This study investigated the roles of associative learning and linguistic knowledge, in particular phonological and semantic knowledge, in word learning of Chinese readers using a cross-sectional design. Extending past research in associative learning using existing Chinese characters as word stimuli, this study resorted to pseudowords and invented…

The present research demonstrates that very brief variations in affect, being around 1 s in length and changing from trial to trial independently from semantic relatedness of primes and targets, modulate the amount of semantic priming. Implementing consonant and dissonant chords (Experiments 1 and 5), naturalistic sounds (Experiment 2), and visual…

We examined whether 12-month-old infants privilege words over other linguistic stimuli in an associative learning task. Sixty-four infants were presented with sets of either word-object, communicative sound-object, or consonantal sound-object pairings until they habituated. They were then tested on a "switch" in the sound to determine whether they…

Two experiments explored whether the facilitatory effect of context on lexical decisions is limited to words subjects generated when given the context as a prompt in a production task, or if the effect is wider in scope. The first experiment provided evidence of a wide scope of facilitation from single word contexts. In the second experiment, the…

Pinker and Prince (1988) argued that two dissociable systems underlie the development of linguistic representations: one rule governed and the other associative. These two dissociable systems of representation and processing are claimed to be a linguistic universal (Pinker, 1999). Therefore, one should expect that nonnative speakers of a language…