This study examined how noun and verb processing in bilingual visual word recognition are affected by within and between-language overlap. We investigated how word class ambiguous noun and verb cognates are processed by bilinguals, to see if co-activation of overlapping word forms between languages benefits from additional overlap within a…

We report 3 experiments that examined whether presentation of a spoken word creates an attentional bottleneck associated with lexical processing in the absence of a response to that word. A spoken word and a visual stimulus were presented in quick succession, but only the visual stimulus demanded a response. Response times to the visual stimulus…

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focused on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically…

We examined whether bilinguals' conceptual representation of homonyms in one language are influenced by meanings in the other. One hundred and seventeen Spanish-English bilinguals generated sentences for 62 English homonyms that were also cognates with Spanish and which shared at least one meaning with Spanish (e.g., plane/"plano"). Production…

Is the bilingual language production system a dynamic system that can operate in different language activation states? Three experiments investigated to what extent cross-language phonological co-activation effects in language production are sensitive to the composition of the stimulus list. L1 Dutch-L2 English bilinguals decided whether or not a…

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic…

Using reading times and event-related brain potentials (ERPs), we investigated the processing of Japanese subject and object relative clauses (SRs/ORs). Previous research on English relative clauses shows that ORs take longer to read (King & Just, 1991) and elicit anterior negativity between fillers and gaps (King & Kutas, 1995), which is…

Two picture naming experiments show that compound word production in Mandarin Chinese and in English is determined by the compound's whole-word frequency, and not by its constituent morpheme frequency. Four control experiments rule out that these results are caused by recognition or articulatory processes. These results are consistent with models…

The structure of lexical entries and the status of lexical decomposition remain controversial. In the psycholinguistic literature, one aspect of this debate concerns the psychological reality of the morphological complexity difference between compound words ("teacup") and single words ("crescent"). The present study investigates morphological…

Three experiments investigating the use of temporal information in a reduced relative clause to interpret verb tense of the main clause found that subjects rapidly assessed temporal information to resolve tense ambiguity, demonstrating an incremental approach to comprehension that uses previous discourse to continuously update comprehension and…

Studied a bilingual Italian-English aphasic patient who was very poor in categorizing Italian nouns for grammatical gender in explicit metalinguistic tasks, and was at chance when gender could not be inferred from the word's phonology. However, she showed a good ability to modify adjectives to match the gender of nouns in a task that involved…

Examined whether the preferences of verbs for appearing in particular subcategory structures can influence parsing and whether this influence is graded according to the strength of the preferences. Findings suggest that the verb subcategory preferences do produce a graded influence on the parse, according to their strength. (28 references)…

Reports two sets of lexical priming experiments in which the morphological, semantic, and orthographic relationships between primes and targets are varied in three SOA conditions. Results showed that morphological structure plays a significant role in early visual recognition of English words that is independent of both semantic and orthographic…

Compared responses of English-French bilinguals performing semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks using translation-priming stimuli. Using the same stimuli, priming effects were significantly stronger in semantic categorization than in lexical decision, suggesting the translation-priming effect in the former is mediated by semantic…

Results from an English acceptability-rating experiment are presented that demonstrate that people find doubly nested relative-clause structures just as acceptable when only two verb phrases are included instead of the grammatically required three. Three possible accounts of the results are considered. (Author/VWL)