This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the sixth MOrphological PROcessing Conference (MOPROC), which was kept in June 2009 in Turku, Finland. The issue contains 13 articles by leading scholars in the field of morphological processing. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and…

Bilinguals are slower when naming a picture in their second language than when naming it in their first language. Although the phenomenon has been frequently replicated, it is not known what causes the delay in the second language. In this article we discuss at what processing stages a delay might arise according to current models of bilingual…

The papers in this special issue of "Language and Cognitive Processing" on the neural bases of language production illustrate two general approaches in current cognitive neuroscience. One approach focuses on investigating cognitive issues, making use of the logic of associations/dissociations or the logic of neural markers as key investigative…

Retrieving a word in a sentence requires speakers to overcome syntagmatic, as well as paradigmatic interference. When accessing "cat" in "The cat chased the string", not only are similar competitors such as "dog" and "cap" activated, but also other words in the planned sentence, such as "chase" and "string". We hypothesise that both types of…

A key question in bilingual language production research is how bilingual individuals control the use of their two languages. The psycholinguistic literature concerning language control is unresolved. It is a matter of controversy whether (a) issues to do with control are central to understanding bilingual language processing; and (b) if they are,…

Describes lexical influences on selective adaptation using words with ambiguous phonemes as adapters. (Author/VWL)

Describes the Verbal Transformation Effect (VTE): When listeners hear the same word repeated very many times at a rapid rate, the word tends to be perceived as other words. Reports lexical effects in the VTE and examines their cause. (Author/VWL)

This paper presents a discussion of the constraints imposed on lexicalisation during production by language-specific patterns, such as whether words exist in a language to describe a given event and whether language-specific syntactic and phonological information correlates with semantic properties. First, we introduce in broad strokes relevant…

Presents the gating paradigm as it is used in spoken word recognition research. In this task, a spoken-language stimulus is presented in segments of increasing duration and subjects are asked to propose the word being presented and to give a confidence rating after each segment. The advantages and problems associated with this task are discussed.…

The role of prosodic breaks (PB) in the parsing of locally ambiguous noun phrases (NP) + verb (V) + NP + prepositional phrase (PP) was examined in four word-monitoring experiments. Results indicate that PBs can influence sentence parsing. The article discusses possible mechanisms in the framework of two models. (32 references) (Author/CK)

Notes that phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion. Points out that when part of an utterance is replaced by another sound, listeners perceptually restore the missing speech. Several paradigms measure this illusion and explore its bottom-up and top-down bases. Findings reveal that acoustic properties of the replacement sound strongly…

Notes that the primary use of sequence monitoring has been to determine which linguistic units are involved in word recognition and how these units might differ across languages. The task involves presenting subjects with targets either congruent or incongruent with a linguistic unit in the target-bearing item. The article focuses on the…

Describes a new paradigm that may be appropriate for uncovering speech perceptual codes. Illusory words are detected by blending two dichotic stimuli. The paradigm's design allows for comparison of different speech units by the manipulation of the distribution of information between two inputs. (23 references) (Author/CK)

Several aspects of the measurement and analysis of event-related brain potentials are explained in this introduction to a special issue, and some interpretation issues relevant for language studies are discussed. This article provides background for language researchers not familiar with the methodology. (Contains 42 references.) (Author/LB)

Considers the fact that prosody is a grammatical (phonological) structure that must be parsed. The article describes prosodic categories marked by intonational pattern for English and Japanese, concentrates on "pitch accent" and tonally marked "phrases," and discusses potential ambiguities in parsing these categories. (60…