Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different…

Models of written word recognition in languages using the Roman alphabet assume that a word's visual form is quickly mapped onto abstract units. This proposal is consistent with the finding that masked priming effects are of similar magnitude from lowercase, uppercase, and alternating-case primes (e.g., beard-BEARD, BEARD-BEARD, and BeArD-BEARD).…

Many influential models of sentence production (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994; Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987; Levelt, 1989) emphasize the central role of verbs in structural encoding, and thus predict that verbs should be selected early in sentence formulation, possibly even before the phonological encoding of the first constituent (Ferreira, 2000).…

A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders…

Studies using the lexical decision task with English stimuli have demonstrated that homophones are responded to more slowly than nonhomophonic controls. In contrast, several studies using Chinese stimuli have shown that homophones are responded to more rapidly than nonhomophonic controls. In an attempt to better understand the impact of homophony,…

Theories of language production generally describe the segment as the basic unit in phonological encoding (e.g., Dell, 1988; Levelt, Roelofs, & Meyer, 1999). However, there is also evidence that such a unit might be language specific. Chen, Chen, and Dell (2002), for instance, found no effect of single segments when using a preparation…

Building on P. H. Allum and L. Wheeldon (2007), the authors conducted 5 experiments to investigate the scope of lexical access during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Speakers described pairs of pictured objects, and on critical trials, 1 object was previewed. In Japanese, sentence onset is speeded by the preview of each of the…

Four experiments investigate the scope of grammatical planning during spoken sentence production in Japanese and English. Experiment 1 shows that sentence latencies vary with length of sentence-initial subject phrase. Exploiting the head-final property of Japanese, Experiments 2 and 3 extend this result by showing that in a 2-phrase subject…