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;…

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…

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…

Four picture-description experiments investigated if syntactic formulation in language production can proceed with only minimal working memory involvement. Experiments 1-3 compared the initiation latencies, utterance durations, and errors for syntactically simpler picture descriptions (adjective-noun phrases, e.g., "the red book") to…

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their…

We describe a leaky competing accumulator (LCA) model of the lexical decision task that can be used as a response/decision module for any computational model of word recognition. The LCA model uses evidence for a word, operationalized as some measure of lexical activity, as input to the "YES" decision node. Input to the "NO" decision node is…

Determiner selection requires the retrieval of the noun's syntactic features (e.g., gender) and sometimes of its phonological features. Miozzo and Caramazza (1999) argued that the selection of determiners in Germanic languages is more straightforward than in Romance languages because it is not dependent on the phonological properties of the…

Recent studies reported reductions of well-established biases in decision making under risk, such as the framing effect, during foreign language (FL) use. These modulations were attributed to the use of FL itself, which putatively entails an increase in emotional distance. A reduced framing effect in this setting, however, might also result from…

This article reports findings from 3 experiments examining whether 2nd language (L2) words are represented in episodic memory, as originally proposed by Jiang and Forster (2001). Experiment 1 was a direct replication of Jiang and Forster, testing highly proficient Chinese-English bilinguals. Masked translation priming was obtained in an episodic…

Word age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects reading. The mapping hypothesis predicts AoA effects when input--output mappings are arbitrary. In Spanish, the orthography-to-phonology mappings required for word naming are consistent; therefore, no AoA effects are expected. Nevertheless, AoA effects have been found, motivating the present investigation of…

The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the…

In 3 experiments, participants saw lists of 16 words for free recall with or without a 6-digit immediate serial recall (ISR) task after each word. Free recall was performed under standard visual silent and spoken-aloud conditions (Experiment 1), overt rehearsal conditions (Experiment 2), and fixed rehearsal conditions (Experiment 3). The authors…