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…

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…

The present study explored when and how the top-down intention to speak influences the language production process. We did so by comparing the brain's electrical response for a variable known to affect lexical access, namely word frequency, during overt object naming and non-verbal object categorization. We found that during naming, the…

Early on during word recognition, letter positions are not accurately coded. Evidence for this comes from transposed-letter (TL) priming effects, in which letter strings generated by transposing two adjacent letters (e.g., "jugde") produce large priming effects, more than primes with the letters replaced in the corresponding position (e.g.,…

This study examines how the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents affects bilingual word recognition. Performing one of three tasks, Dutch-English bilinguals processed cognates with varying degrees of form overlap between their English and Dutch counterparts (e.g., "lamp-lamp" vs. "flood-vloed" vs. "song-lied"). In lexical…

Event-related brain potentials were recorded during RSVP reading to test the hypothesis that quantifier expressions are incrementally interpreted fully and immediately. In sentences tapping general knowledge ("Farmers grow crops/worms as their primary source of income"), Experiment 1 found larger N400s for atypical ("worms") than typical objects…

This study examined how 6-9 year-old English-speaking children and adults establish anaphoric dependencies during auditory sentence comprehension. Using eye-movement monitoring during listening and a corresponding sentence-picture judgment task, we investigated both the ultimate interpretation and the online processing of reflexives in comparison…

Theories of confidence judgments have embraced the role random error plays in influencing responses. An important next step is to identify the source(s) of these random effects. To do so, we used the stochastic judgment model (SJM) to distinguish the contribution of encoding and retrieval processes. In particular, we investigated whether dividing…

This paper investigates the cognitive processes underlying picture naming and auditory word repetition. In the two-step model of lexical access, both the semantic and phonological steps are involved in naming, but the former has no role in repetition. Assuming recognition of the to-be-repeated word, repetition could consist of retrieving the…

Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these…

Recent research using masked priming has suggested that there is a form of morphological decomposition that is based solely on the appearance of morphological complexity and that operates independently of semantic information [Longtin, C.M., Segui, J., & Halle, P. A. (2003). Morphological priming without morphological relationship. "Language and…

Four dual-task experiments examined visuospatial, articulatory, and central executive working memory involvement during the development and application of spatial mental models. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants read route and survey spatial descriptions while undertaking one of four secondary tasks targeting working memory components.…

Lexical access is concerned with how the spoken or visual input of language is projected onto the mental representations of lexical forms. To date, most theories of lexical access have been based almost exclusively on studies of spoken languages and/or orthographic representations of spoken languages. Relatively few studies have examined how…

In two experiments, we explored the time course and flexibility with which speakers' eye gaze can be used to disambiguate referring expressions in spontaneous dialog. Naive director/matcher pairs were separated by a barrier and saw each other's faces but not their displays. Displays held identical objects, with the matcher's arranged in a row and…

Two experiments examined the dynamics of lexical activation in spoken-word recognition. In both, the key materials were pairs of onset-matched picturable nouns varying in frequency. Pictures associated with these words, plus two distractor pictures were displayed. A gating task, in which participants identified the picture associated with…