We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated the effects of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus on the interpretation of pronouns in subsequent discourse. By probing the effects of these factors on real-time pronoun interpretation, we aim to contribute to our understanding of how topicality-related…

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

The issue of how information flows within the lexical system in written naming was investigated in five experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named target pictures that were accompanied by context pictures having phonologically and orthographically related or unrelated names (e.g., a picture of a "ball" superimposed on a picture of…

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 experiments compared how relatively long novel prefixed words (e.g., "overfarm") and existing prefixed words were processed in reading. The use of novel prefixed words allows one to examine the roles of whole-word access and decompositional processing in the processing of non-novel prefixed words. The two experiments found that,…

Examined whether phonological selection occurs sequentially or in parallel. College students named picture primes and targets, with varied response stimulus intervals between primes and targets. Results were consistent with Dell's (1988) two-stage sequential model of encoding, which shows an initial parallel activation within a lexical network…

Presents results of four experiments that show that verbs have family size effect independently of nominal conversion alternants, that this effect is a strict type frequency effect and not a token frequency effect, that the effect is co-determined by the morphological structure of the inflected verb, and that it occurs irrespective of the…

Reports the results of three experiments that used vowel and tone monitoring tasks to investigate the role of tone information in processing Mandarin. (Author/VWL)

In two masked priming experiments with Chinese characters, orthographic priming effects were observed in lexical decision and naming tasks despite the fact that the primes were phonologically unrelated to the target characters. Data suggest that the recovery of lexical information for Chinese characters does not depend on the prior activation of…

In three experiments, readers were presented with garden-path sentences containing reciprocal verbs, and their eye movements were monitored. Results demonstrate that information from the reciprocal verb influenced the earliest stages of syntactic processing. (29 references) (Author/CK)

Studied "pre-ambiguity" plausibility information, information about verb argument structure frequencies, and "post-ambiguity" constraints in undergraduates. All three types of constraints were helpful in the resolution of ambiguities. Ambiguity resolution becomes more difficult as the competitor interpretations becomes stronger. Study items are…

Investigates the relationship between focusing and coherence relations in pronoun comprehension. Examines a function of connectives: that of signaling coherence relations between two clauses. In three studies, coherence relations between sentence fragments ending in pronouns and participants' continuations to the fragments were identified.…

Four visual lexical decision experiments using the masked priming paradigm tested for effects of prime word frequency and cumulative root frequency with primes varying in degree of morphological and orthographic overlap with free root targets in French. (Author/VWL)

Notes that, in Spanish, there is empirical support for the notion that, in visual word recognition, the syllables initially activate competing lexical candidates. Presents experiments intended to explore these inhibitory processes and discusses the applicability of the data to a dual-route model and the time course of syllabic processing. (55…