Following two individually mentioned characters in a text it is possible to successfully refer to either the individuals, or the set of two. Various factors, syntactic and pragmatic, have been found to affect the ease with which these types of reference can be made, however. This is therefore an interesting puzzle for those attempting to work out…

Are comprehenders affected by an alternative analysis that they do not adopt (a nonadopted analysis) in case of syntactic ambiguity? If the processor only considers and maintains the preferred analysis at a given time, an alternative analysis is then not considered and will hence not affect processing. In two experiments, we examined the…

Recent neurobiological studies revealed evidence for lexical representations that are not specified for the coronal place of articulation (PLACE; Friedrich, Eulitz, & Lahiri, 2006; Friedrich, Lahiri, & Eulitz, 2008). Here we tested when these types of underspecified representations influence neuronal speech recognition. In a unimodal…

Is the bilingual language production system a dynamic system that can operate in different language activation states? Three experiments investigated to what extent cross-language phonological co-activation effects in language production are sensitive to the composition of the stimulus list. L1 Dutch-L2 English bilinguals decided whether or not a…

Speakers choose a particular expression based on many factors, including availability of the referent in the perceptual context. We examined whether, when expressing referents, monolingual English- and Turkish-speaking children: (1) are sensitive to perceptual context, (2) express this sensitivity in language-specific ways, and (3) use co-speech…

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

We investigated the functional organisation of neural systems supporting language production when the primary language articulators are also used for meaningful, but nonlinguistic, expression such as pantomime. Fourteen hearing nonsigners and 10 deaf native users of American Sign Language (ASL) participated in an H[subscript 2][superscript…

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms--in particular, "emphatic" strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns--cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single…

The study explored the different influences of roots and suffixes in reading aloud morphemic pseudowords (e.g., vetr-ezza, "glass-ness"). Previous work on adults showed a facilitating effect of both roots and suffixes on naming times. In the present study, pseudoword stimuli including roots and suffixes in different combinations were…

Correct use of verb argument structure relies on accurate verb semantic representations whose formation depends partly on use of reverse linking. We predicted that children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI), who have difficulties with reverse linking, would have inaccurate semantic representations for verbs and hence difficulties with verb…

In three experiments, we investigate whether speakers tend to perseverate in the assignment of emphasis to concepts with particular thematic roles across utterances. Participants matched prime sentences involving clefts (e.g., "Het is de cowboy die hij slaat," "It is the cowboy that he is hitting") to pictures and then…

A growing body of evidence suggests that semantic access is obligatory. Several studies have demonstrated that brain activity associated with semantic processing, measured in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), is elicited even by meaningless, orthographically illegal strings, suggesting that semantic access is not gated…

"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…

We present an MEG study of homonym recognition in reading, identifying effects of a semantic measure of homonym ambiguity. This measure sheds light on two competing theories of lexical access: the "early access" theory, which entails that lexical access occurs at early (pre 200 ms) stages of processing; and the "late access" theory, which…

We used event-related brain potentials to clarify the role of phonology in activating the meanings of high-frequency words during skilled silent reading. Target homophones ("meet") in sentences such as "The students arranged to meet in the library to study" were replaced on some trials by either a high-frequency homophone mate…