Time course estimates from eye tracking during spoken language processing (the "visual world paradigm", or VWP) have enabled progress on debates regarding fine-grained details of activation and competition over time. There are, however, three gaps in current analyses of VWP data: consideration of time in a statistically rigorous manner,…

The English language makes a grammatical distinction between count nouns and mass nouns. For example, count nouns but not mass nouns can be pluralized and can appear with the indefinite article. Some scholars dismiss the distinction as an arbitrary convention of language whereas others suggest that it is conceptually based. The present studies…

Previous researchers have found it challenging to disentangle the memory and language capabilities of the famous amnesic patient H. M. Here, we present an original linguistic analysis of H. M. based on empirical data drawing upon novel spoken discourse with him. The results did not uncover the language deficits noted previously. Instead, H. M.'s…

Theories of English phonology regard syllable onset patterns as irrelevant to the assignment of lexical stress. This paper describes three studies that challenge this position. Study 1 tested whether stress patterns on a large sample of disyllabic English words varied as a function of word onset. The incidence of trochaic stress increased…

It has been shown that the processing of irregular past-tense forms is affected by phonological factors that are inherent in the relationship of the past-tense forms to other words in the lexicon (rhyming families of irregulars) or to their base forms (vowel dominance effects). This paper addresses more ephemeral phonological effects. In a…

The distinction between singular and plural enters into linguistic phenomena such as morphology, lexical semantics, and agreement and also must interface with perceptual and conceptual systems that assess numerosity in the world. Three experiments examine the computation of semantic number for singulars and plurals from the morphological…

A central question for psycholinguistics concerns the role of grammatical constraints in online sentence processing. Many current theories maintain that the language processing mechanism constructs a parse or parses that are grammatically consistent with the whole of the perceived input each time it processes a word. Several bottom-up, dynamical…

This paper concerns the influence of age of acquisition (AoA) in word reading and other tasks, and attempts to develop a number of issues raised by Zevin and Seidenberg (2002). Analyses performed on both rated and objective measures of AoA show that the frequency trajectory of words is a reliable predictor of their order of acquisition, which…