Lexical-semantic knowledge is a core language component that undergoes prolonged development throughout childhood and is therefore highly amenable to developmental studies. Most previous lexical-semantic functional MRI (fMRI) studies have been limited to single-word or word-pair tasks, outside a sentence context. Our objective was to investigate…

This study evaluates whether tip of the tongue experiences (TOTs) are caused by a more accessible word which blocks retrieval of the target word, especially for older adults. In a ''competitor priming'' paradigm, young and older adults produced the name of a famous character (e.g., Eliza Doolittle) in response to a question and subsequently named…

The present study employs event related potentials (ERPs) to verify the utility of using electrophysiological measures to study developmental questions within the field of language comprehension. Established ERP components (N400 and P600) that reflect semantic and syntactic processing were examined. Fifteen adults and 14 children (ages 8-13)…