An ongoing debate in the literature on language acquisition is whether preschool children process reference in an egocentric way or whether they spontaneously and by-default take their partner's perspective into account. The reported study implements a computerized referential task with a controlled trial presentation and simple verbal…

Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In…

Children are able to resolve the referential ambiguity of learning new words by tracking co-occurrence probabilities across moments in time, a behavior termed cross-situational word learning (CSWL). Although we know that children can use co-occurrence data to map words to objects, the literature has a striking limitation: research has focused on…

Lexical access is a core component of word processing. In order to produce or comprehend a word, language users must access word forms in their mental lexicon. However, despite its involvement in both tasks, previous research has often studied lexical access in either production or comprehension alone. Therefore, it is unknown to which extent…

Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we…

Ninety-six participants, who were younger (20 years) or older (68 years) adults and either monolingual or bilingual, completed tasks assessing working memory, lexical retrieval, and executive control. Younger participants performed most of the tasks better than older participants, confirming the effect of aging on these processes. The effect of…