simply by extracting them from context rather than by rote memorization or explicit instruction. Although this skill is remarkable, little is known about the brain mechanisms involved. In the present study, ERPs were recorded as participants read stories in which pseudowords were presented multiple…

Early acquired words are processed faster than later acquired words in lexical and semantic tasks. Demonstrating such age of acquisition (AoA) effects beyond reasonable doubt, and then investigating those effects empirically, is complicated by the natural correlation between AoA and other word properties such as frequency and imageability. In an…

When unimpaired participants name pictures quickly, they produce many perseverations that bear a semantic relation to the target, especially when the pictures are blocked by category. Evidence suggests that the temporal properties of these "semantic perseverations" may differ from typical lexical perseverations in aphasia. To explore this, we…

We argue that the semantic analysis of task-irrelevant stimuli is modulated by feature-specific attention allocation. In line with this hypothesis, we found semantic priming of pronunciation responses to depend upon the extent to which participants focused their attention upon specific semantic stimulus dimensions. In Experiment 1, we examined the…

This study investigated whether eye-tracking technology could be employed as a measure of noticing of corrective feedback (in the form of explicit recasts) during NS-NNS task-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC). Pairs of university-level learners of English (n = 18) engaged in a short chat interaction task with a native…

This study examined to what extent young second language (L2) learners showed morphological family size effects in L2 word recognition and whether the effects were grade-level related. Turkish-Dutch bilingual children (L2) and Dutch (first language, L1) children from second, fourth, and sixth grade performed a Dutch lexical decision task on words…

We investigated the processing of agreement marking and case marking in the comprehension of German relative clauses in 48 seven-year-old monolingual German-speaking children in a picture selection task. We examined the relation between the effectiveness of these different morphological cues and individual memory resources as measured by a…

Previous evidence shows that nouns are easier for many language users to retrieve than verbs, but scant research has been conducted with children in bilectal environments (where both standard and non-standard forms of a language are spoken). This study investigates object and action naming in children who are native speakers of a non-standard…

Research has shown that English and German native speakers use prosodic cues during speech production to convey the intended meaning of an utterance. However, little is known about whether American L2 learners of German also use such cues during L2 production. The present study shows that inter-mediate-level L2 learners of German (English L1) use…

Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the N400 (an ERP component that occurs in response to meaningful stimuli) in children aged 8-10 years old and examined relationships between the N400 and individual differences in listening comprehension, word recognition and non-word decoding. Moreover, we tested the claim that the N400…

This paper investigated children's ability to use syntactic structures to infer semantic information. The particular syntax-semantics link examined was the one between transitivity (transitive/intransitive structures) and telicity (telic/atelic perspectives; that is, boundedness). Although transitivity is an important syntactic reflex of telicity,…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine the accuracy, latency, and errors of noun (object) and verb (action) naming in children with and without specific language impairment (SLI) and to determine whether children with SLI have a particularly large noun-verb performance gap. Method: Children with SLI, age-matched peers (AM), and…

Naming a picture of a dog primes the subsequent naming of a picture of a dog (repetition priming) and interferes with the subsequent naming of a picture of a cat (semantic interference). Behavioral studies suggest that these effects derive from persistent changes in the way that words are activated and selected for production, and some have…

When young adults carry out visual search, distractors that are semantically related, rather than unrelated, to targets can disrupt target selection (see [Belke et al., 2008] and [Moores et al., 2003]). This effect is apparent on the first eye movements in search, suggesting that attention is sometimes captured by related distractors. Here we…

Word age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects reading. The mapping hypothesis predicts AoA effects when input--output mappings are arbitrary. In Spanish, the orthography-to-phonology mappings required for word naming are consistent; therefore, no AoA effects are expected. Nevertheless, AoA effects have been found, motivating the present investigation of…