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…

The word-superiority effect (WSE) describes the superior recognition of word constituents in a word, as opposed to a non-word, context. In this study, the WSE was used as a diagnostic tool to examine the modulatory effect of word semantic transparency on the degree to which Chinese bimorphemic compound words are lexically represented as unitised…

In this study, we investigate the processing of morphologically complex words in Danish using auditory lexical decision. We document a second critical point in auditory comprehension in addition to the Uniqueness Point (UP), namely the point at which competing morphological continuation forms of the base cease to be compatible with the input,…

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…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…