Visual artists and photographers believe that a viewer's gaze can be guided by selective use of image clarity and blur, but there is little systematic research. In this study, participants performed several eye-tracking tasks with the same naturalistic photographs, including recognition memory for the entire photo, as well as recognition memory…

The influence of coarticulation cues on spoken word recognition is not yet well understood. This acoustic/phonetic variation may be processed early and recognized as sensory noise to be stripped away, or it may influence processing at a later prelexical stage. The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) in a picture/spoken word matching…

Are there individual differences in children's prediction of upcoming linguistic input and what do these differences reflect? Using a variant of the preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), we found that, upon hearing a sentence like, "The boy eats a big cake," 2-year-olds fixate edible objects…

Two prominent dual-route computational models of reading aloud are the dual-route cascaded (DRC) model, and the connectionist dual-process plus (CDP+) model. While sharing similarly designed lexical routes, the two models differ greatly in their respective nonlexical route architecture, such that they often differ on nonword pronunciation. Neither…

We tested the magnitude of the face identity aftereffect following adaptation to different modes of adaptors in four experiments. The perceptual midpoint between two morphed famous faces was measured pre- and post-adaptation. Significant aftereffects were observed for visual (faces) and nonvisual adaptors (voices and names) but not nonspecific…

Previous studies have shown that past and future temporal concepts are spatially represented (past being located to the left and future to the right in a mental time line). This study aims at further investigating the nature of this space-time conceptual metaphor, by testing whether the temporal reference of words orient spatial attention or…

Recent studies have found that masked word primes that are orthographic neighbors of the target inhibit lexical decision latencies (Davis & Lupker, 2006; Nakayama, Sears, & Lupker, 2008), consistent with the predictions of lexical competition models of visual word identification (e.g., Grainger & Jacobs, 1996). In contrast, using the…

In four experiments, we investigated whether masked stimuli in priming experiments are subjected to early or to late selection. In Experiment 1, participants classified four target-pictures as being small or large. In line with early selection accounts, prime-pictures with a different perceptual appearance as the experienced targets did not elicit…

Two lexical decision experiments examined the joint effects of stimulus quality, semantic context, and cue-target associative strength when all factors were intermixed in a block of trials. Both experiments found a three-way interaction. Semantic context and stimulus quality interacted when associative strength between cue-target pairs was strong,…

Since M. M. Chun and Y. Jiang's (1998) original study, a large body of research based on the contextual cuing paradigm has shown that the visuocognitive system is capable of capturing certain regularities in the environment in an implicit way. The present study investigated whether regularities based on the semantic category membership of the…

It is much debated whether translation is semantically mediated or based on word-word associations at the lexical level. In 2 experiments with Dutch (L1)-French (L2) bilinguals, the authors showed that there is a semantic number magnitude effect in both forward and backward translation of number words: It takes longer to translate number words…