"AU" /o/ and "AN" /a/ in French are both complex graphemes, but they vary in their strength of association to their respective sounds. The letter sequence "AU" is systematically associated to the phoneme /o/, and as such is always parsed as a complex grapheme. However, "AN" can be associated with either one…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

When watching others describe events, does information from their speech and gestures affect our memory representations for the gist and surface form of the described events? Does our reliance on these memory representations change over time? Forty participants watched videos of stories narrated by an actor. Each story included three target events…

This study investigates the phonological nature of the lexical links in the bilingual lexicon using different-script bilinguals. Highly proficient Hindi-English bilinguals performed a translation recognition task (i.e., decide whether two words presented sequentially are a correct translation pair). For the critical trials, the second word was a…

Four experiments explored the applicability of auditory stimulus presentation in affective priming tasks. In Experiment 1, it was found that standard affective priming effects occur when prime and target words are presented simultaneously via headphones similar to a dichotic listening procedure. In Experiment 2, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) was…

Humans have knowledge about the properties of their native language at various levels of representation; sound, structure, and meaning computation constitute the core components of any linguistic theory. Although the brain sciences have engaged with representational theories of sound and syntactic structure, the study of the neural bases of…

Two picture naming experiments show that compound word production in Mandarin Chinese and in English is determined by the compound's whole-word frequency, and not by its constituent morpheme frequency. Four control experiments rule out that these results are caused by recognition or articulatory processes. These results are consistent with models…

Previous studies have examined cross-serial and embedded complement clauses in West Germanic in order to distinguish between different types of working memory models of human sentence processing, as well as different formal language models. Here, adult plasticity in the use of these constructions is investigated by examining the response of…