Time reference in Indo-European languages is marked on the verb. With tensed verb forms, the speaker can refer to the past (wrote, has written), present (writes, is writing) or future (will write). Reference to the past through verb morphology has been shown to be particularly vulnerable in agrammatic aphasia and both agrammatic and…

This study clarifies the involvement of short- and long-term memory in novel word-form learning, using the Hebb repetition paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants recalled sequences of visually presented syllables (e.g., "la"-"va"-"bu"-"sa"-"fa"-"ra"-"re"-"si"-"di"), with one particular (Hebb) sequence repeated on every third trial. Crucially,…

In three experiments we compared the performance of native English speakers to that of Spanish-English and Dutch-English bilinguals on a masked morphological priming lexical decision task. The results do not show significant differences across the three experiments. In line with recent meta-analyses, we observed a graded pattern of facilitation…

This study examines how the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents affects bilingual word recognition. Performing one of three tasks, Dutch-English bilinguals processed cognates with varying degrees of form overlap between their English and Dutch counterparts (e.g., "lamp-lamp" vs. "flood-vloed" vs. "song-lied"). In lexical…

This eye-tracking study explores visual recognition of Dutch suffixed words (e.g., "plaats+ing" "placing") embedded in sentential contexts, and provides new evidence on the interplay between storage and computation in morphological processing. We show that suffix length crucially moderates the use of morphological properties. In words with shorter…

This study examines the link between distributional patterns in the input and infants' acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies. In two Headturn Preference experiments, Dutch-learning 24-month-olds (but not 17-month-olds) were found to track the remote dependency between the definite article "het" and the diminutive suffix…

Bilinguals' lexical mappings for their two languages have been found to converge toward a common naming pattern. The present paper investigates in more detail how semantic convergence is manifested in bilingual lexical knowledge. We examined how semantic convergence affects the centers and boundaries of lexical categories for common household…

In four experiments, we investigated the role of shared word order and alignment with a dialogue partner in the production of code-switched sentences. In Experiments 1 and 2, Dutch-English bilinguals code-switched in describing pictures while being cued with word orders that are either shared or not shared between Dutch and English. In Experiments…

In four experiments, we investigated how listeners compensate for reduced /t/ in Dutch. Mitterer and Ernestus [Mitterer, H., & Ernestus, M. (2006). "Listeners recover /t/s that speakers lenite: evidence from /t/-lenition in Dutch." "Journal of Phonetics," 34, 73-103] showed that listeners are biased to perceive a /t/ more easily after /s/ than…

To what extent do bilinguals have a single, integrated representation of syntactic information? According to Hartsuiker et al. (2004) [Hartsuiker, R. J., Pickering, M. J., & Veltkamp, E. (2004). "Is syntax separate or shared between languages? Cross-linguistic syntactic priming in Spanish-English bilinguals." "Psychological Science," 15,…

For several languages, a preference for subject relative clauses over object relative clauses has been reported. However, Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2002) showed that there is no such preference for relative clauses with an animate subject and an inanimate object. A Dutch object relative clause as...de rots, die de wandelaars beklommen hebben...…

Contradictory data have been obtained about the processing of singular and plural nouns in Dutch and English. Whereas the Dutch findings point to an influence of the base frequency of the singular and the plural word forms on lexical decision times (Baayen, Dijkstra, & Schreuder, 1997), the English reaction times depend on the surface frequency of…

An important psycholinguistic discussion centers on the question of whether bilinguals use the same representations and mechanisms for the languages they speak (the interactive view) or whether the representations and mechanisms for each language are kept strictly separated (the modular view). Empirical investigations of this question have focused…

This study investigates whether or not masked form priming effects in the naming task depend on the number of shared segments between prime and target. Dutch participants named bisyllabic words, which were preceded by visual masked primes. When primes shared the initial segment(s) with the target, naming latencies were shorter than in a control…

This study uses the morphological family size effect as a tool for exploring the degree of isomorphism in the networks of morphologically related words in the Hebrew and Dutch mental lexicon. Hebrew and Dutch are genetically unrelated, and they structure their morphologically complex words in very different ways. Two visual lexical decision…