Infants younger than 20 months of age interpret both words and symbolic gestures as object names. Later in development words and gestures take on divergent communicative functions. Here, we examined patterns of brain activity to words and gestures in typically developing infants at 18 and 26 months of age. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were…

Purpose: To examine the behavioral effects and neural activation patterns associated with implicit semantic processing influences on phonological judgments during reading in children and adults. Method: Whole-head magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings were obtained from 2 groups, children (9-13 years) and adults, performing a homophone judgment…

Semantic and orthographic learning of new words was investigated with the help of the picture-word interference (PWI) task. In this version of the Stroop task, picture naming is delayed by the simultaneous presentation of a semantically related as opposed to an unrelated distractor word (a specific PWI effect), as well as by an unrelated word…

Most studies on the Stroop effect (unintentional automatic word processing) have been restricted to English speakers using vocal responses. Little is known about this effect with deaf signers. The study compared Stroop task responses among four different samples: deaf participants from a Japanese-language environment and from an English-language…

Tests two accounts of the role of gesture in speaking. Specifically, the study seeks to establish whether gesture is involved in the conceptual planning of messages, or whether it is involved only in the generation of the surface forms of utterances. To accomplish this goal, two tasks were developed that elicit comparable utterances but make…

Purpose: Vietnamese children's performance on language-based processing tasks of fast-mapping (FM) word-learning and dynamic assessment (DA) word- and rule-learning tasks were investigated. Method: Twenty-one first- and second-generation Vietnamese preschool children participated in this study. All children were enrolled in 2 Head Start programs…

This study inspected the processes of verifying the current discourse constituent against the referents that it passively cues during reading. It seemed plausible that, after understanding "The customer ate pancakes," the processes of fully understanding "The waiter implied that the customer ate eggs" might resemble those of intentionally…

Cued recall with an extralist cue poses a challenge for contemporary memory theory in that there is a need to explain how episodic and semantic information are combined. A parallel activation and intersection approach proposes one such means by assuming that an experimental cue will elicit its preexisting semantic network and a context cue will…

The authors investigated effects of task and overlapping processing load on semantic processing. In 3 experiments the brain potential component N400 was elicited by synonymous and nonsynonymous spoken noun pairs that were to be classified according to semantic relatedness. The time course of the N=400 component to the nouns was delayed, and its…

This study investigated the linguistic processing of visual speech (video of a talker's utterance without audio) by determining if such has the capacity to prime subsequently presented word and nonword targets. The priming procedure is well suited for the investigation of whether speech perception is amodal since visual speech primes can be used…

Four experiments examined the nature of forgetting and the processing--storage relationship during performance on a prevalent working memory task, the reading span test. Using two different presentation paradigms, Experiments 1 and 2 replicated Towse, Hitch, and Hutton's (1998, 2000) finding that the Short-Final lists, which presented a long…

The authors report 3 dual-task experiments concerning the locus of frequency effects in word recognition. In all experiments, Task 1 entailed a simple perceptual choice and Task 2 involved lexical decision. In Experiment 1, an underadditive effect of word frequency arose for spoken words. Experiment 2 also showed underadditivity for visual lexical…

Background: Problems with subject-verb agreement and phonological (processing) skills have been reported to occur in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and in those with developmental dyslexia, but only a few studies have compared such problems in these two groups. Previous studies have claimed a causal relationship between…

The study examines the impact of topic familiarity and passage sight vocabulary on lexical inferencing and retention. Independent variables include (a) a topic familiarity questionnaire, and (b) a passage sight vocabulary test. A repeated-measures design was used with a cross-sectional sample of 35 adult L2 learners of Spanish. Ss read narratives…

Research on dyslexia has focused on the phonological level of linguistic analysis. Here we extend the investigation of the linguistic competence of individuals with dyslexia to the morphological level of linguistic analysis. We examine whether adult Hebrew readers with dyslexia extract and represent morphemic units similarly to normal readers.…