The influence of domain knowledge on reading behavior has received limited investigation compared to the influence of, for example, context and/or word frequency. The current study tested participants with and without domain knowledge of the "Harry Potter" (HP) universe. Fans and non-fans read sentences containing HP, high-frequency…

Semantic diversity quantifies the similarity in the content of contexts a word has been experienced in. Four experiments investigated its effect on lexical and semantic judgments in 9- to 10-year-olds and adults. In Experiment 1, a cross-modal semantic judgment task, participants decided whether a visually presented word matched an audio…

Grounded or embodied cognition research has employed body-object interaction (BOI; e.g., Pexman et al., 2019) ratings to investigate sensorimotor effects during language processing. We investigated relationships between BOI ratings and nonarbitrary statistical mappings between words' phonological forms and their syntactic category in English;…

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same…

Semantic ambiguity has been shown to slow comprehension, although it is unclear whether this ambiguity disadvantage is attributable to competition in semantic activation or difficulties in response selection. We tested the two accounts by examining semantic relatedness decisions to homonyms, or words with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g.,…

There are numerous studies showing processing advantages for collocations, but none of them so far takes into account the fact that the morphological form of a collocation varies to fit the context. Questions whether collocations retain their processing advantage when their morphological form changes and how or if different morphological forms of…

Word frequency is an important predictor of lexical-decision task performance. The current study further examined the role of this variable by exploring the influence of frequency trajectory. Frequency trajectory is measured by how often a word occurs in childhood relative to adulthood. Past research on the role of this variable in word…

Prior behavioral experiments across a variety of tasks have typically shown that the go/no-go procedure produces not only shorter response times and/or fewer errors than the two-choice procedure, but also yields a higher sensitivity to experimental manipulations. To uncover the time course of information processing in the go/no-go versus the…

The present experiments investigated the influence of combined phonological and semantic information on lexical retrieval, metacognitive retrieval states, and selection in an immediate multiple-choice task. Younger and older adults attempted to retrieve words (e.g., abdicate) from low-frequency word definitions. Retrieval was preceded by primes…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Current models of word-meaning access typically assume that lexical-semantic representations of ambiguous words (e.g., 'bark of the dog/tree') reach a relatively stable state in adulthood, with only the relative frequencies of meanings and immediate sentence context determining meaning preference. However, recent experience also affects…

There is mounting evidence that the ease of producing and understanding language depends not only on the frequencies of individual words but also on the frequencies of word combinations. However, in two picture description experiments, Janssen and Barber (2012) found that French and Spanish speakers' speech onset latencies for short phrases…

Recent research has shown that leet words (i.e., words in which some of the letters are replaced by visually similar digits; e.g., VIRTU4L) can be processed as their base words without much cost. However, it remains unclear whether the digits inserted in leet words are simply processed as letters or whether they are simultaneously processed as…

Recent studies have documented frequency effects for word n-grams, independently of word unigram frequency. Further studies have revealed constructional prototype effects, both at the word level as well as for phrases. The present speech production study investigates the time course of these effects for the production of prepositional phrases in…

Reading efficiently in a second language (L2) is a crucial skill, but it is not universally achieved. Here we ask whether L2 reading efficiency is better captured as a language specific skill or whether it is mostly shared across L1 and L2, relying on general language abilities. To this end, we examined word frequency and predictability effects in…