Language is generally viewed as conveying information through symbols whose form is arbitrarily related to their meaning. This arbitrary relation is often assumed to also characterize the mental representations underlying language comprehension. We explore the idea that visuo-spatial information can be analogically conveyed through acoustic…

When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter…

Human infants possess powerful learning mechanisms used for the acquisition of language. To what extent are these mechanisms domain specific? One well-known infant language learning mechanism is the ability to detect and generalize rule-like similarity patterns, such as ABA or ABB [Marcus, G. F., Vijayan, S., Rao, S. B., & Vishton, P. M. (1999).…

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. "Language and Speech, 22," 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on…

Cognitive processes are often attributed to statistical or symbolic general-purpose mechanisms. Here we show that some spontaneous generalizations are driven by specialized, highly constrained symbolic operations. We explore how two types of artificial grammars are acquired, one based on repetitions and the other on characteristic relations…

The influence of orthography on children's on-line auditory word recognition was studied from the end of Grade 2 to the end of Grade 4, by examining the orthographic consistency effect [Ziegler, J. C., & Ferrand, L. (1998). Orthography shapes the perception of speech: The consistency effect in auditory recognition. "Psychonomic Bulletin & Review",…

The present study is aimed at identifying how prior causal beliefs and covariation information contribute to belief updating when evidence, either compatible or contradictory with those beliefs, is provided. Participants were presented with a cover story with which it was intended to activate or generate a causal belief. Variables related to the…

Number processing is characterized by the distance and the size effect, but symbolic numbers exhibit smaller effects than non-symbolic numerosities. The difference between symbolic and non-symbolic processing can either be explained by a different kind of underlying representation or by parametric differences within the same type of underlying…

In a recall-based spoken production experiment, native English-speaking participants' variable use of the complementiser "that" to introduce the sentential complement in sentences like "Henry knew (that) Lucy/Louise washed the dishes" was found to be related to whether "that" inclusion/omission resulted in an alternating sequence of stressed and…

To learn a language, speakers must learn its words and rules from fluent speech; in particular, they must learn dependencies among linguistic classes. We show that when familiarized with a short artificial, subliminally bracketed stream, participants can learn relations about the structure of its words, which specify the classes of syllables…

This report examines whether knowledge about function influences the formation of artifact categories in 11-12- month old infants. Using an object-examination task, a set of artificial stimuli was presented that could either be grouped according to overall similarity or according to similarity in one functionally relevant part. Experiment 1…

Vocabulary growth was suggested to prompt the implementation of increasingly finer-grained lexical representations of spoken words in children (e.g., [Metsala, J. L., & Walley, A. C. (1998). "Spoken vocabulary growth and the segmental restructuring of lexical representations: precursors to phonemic awareness and early reading ability." In J. L.…

Disagreement exists about how speakers monitor their internal speech. Production-based accounts assume that self-monitoring mechanisms exist within the production system, whereas comprehension-based accounts assume that monitoring is achieved through the speech comprehension system. Comprehension-based accounts predict perception-specific effects,…

Gibson's Dependency Locality Theory (DLT) [Gibson, E. 1998. "Linguistic complexity: locality of syntactic dependencies." "Cognition," 68, 1-76; Gibson, E. 2000. "The dependency locality theory: A distance-based theory of linguistic complexity." In A. Marantz, Y. Miyashita, & W. O'Neil (Eds.), "Image, Language, Brain" (pp. 95-126). Cambridge, MA:…

Eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions to manipulate one of four objects pictured on a computer screen. Target words occurred in utterance-medial (e.g., "Put the cap next to the square") or utterance-final position (e.g., "Now click on the cap"). Displays consisted of the target picture (e.g., a cap), a…