Is the bilingual language production system a dynamic system that can operate in different language activation states? Three experiments investigated to what extent cross-language phonological co-activation effects in language production are sensitive to the composition of the stimulus list. L1 Dutch-L2 English bilinguals decided whether or not a…

We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated the effects of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus on the interpretation of pronouns in subsequent discourse. By probing the effects of these factors on real-time pronoun interpretation, we aim to contribute to our understanding of how topicality-related…

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking…

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were…

The issue of how information flows within the lexical system in written naming was investigated in five experiments. In Experiment 1, participants named target pictures that were accompanied by context pictures having phonologically and orthographically related or unrelated names (e.g., a picture of a "ball" superimposed on a picture of…

We report three experiments on reference resolution in Dutch. The results of two off-line experiments and an eye-tracking study suggest that the interpretation of different referential forms--in particular, "emphatic" strong pronouns, weak pronouns, and demonstrative pronouns--cannot be satisfactorily explained in terms of a single…

During the last years there has been an increasing interest in examining the brain responses to word order variations. In one ERP study conducted in Spanish, Casado, Martin-Loeches, Munoz, and Fernandez-Frias (2005) had participants read Spanish transitive sentences with either an SVO (subject-verb-object) or an OVS order. The word order of a…

Two experiments compared how relatively long novel prefixed words (e.g., "overfarm") and existing prefixed words were processed in reading. The use of novel prefixed words allows one to examine the roles of whole-word access and decompositional processing in the processing of non-novel prefixed words. The two experiments found that,…

In five picture-word interference experiments, this article explores the gender-congruity effect in Dutch in two languages, Spanish and Catalan. Performance was not affected by the relationship between the gender of the picture and the gender of the word. Results show that the gender-congruity effect is not a universal effect, but varies from…

Reports the results of three experiments that used vowel and tone monitoring tasks to investigate the role of tone information in processing Mandarin. (Author/VWL)

Three experiments examined initial fixation position effects for Hebrew readers. Experiment 1 found the preferred viewing location for Hebrew readers to be to the right of the center of words and not modulated by inflectional morphological constraints. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that derivational morphological constraints do modulate the…

Proposes a dynamical systems approach to parsing in which syntactic hypotheses are associated with attractors in a metric space. The experiments discussed documented various contingent frequency effects that cut across traditional linguistic grains, each of which was predicted by the dynamical systems model. (47 references) (Author/CK)

Presents results of four experiments that show that verbs have family size effect independently of nominal conversion alternants, that this effect is a strict type frequency effect and not a token frequency effect, that the effect is co-determined by the morphological structure of the inflected verb, and that it occurs irrespective of the…

In three experiments, readers were presented with garden-path sentences containing reciprocal verbs, and their eye movements were monitored. Results demonstrate that information from the reciprocal verb influenced the earliest stages of syntactic processing. (29 references) (Author/CK)

Through experimentation, concurrent articulation was demonstrated to impair native English subject's ability to compare the internal stress patterns of written words. It was determined that the articulators' movements specifically affected stress analysis of words and this reflected postlexical, off-line processing. (25 references) (JL)