Two experiments using a lexical priming paradigm investigated how stress information is processed in reading Italian words. In both experiments, prime and target words either shared the stress pattern or they had different stress patterns. We expected that lexical activation of the prime would favour the assignment of congruent stress to the…

Contradictory results have been found in Chinese as to whether subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. One major disagreement concerns the region where the difficulty arises. In this study, a "maze" task was used to localise processing difficulty by requiring participants to make a choice between two…

"AU" /o/ and "AN" /a/ in French are both complex graphemes, but they vary in their strength of association to their respective sounds. The letter sequence "AU" is systematically associated to the phoneme /o/, and as such is always parsed as a complex grapheme. However, "AN" can be associated with either one…

We present an MEG study of homonym recognition in reading, identifying effects of a semantic measure of homonym ambiguity. This measure sheds light on two competing theories of lexical access: the "early access" theory, which entails that lexical access occurs at early (pre 200 ms) stages of processing; and the "late access" theory, which…

Mental representations formed from words or phrases may vary considerably in their feature-based complexity. Modern theories of retrieval in sentence comprehension do not indicate how this variation and the role of encoding processes should influence memory performance. Here, memory retrieval in language comprehension is shown to be influenced by…

Two eye-tracking experiments and two self-paced reading experiments investigated processing of sentences containing reduced relative clauses. Processing of a reduced relative is facilitated when it is preceded by a sentence that has the same syntactic structure, as long as the preceding sentence contains the same critical verb as the target…

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 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,…

Three primed naming experiments were conducted to investigate development of sublexical processing in reading Chinese. Target characters were either homophonic to or semantically related to phonetic radicals embedded in irregular complex characters, but not to the complex characters themselves. (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…

Developmental aspects of spelling-to-sound mapping for English monosyllabic words are investigated with a simple two-layer network model using a simple, general learning rule. The model is trained on both regularly and irregularly spelled words but extracts regular spelling to sound relationships, which it can apply to new words. Training-related…