The public debate on the use of the German nonbinary gender asterisk ("Lehrer*in" 'teacher') is emotionally charged. While it has been adopted by political and educational institutions, opponents argue that it is inappropriate for making persons identifying themselves beyond the male-female-dichotomy more visible. We investigated this…

In two experiments this study tested the "Graded Salience Hypothesis" and the "Defaultness Hypothesis." It weighs the effects of linguistic versus pictorial contexts in terms of activation (or suppression) of default, salient meanings when context invites nondefault, less-salient alternatives. Using a naming task, Experiments 1…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

Previous text comprehension studies using the contradiction paradigm primarily tested assumptions of the activation mechanism involved in reading. However, the nature of the contradiction in such studies relied on validation of information in readers' general world knowledge. We directly tested this validation process by varying the strength of…

Recognition judgments to the non-antecedents of a repeated-noun anaphor are slower and less accurate after than before the processing of the anaphor. Disagreement exists as to whether this pattern of performance reflects a bias shift carried out by a memory process associated with the recognition of a word that has previously occurred in the…

Participants read a series of passages containing an action that required the use of an instrument. In Experiment 1, a naming task failed to detect activation of a target instrument when that instrument was supported in the preceding text. In Experiment 2, reading times were slow on a target sentence that contradicted the inferential information,…