Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

The ability to map similar sounding words to different meanings alone is far from enough for successful speech processing. To overcome variability in the speech signal, young learners must also recognize words across surface variations. Previous studies have shown that infants at 14 months are able to use variations in word-internal cues (i.e.,…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the interaction between processing lexical and speaker-specific information in spoken word recognition. The specific question is whether repetition and semantic/associative priming is reduced when the prime and target are produced by different speakers. In Experiment 1, the prime and target were repeated…

Very few studies exist on the role of cross-language similarities in cognate word acquisition. Here we sought to explore, for the first time, the interplay of orthography (O) and phonology (P) during the early stages of cognate word acquisition, looking at children and adults with the same level of foreign language proficiency and by using two…

Mediated priming refers to the faster word recognition of a target (e.g., milk) following presentation of a prime (e.g., pasture) that is related indirectly via a connecting "mediator" (e.g., cow). Association strength may be an important factor in whether mediated priming occurs prospectively (with target activation prior to its presentation) or…

The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an event-related potential (ERP) norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a…

This study examined how the two cerebral hemispheres recruit semantic processing mechanisms by combining event-related potential measures and visual half-field methods in a word priming paradigm in which semantic strength and predictability were manipulated using lexically associated word pairs. Activation patterns on the late positive complex…

We propose that speech comprehension involves the activation of token representations of the phonological forms of current lexical hypotheses, separately from the ongoing construction of a conceptual interpretation of the current utterance. In a series of cross-modal priming experiments, facilitation of lexical decision responses to visual target…

A study is reported in which pairs of synonyms, antonyms, coordinates, and super super-subordinates were presented dichotically to university students. After each pair the subject reported what he heard. In one condition the two members of a pair were presented simultaneously, and in another they were presented sequentially. (Author/RM)

Several recent studies from our laboratory have shown that 14-month-old infants have difficulty learning to associate two phonetically similar new words to two different objects when tested in the Switch task. Because the infants can discriminate the same phonetic detail that they fail to use in the associative word-learning situation, we have…

Two experiments explored whether the facilitatory effect of context on lexical decisions is limited to words subjects generated when given the context as a prompt in a production task, or if the effect is wider in scope. The first experiment provided evidence of a wide scope of facilitation from single word contexts. In the second experiment, the…

Individual differences in context effects both in a word-level task and in a sentence-level task were found to be related to individual differences in reading continuous text. These results are presented within the framework of a verification model, and the implications for two-process theory are discussed. (Author/PN)

Schuberth and Eimas (EJ 159 939) reported that context and frequency effects added to determine reaction times in a lexical decision (word v nonword) task. The present reexamination shows that context and frequency do interact, with semantic context facilitating the processing of low-frequency words more than high-frequency words. (Author/CP)

An earlier study showed that responses are remembered better when subjects produce them from cues, than when subjects read cue-response pairs. The decided memory advantage for generated targets relative to read ones is known as the generation effect. The present research is designed to study the generation effect for cues, following a…

Justifies the teaching of vocabulary recognition strategies from vocabulary development exercises and reviews five such strategies. These strategies are: (1) inferring from context, (2) identifying lexical familiarization, (3) unchaining nominal compounds, (4) synonym search, and (5) word analysis. (Author/SED)