Language production and the execution of motor acts have long been thought to have similarities in the rules of their execution. Recent studies have begun to directly compare these two processes by measuring certain phenomena found in both. Until now, comparisons have only been made in parallel, with different groups of participants and/or tasks.…

Four experiments were designed to investigate the possible effect of orthographic neighborhood frequency (NF) on Chinese character recognition. Orthographic neighbors were operated under two conditions: stroke based and radical based. With the lexical decision and repeated-matching tasks adopted, the results showed an inhibitory NF effect on…

Reading is one of the most important milestones a child achieves throughout development. Above the letter level, the syllable has been shown to play a relevant role at early stages of visual word recognition in adult skilled readers. However, studies aiming to examine when, during reading acquisition, the syllable emerges as a functional…

It is widely assumed that subliminal word priming is case insensitive and that a short SOA (< 100 ms) is required to observe any effects. Here we attempted to replicate results from an influential study with the inclusion of a longer SOA to re-examine these assumptions. Participants performed a semantic categorisation task on visible word…

We tested whether second language (L2) learners rely more on explicit memory during structural priming at lower than at higher proficiency levels (Hartsuiker & Bernolet, 2017). We compared within-L2 priming with lexical overlap in 100 low and 100 high proficiency French L2 speakers under low versus high working memory load conditions induced…

Although syntactic priming has been well studied and is commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under debate. Recent studies have suggested that exposure to nonlinguistic statistical patterns may influence language users' relative clause attachment biases, but whether the priming effect comes…

The "recycling hypothesis" posits that the word recognition system is built upon minimal modifications to the neural architecture used in object recognition. In two masked priming lexical decision studies, we examined whether "mirror generalization," a phenomenon in object recognition, occurs in word recognition. In Study 1, we…

For children, Object Relative (OR) clauses can be late acquired across a number of languages (e.g., this is the goat that the cows are pushing), and production of non-standard ORs that include resumption is often attested (e.g., Italian; French; English). In addition, starting at age 6, children start adopting passive subject relatives (SRs)…

This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)--an understudied group in the literature--and investigates whether these learners, in…

The current experiments examined the creation of nonbelieved true and false memories after imagining bizarre and familiar actions using the imagination inflation procedure (Goff & Roediger, 1998). In both experiments, participants took part in three sessions. In Session 1, participants had to perform or imagine simple familiar actions (e.g.,…

Dialects vary in their allophonic patterns, which can affect listeners' phonological and lexical representations. I explore how different exposure to dialect-specific allophonic patterns for two vowels in American English, /ae ai/, affects listeners' lexical processing behaviors across three perception tasks: perceptual similarity, priming, and…

The implicit learning account of syntactic priming proposes that the same mechanism underlies syntactic priming and language development, providing a link between a child and adult language processing. The present experiment tested predictions of this account by comparing the persistence of syntactic priming effects in children and adults.…

Young people use slang for identifying themselves with a particular social group, gaining social recognition and respect from that group, and expressing their emotional state. One feature of Internet slang is its active use by youth in online communication, which, under certain conditions, may cause problematic Internet use (PIU). We conducted two…

Ratings of perceptual experience on a trial-by-trial basis are increasingly used in masked priming studies to assess prime awareness. It is argued that such subjective ratings more adequately capture the content of phenomenal consciousness compared to the standard objective psychophysical measures obtained in a session after the priming…

In the field of second and foreign language education, conscious cognitive models of motivation dominate, while the role of unconscious motivation has not been studied systematically. Expanding the language motivation research to include implicit processes is likely to enrich the field of language learning and open up new contributions to current…