The Stroop paradigm was used to examine the role of phonological activation in semantic access and its development in reading Chinese characters. Subjects (age 7-23 years) of different reading ability were asked to name the display color of Chinese characters. The characters were displayed in four different colors: red, yellow, blue and green.…

This study explores emerging lexical processes that may be the foundation for children's acquisition of morphological knowledge and the relation of these processes to reading comprehension. First and third graders were given two tasks involving lexical analysis of morphologically complex words. Two years later, they were given a measure of…

Developmental changes in children's verbal fluency were explored in this study. One hundred and forty children aged from 7 to 16 completed four verbal fluency tasks, each with a different the production criterion (letter, sound, semantic, and free). The age differences were analyzed both in terms of number of words produced, and clustering,…

Idiom comprehension was assessed in 10 aphasic patients with semantic deficits by means of a string-to-picture matching task. Patients were also submitted to an oral explanation of the same idioms, and to a word comprehension task. The stimuli of this last task were the words following the verb in the idioms. Idiom comprehension was severely…

Two experiments showed that French native speakers rely on sublexical and lexical cues to allocate gender during word recognition. Sublexical cues were based on whether the word ending was typical for a particular gender rather than neutral with regard to gender. Lexical cues were based on whether the associated definite article was informative…

Using Korean, we investigated how syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic factors influence the representation of a sentence, in particular, the relative accessibility of different components of a sentence representation. In six experiments, participants performed a probe recognition task after reading each of a series of sentences. We manipulated the…

Semantic priming refers to a reduction in the reaction time to identify or make a judgment about a stimulus that has been immediately preceded by a semantically related word or picture and is thought to result from a partial overlap in the semantic associates of the two words. A semantic priming lexical decision task using spoken words was…

Investigated patterns and strength of connections between English dative verbs and the double-object dative argument structure in native-speaker production. Subjects completed three written production tasks using dative and other verbs from different semantic classes of verbs. Results show alternating dative verbs varied in patterns of connection…

Investigates control of the bilingual lexico-semantic system in visual word recognition. Used a visual lexical decision task to explore control processes in proficient German-English bilinguals. Critical stimuli were interlingual homographs such as the low-frequency English word "tag," which means day in German. Overall, participants…

The effect of second language experience and vocabulary ability was investigated in a semantic priming experiment with weakly related English word pairs (e.g., "city"-"grass"). Participants made lexical decisions to targets preceded by unrelated or weakly related primes or to nonword targets preceded by words. Reliable priming was found for…

Eight experiments investigated the effects of visual, spatial, auditory, and executive interference on the symbolic comparison of animal size and ferocity, semantic goodness of words, and numbers. Dynamic visual noise (DVN) and the reading of visually presented stimulus items were shown to selectively interfere with response times on the animal…

Morphology is one of the organizing principles of the mental lexicon. It is especially important in Hebrew, where word structure expresses a rich array of semantic notions. This study investigated the ability of Hebrew-speaking children to solve written morphological analogies by reading and completing two sets of real and invented root- and…

In this article second language (L2) knowledge of Dutch grammatical gender is investigated. Adult speakers of German, English and a Romance language (French, Italian or Spanish) were investigated to explore the role of transfer in learning the Dutch grammatical gender system. In the first language (L1) systems, German is the most similar to Dutch…

This study investigates the oral language skills of 8-year-old children with impaired reading comprehension. Despite fluent and accurate reading and normal nonverbal ability, these children are poor at understanding what they have read. Tasks tapping 3 domains of oral language, namely phonology, semantics, and morphosyntax, were administered,…

Language delay and impairment are salient features of autism. More specifically, there is evidence of atypical semantic organization in autism, but the functional brain correlates are not well understood. The current study used functional MRI to examine activation associated with semantic category decision. Ten high-functioning men with autism…