Automaticity can be established by consistently reinforcing contingencies during practice. During reinforcement learning, however, new relations can also be derived, which were never directly reinforced. For instance, reinforcing the overlapping contingencies A [right arrow] B and A [right arrow] C, can lead to a new relation B-C, which was never…

An ongoing debate in the literature on language acquisition is whether preschool children process reference in an egocentric way or whether they spontaneously and by-default take their partner's perspective into account. The reported study implements a computerized referential task with a controlled trial presentation and simple verbal…

The detection of a conflict between relevant and irrelevant information on a given trial typically results in a smaller conflict effect on the next trial. This sequential effect has been interpreted as an expression of cognitive control implemented to resolve conflict. In this context, 2 different but related issues have received increasing…

A growing body of research demonstrates that instructions can elicit automatic response activations. The results of the present study indicate that instruction-based response activations can also counteract automatic response activations based on long-term associations. To this end, we focused on the Simon effect, which is the observation that…

The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of "automatic target activation" and/or the use of strategies like prospective "expectancy generation" and "retrospective semantic…

The present study assessed intra- and cross-lingual neighborhood effects, using both a generalized lexical decision task and an analysis of a large-scale bilingual eye-tracking corpus (Cop, Dirix, Drieghe, & Duyck, 2016). Using new neighborhood density and frequency measures, the general lexical decision task yielded an inhibitory…

Many studies in bilingual visual word recognition have demonstrated that lexical access is not language selective. However, research on bilingual word recognition in the auditory modality has been scarce, and it has yielded mixed results with regard to the degree of this language nonselectivity. In the present study, we investigated whether…