In the realm of logographic writing systems, such as Chinese characters, orthographic transparency fundamentally differs from alphabetic languages, posing unique challenges for individuals with developmental dyslexia (DD). This study employed event-related potentials (ERPs) and a masked priming paradigm to investigate how Chinese children with DD…

Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different…

We studied the role of discourse coherence relations on structure formulation in sentence production by examining whether a connective, an essential signal of coherence relations, modulates the tendency for speakers to reuse sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). We further examined three possible modulating factors: the type of…

Arai et al. (2007) showed that structural priming in the comprehension of English dative sentences only occurred when the verb was repeated between prime and target, suggesting a lexically-dependent mechanism of structure prediction. However, a recent study in Mandarin comprehension found abstract (verb-independent) structural priming and such…

Most orthographies contain both accented and non-accented vowels. But are they processed as variants of the same letter unit or as separate abstract units? Recent research in French has revealed that accented vowels seem to be processed as separate units. Here we examined whether this phenomenon is universal or language-specific. We chose Spanish…

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that…

In a masked priming word-naming task, a facilitation due to the initial-segmental sound overlap for 2-character kanji prime-target pairs was affected by certain orthographic properties (Yoshihara, Nakayama, Verdonschot, & Hino, 2017). That is, the facilitation that was due to the initial mora overlap occurred only when the mora was the whole…

Two visual world experiments investigated the priming of form (e.g., phonology) during language processing. In Experiment 1, participants heard high cloze probability sentences like "In order to have a closer look, the dentist asked the man to open his . . ." while viewing visual arrays with objects like a predictable target mouth,…

Much of the evidence for morphological decomposition accounts of complex word identification has relied on the masked-priming paradigm. However, morphologically complex words are typically encountered in sentence contexts and processing begins before a word is fixated, when it is in the parafovea. To evaluate whether the single word-identification…

It is well established that emotion is extensively influenced by language. However, previous studies mainly focus on the first language (L1) rather than the second language (L2). The current study explored whether L2 shapes emotion perception in masked priming paradigm by distinguishing emotion-label words (e.g. fear, pride) and emotion-laden…

In two visual-world eye-tracking experiments, we explore the extent to which conflicting first-language (L1) based grammatical parses influence second-language (L2) learners' on-line and off-line interpretation of sentences in the L2. We used cross-linguistic structural priming to potentially boost competition from the L1 grammar during the…

Research has shown that adults' lexical-semantic representations are surprisingly malleable. For instance, the interpretation of ambiguous words (e.g., bark) is influenced by experience such that recently encountered meanings become more readily available (Rodd et al., 2016, 2013). However, the mechanism underlying this word-meaning priming effect…

We investigated the mechanisms underlying sandwich priming, a procedure in which a brief preprime target presentation precedes the conventional mask-prime-target sequence, used to study orthographic similarity. Lupker and Davis (2009) showed the sandwich paradigm enhances orthographic priming effects: With primes moderately related to targets,…

The present study investigated the effect of classroom-based syntactic training on children's abilities to produce passive sentences. Thirty-three monolingual English children (mean age 5;2), were involved in passive-voice training based on storytelling sessions within a priming design. The training was delivered in a classroom setting, with two…

In past decades, researchers have conducted a myriad of masked priming lexical decision experiments aimed at unveiling the early processes underlying lexical access. A relatively overlooked question is whether a masked unrelated wordlike/unwordlike prime influences the processing of the target stimuli. If participants apply to the primes the same…