Three structural priming experiments investigated how monotransitive and intransitive structures are represented. Experiment 1 showed that priming from intransitives was stronger when the verb was the same in prime and target than when it was different, but monotransitive priming was unaffected by verb repetition. We argue that the activation of…

Recent findings suggest that the immediate free recall (IFR) of short lists is similar to immediate serial recall (ISR). These findings were obtained using a methodology in which participants did not know the list length in advance of each list, and this uncertainty may have encouraged participants to adopt atypical recall strategies. Therefore,…

Complex networks describe how entities in systems interact; the structure of such networks is argued to influence processing. One measure of network structure, clustering coefficient, C, measures the extent to which neighbors of a node are also neighbors of each other. Previous psycholinguistic experiments found that the C of phonological…

Memory for emotional events is usually very good even when tested shortly after study, before it is altered by the influence of emotional arousal on consolidation. Immediate emotion-enhanced memory may stem from the influence of emotion on cognitive processes at encoding and retrieval. Our goal was to test which cognitive factors are necessary and…

Six lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the influence of complex structure on the processing speed of English compounds. All experiments revealed that semantically transparent compounds (e.g., "rosebud") were processed more quickly than matched monomorphemic words (e.g., "giraffe"). Opaque compounds (e.g., "hogwash") were also…

Readers of the Roman script must "unlearn" some forms of mirror generalization when processing printed stimuli (i.e., herb and herd are different words). Here we examine whether the suppression of mirror generalization is a process that affects all letters or whether it mostly affects reversible letters (i.e., b/d). Three masked priming lexical…

The effect of knowledge on memory generally is processing. However, both conceptual and empirical reasons exist to suspect that the organizational account is incomplete. Recently a revised version of that account has been proposed under the rubric of distinctiveness theory (Rawson & Van Overschelde, 2008). The goal of the experiments reported…

The Gesture as Simulated Action (GSA) framework (Hostetter & Alibali, 2008) holds that representational gestures are produced when actions are simulated as part of thinking and speaking. Accordingly, speakers should gesture more when describing images with which they have specific physical experience than when describing images that are less…

Four experiments were conducted to investigate how the cognitive control of memory retrieval selects particular qualitative characteristics as a consequence of instantiating a retrieval mode for recognition memory. Adapting the memory for foils paradigm from Jacoby, Shimizu, Daniels, and Rhodes (Jacoby, L. L., Shimizu, Y., Daniels, K. A., &…

There has been much debate, in both the linguistics and the psycholinguistics literature, concerning numbers and the interpretation of number denoting determiners ("numerals"). Such debate concerns, in particular, the nature and distribution of upper-bounded ("exact") interpretations vs. lower-bounded ("at-least") construals. In the present paper…

A series of experiments explored whether chunking in short-term memory for verbal materials depends on attentionally limited executive processes. Secondary tasks were used to disrupt components of working memory and chunking was indexed by the sentence superiority effect, whereby immediate recall is better for sentences than word lists. To…

The strongest support for feedback in speech perception comes from evidence of apparent lexical influence on prelexical fricative-stop compensation for coarticulation. Lexical knowledge (e.g., that the ambiguous final fricative of "Christma?" should be [s]) apparently influences perception of following stops. We argue that all such previous…

Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these…

Three experiments examined the effects of position distinctiveness, item familiarity, and frequency of presentation on serial position functions in a task involving reconstructing the order of a subset of 12 names in a list of 20 names. Three different serial position conditions were compared in which the subset of names occurred in Positions…

Using the DRM paradigm, our experiments examined the activation and monitoring of memories in semantic and phonological networks. Participants viewed lists of words and/or pseudohomophones (e.g., "dreem"). In Experiment 1, participants verbally recalled lists of semantic associates or attempted to write them as they appeared during study. False…