Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to…

When hearing an object label, a specific object may come to mind. With the phrase, "There was a balloon in the pack/air" the representation of balloon varies based on the implied shape (deflated vs. inflated). The current study investigated whether the implied shape affects sentence-picture verification for adults and preschool children.…

Little is explored regarding the modality-specific differences in recall abilities of preschool children. Understanding modality-specific differences in the recall at an early age might give an insight into age-linked trends, which can lay a foundation for later development. The current study used a cross-sectional design to investigate the…

Purpose: When speakers retrieve words, they do so extremely quickly and accurately--both speed and accuracy of word retrieval are compromised in persons with aphasia (PWA). This study examined the contribution of two domain-general mechanisms: processing speed and cognitive control on word retrieval in PWA. Method: Three groups of participants,…

Purpose: The study examined age-related differences in the use of semantic context and in the effect of semantic competition in spoken sentence processing. We used offline (response latency) and online (eye gaze) measures, using the "visual world" eye-tracking paradigm. Method: Thirty younger and 30 older adults heard sentences related…

Seeing articulatory gestures enhances speech perception. Perception of auditory speech can even be changed by incongruent visual gestures, which is known as the McGurk effect (e.g., dubbing a voice saying /mi/ onto a face articulating /ni/, observers often hear /ni/). In children, the McGurk effect is weaker than in adults, but no previous…

One core question in studies of language processing is the extent to which interlocutors engage in real-time communicative perspective-taking. Current evidence suggests that both children and young adult listeners are able to draw on common ground (shared knowledge) to guide referential interpretation. However, less is known about older listeners,…

Infants as young as 2 months can integrate audio and visual aspects of speech articulation. A shift of attention from the eyes towards the mouth of talking faces occurs around 6 months of age in monolingual infants. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of attention during audiovisual speech processing is influenced by speech and language…

The present study investigated infants' knowledge about familiar nouns. Infants (n = 46, 12-20-month-olds) saw two-image displays of familiar objects, or one familiar and one novel object. Infants heard either a matching word (e.g. "foot' when seeing foot and juice), a related word (e.g. "sock" when seeing foot and juice) or a nonce…

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

The present article is aimed to investigate whether there are any differences between youngsters and adults in their working and long-term memory functioning. The theory of Depth of Processing (Craik and Lockhart in "J Verbal Learning Verbal Behav" 11:671-684, 1972) discusses the varying degrees of strengths of memory traces as the…

The study aimed to examine whether Kurdish-Persian early Bilingual university students (EBL) and Persian Monolingual university students (ML) differ on tasks of executive function (EF). Thirty male EBL and 30 male ML students from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad completed a Persian Stroop Color-Word task (SCWT), Backward Digit Span Test (BDST),…

Evidentiality in language marks how information contained in a sentence was acquired. For instance, Turkish has two past-tense morphemes that mark whether access to information was direct (typically, perception) or indirect (hearsay/inference). Full acquisition of evidential systems appears to be a late achievement cross-linguistically. Currently,…

This research revealed both similarities and striking differences in early language proficiency among infants from a broad range of advantaged and disadvantaged families. English-learning infants ("n" = 48) were followed longitudinally from 18 to 24 months, using real-time measures of spoken language processing. The first goal was to…

Few studies have explored the development of the gesture-speech system after the two-word stage. Aim of the present study is to examine developmental changes in speech and gesture use, in the context of a simple naming task. Fifty-one children (age range: 2;3-7;6) were divided into five age groups and requested to name pictures representing…