Across the languages of a bilingual, translation equivalents can have the same orthographic form and shared meaning (e.g., TABLE in French and English). How such words, called orthographically identical cognates, are processed and represented in the bilingual brain is not well understood. In the present study, late French-English bilinguals…

Proactive interference (PI) refers to the finding that memory for recently studied (target) information can be vastly impaired by the previous study of other (nontarget) information. PI can be reduced in a number of ways, for instance, by directed forgetting of the prior nontarget information, the testing of the prior nontarget information, or an…

Conditional reasoning consists in combining a conditional premise with a categorical premise and inferring a conclusion from them. Two well-known conditional arguments are Modus Ponens (MP: "If P then Q; P//"therefore Q), which is logically valid and Affirmation of the Consequent (AC: "If P then Q; Q//"therefore "P"), which is not. The latter is…

People often falsely recognize items that are similar to previously encountered items. This robust memory error is referred to as "gist-based false recognition". A widely held view is that this error occurs because the details fade rapidly from our memory. Contrary to this view, an initial experiment revealed that, following the same encoding…

Three structural priming experiments investigated how monotransitive and intransitive structures are represented. Experiment 1 showed that priming from intransitives was stronger when the verb was the same in prime and target than when it was different, but monotransitive priming was unaffected by verb repetition. We argue that the activation of…

Recent findings suggest that the immediate free recall (IFR) of short lists is similar to immediate serial recall (ISR). These findings were obtained using a methodology in which participants did not know the list length in advance of each list, and this uncertainty may have encouraged participants to adopt atypical recall strategies. Therefore,…

Generics are statements such as "tigers are striped" and "ducks lay eggs". They express general, though not universal or exceptionless, claims about kinds (Carlson & Pelletier, 1995). For example, the generic "ducks lay eggs" seems true even though many ducks (e.g. the males) do not lay eggs. The universally quantified version of the statement…

Relatively little attention has been paid to the potential role that reflecting on the meaning and implications of suggested events (i.e., conceptual elaboration) might play in promoting the creation of false memories. Two experiments assessed whether encouraging repeated conceptual elaboration, would, like perceptual elaboration, increase false…

Complex networks describe how entities in systems interact; the structure of such networks is argued to influence processing. One measure of network structure, clustering coefficient, C, measures the extent to which neighbors of a node are also neighbors of each other. Previous psycholinguistic experiments found that the C of phonological…

Memory for emotional events is usually very good even when tested shortly after study, before it is altered by the influence of emotional arousal on consolidation. Immediate emotion-enhanced memory may stem from the influence of emotion on cognitive processes at encoding and retrieval. Our goal was to test which cognitive factors are necessary and…

Retrieval dynamics in context-dependent recall were explored via manipulations of external and internal context in two experiments. Participants were tested in either the same or different context as the material was learned in and correct recalls, errors, and recall latency measures were examined. In both experiments changes in context resulted…

Six lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the influence of complex structure on the processing speed of English compounds. All experiments revealed that semantically transparent compounds (e.g., "rosebud") were processed more quickly than matched monomorphemic words (e.g., "giraffe"). Opaque compounds (e.g., "hogwash") were also…

Current views of lexical selection in language production differ in whether they assume lexical selection by competition or not. To account for recent data with the picture-word interference (PWI) task, both views need to be supplemented with assumptions about the control processes that block distractor naming. In this paper, we propose that such…

We investigated the mechanisms by which fillers, such as "uh" and "um", affect memory for discourse. Participants listened to and attempted to recall recorded passages adapted from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The type and location of interruptions were manipulated through digital splicing. In Experiment 1, we tested a processing time…

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have a bad philosophical reputation. They seem, however, to be widely used and frequently accepted in many legal, political, and ethical contexts. Hahn and Oaksford (2007) argued that distinguishing strong and weak SSAs may have a rational basis in Bayesian decision theory. In this paper three experiments…