Two experiments explored the mapping between language and mental representations of visual scenes. In both experiments, participants viewed, for example, a scene depicting a woman, a wine glass and bottle on the floor, an empty table, and various other objects. In Experiment 1, participants concurrently heard either "The woman will put the glass…

Theories of spoken word production generally assume a distinction between at least two types of phonological processes and representations: lexical phonological processes that recover relatively arbitrary aspects of word forms from long-term memory and post-lexical phonological processes that specify the predictable aspects of phonological…

Capacity limits in linguistic short-term memory (STM) are typically measured with forward span tasks in which participants are asked to recall lists of words in the order presented. Using such tasks, native signers of American Sign Language (ASL) exhibit smaller spans than native speakers ([Boutla, M., Supalla, T., Newport, E. L., & Bavelier, D.…

In the past, the nature of the compositional units proposed for spoken language has largely diverged from the types of control units pursued in the domains of other skilled motor tasks. A classic source of evidence as to the units structuring speech has been patterns observed in speech errors--"slips of the tongue". The present study reports, for…

Language is generally viewed as conveying information through symbols whose form is arbitrarily related to their meaning. This arbitrary relation is often assumed to also characterize the mental representations underlying language comprehension. We explore the idea that visuo-spatial information can be analogically conveyed through acoustic…

We report an experiment in which subjects named 120 pictures, consisting of series of five pictures drawn from each of 24 semantic categories (and intermixed with 45 fillers). The number of intervening trials (lag) between successive presentations of members of the same category varied from two to eight. Subjects' naming latencies were slowed by…