This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning ("semantic reversal anomalies"). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. [Kolk et al., 2003] and [Kuperberg et al., 2003]), but a biphasic N400--late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky…

This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group).…

A picture-word interference paradigm with visually presented distractors was used to investigate the independent effects of orthographic and phonological facilitation on Mandarin monosyllabic word production. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word relationship along different lexical dimensions were varied. We observed a…

One important finding with the picture-word interference paradigm is that picture-naming performance is facilitated by the presentation of a distractor (e.g., CAP) formally related to the picture name (e.g., "cat"). In two picture-naming experiments we investigated the nature of such form facilitation effect with Mandarin Chinese, separating the…

The aim of this study was to examine processing interactions between segmental (consonant, vowel) and suprasegmental (tone) dimensions of Mandarin Chinese. Using a speeded classification paradigm, processing interactions were examined between each pair of dimensions. Listeners were asked to attend to one dimension while ignoring the variation…

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…

The present study investigated whether morphological encoding is involved in the production of Chinese disyllabic transparent compound words. The implicit priming task of Meyer (1990) was adopted. The first three experiments (Experiment 1A, 1B, and 2) determined that shared orthography or shared meaning alone did not produce the kind of…

Issues in syntactic processing, that aspect of the human sentence comprehension mechanism that recovers a syntactic structure for a given word string, are discussed. In particular, two structural ambiguities in Mandarin Chinese are examined and their successful parsing within the framework of minimal parsing models is discussed. Recent work…

A discussion of semantic interpretation argues that contradictions such as "Sue's both right and wrong" are assigned consistent propositional interpretations such as "Sue's partly right and partly wrong" by universal semantic principles, which obviates analysis via conversational maxims and implicatures. First, it is shown from investigation of…