In three priming experiments, we investigated whether the meanings of ambiguous morphemes were activated during word recognition. Using a meaning generation task, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the dominant meaning of individually presented ambiguous morphemes was reported more often than did other less frequent meanings. Also, participants tended…

There is a general debate as to whether constituent representations are accessed in compound processing. The present study addresses this issue, exploiting the properties of Italian compounds to test the role of headedness and semantic transparency in constituent access. In a first experiment, a lexical decision task was run on nominal compounds.…

Five experiments were conducted to examine how unsuccessful retrieval influences learning and subsequent memory. We used a cued-recall paradigm that produces many unsuccessful retrieval attempts (followed by feedback) and allows comparisons to be made between later memory for these trials and trials that only required reading or studying the…

Dual-process models differentiate between two bases of memory, recollection and familiarity. It is routinely claimed that deeper, semantic encoding enhances recollection relative to shallow, non-semantic encoding, and that recollection is largely a product of semantic, elaborative rehearsal. The present experiments show that this is not always the…

When two consonants within an English word were transposed to create a nonword, difficulty in lexical decision responses to that nonword was revealed, most strongly when the coda of the first syllable was exchanged with the onset of the second (e.g., "nakpin" derived from "napkin"), but also when onsets were exchanged between syllables (e.g.,…

The visual word recognition literature has been dominated by the study of "monosyllabic" words in factorial experiments, computational models, and megastudies. However, it is not yet clear whether the behavioral effects reported for monosyllabic words generalize reliably to "multisyllabic" words. Hierarchical regression techniques were used to…

This study investigated whether Foygel and Dell's (2000) interactive two-step model of speech production could simulate the number and type of errors made in picture-naming by 68 children of elementary-school age. Results showed that the model provided a satisfactory simulation of the mean error profile of children aged five, six, seven, eight and…

In dialog settings, conversational partners converge on similar names for referents. These "lexically entrained" terms [Garrod, S., & Anderson, A. (1987). "Saying what you mean in dialog: A study in conceptual and semantic co-ordination." "Cognition, 27," 181-218] are part of the common ground between the particular individuals who established the…

False memories are sometimes strong enough to elicit recollective experiences. This phenomenon has been termed Phantom Recollection (PR). The Conjoint Recognition (CR) paradigm has been used to empirically separate PR from other memory processes. Recently, a simplification of the CR procedure has been proposed. We herein extend the simplified CR…

This paper investigates the cognitive processes underlying picture naming and auditory word repetition. In the two-step model of lexical access, both the semantic and phonological steps are involved in naming, but the former has no role in repetition. Assuming recognition of the to-be-repeated word, repetition could consist of retrieving the…

The standard task used to study inflectional processing of verbs involves presentation of the stem form from which the participant is asked to generate the past tense. This task reveals a processing disadvantage for irregular relative to regular English verbs, more pronounced for lower-frequency items. Dual- and single-mechanism theories of…

Basic-level picture naming is hampered by the presence of a semantically related context word (compared to an unrelated word), whereas picture categorization is facilitated by a semantically related context word. This reversal of the semantic context effect has been explained by assuming that in categorization tasks, basic-level distractor words…

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…

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a…

Semantic features have different levels of importance in indexing a target concept. The article proposes that semantic relevance, an algorithmically derived measure based on concept descriptions, may efficiently capture the relative importance of different semantic features. Three models of how semantic features are integrated in terms of…