Early acquired words are processed faster than later acquired words in lexical and semantic tasks. Demonstrating such age of acquisition (AoA) effects beyond reasonable doubt, and then investigating those effects empirically, is complicated by the natural correlation between AoA and other word properties such as frequency and imageability. In an…

The authors investigated conditions under which judgments in source-monitoring tasks are influenced by prior schematic knowledge. According to a probability-matching account of source guessing (Spaniol & Bayen, 2002), when people do not remember the source of information, they match source-guessing probabilities to the perceived contingency…

Introduction: The perception of syllable stress has not been widely studied in developmental dyslexia, despite strong evidence for auditory rhythmic perceptual difficulties. Here we investigate the hypothesis that perception of sound rise time is related to the perception of syllable stress in adults with developmental dyslexia. Methods: A…

This study investigated whether Foygel and Dell's (2000) interactive two-step model of speech production could simulate the number and type of errors made in picture-naming by 68 children of elementary-school age. Results showed that the model provided a satisfactory simulation of the mean error profile of children aged five, six, seven, eight and…

The present study investigates how semantic constraint of a sentence context modulates language-non-selective activation in bilingual visual word recognition. We recorded Dutch-English bilinguals' eye movements while they read cognates and controls in low and high semantically constraining sentences in their second language. Early and late…

Optimizing learning over multiple retrieval opportunities requires a joint consideration of both the probability and the mnemonic value of a successful retrieval. Previous research has addressed this trade-off by manipulating the schedule of practice trials, suggesting that a pattern of increasingly long lags--"expanding retrieval practice"--may…

There has been considerable psycholinguistic investigation into the conditions that allow separately introduced individuals to be joined into a plural set and represented as a complex reference object (e.g., Eschenbach et al., 1989; Garrod & Sanford, 1982; Koh & Clifton, 2002; Koh et al., 2008; Moxey, Sanford, Sturt, & Morrow, 2004; Sanford &…

Fluent speech does not contain obvious breaks to word boundaries, yet there are a number of cues that listeners can use to help them segment the speech stream. Most of these cues have been investigated in isolation from one another. In previous work, Norris, McQueen, Cutler, and Butterfield (1997) suggested that listeners use a Possible Word…

This study investigated whether speakers strategically decide where to interrupt their speech once they need to stop. We conducted four naming experiments in which pictures of colored shapes occasionally changed in color or shape. Participants then merely had to stop (Experiment 1); or they had to stop and resume speech (Experiments 2-4). They…

Language comprehension requires recovering meaning from linguistic form, even when the mapping between the two is indirect. A canonical example is ellipsis, the omission of information that is subsequently understood without being overtly pronounced. Comprehension of ellipsis requires retrieval of an antecedent from memory, without prior…

In three experiments we compared the performance of native English speakers to that of Spanish-English and Dutch-English bilinguals on a masked morphological priming lexical decision task. The results do not show significant differences across the three experiments. In line with recent meta-analyses, we observed a graded pattern of facilitation…

This study examined the lexical representation of words with two pronunciation variants. We tested whether both the schwa and reduced variants of French words are stored as lexical entries. The results of four experiments in which speakers named pseudohomophones and pseudowords show an advantage for pseudohomophones over matched pseudowords for…

Disagreement exists about whether lexical selection in word production is a competitive process. Competition predicts semantic interference from distractor words in immediate but not in delayed picture naming. In contrast, Janssen, Schirm, Mahon, and Caramazza (2008) obtained semantic interference in delayed picture naming when participants had to…

Current decision models of recognition memory are based almost entirely on one paradigm, single item old/new judgments accompanied by confidence ratings. This task results in receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) that are well fit by both signal-detection and dual-process models. Here we examine an entirely new recognition task, the judgment…

Several theoretical accounts have been proposed with respect to the issue how quickly the implicit causality verb bias affects the understanding of sentences such as "John beat Pete at the tennis match, because he had played very well". They can be considered as instances of two viewpoints: the focusing and the integration account. The focusing…