The present study evaluated if lexical expertise, defined as the quality and quantity of a reader's word representations, influenced college students' ability to learn novel homophones while reading. In two experiments novel homophones (e.g. 'brale') and novel nonhomophones (e.g. 'gloobs') were embedded in sentences. In Experiment 1, novel…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is…

Unlike with the typically developing population, non-typically developing individuals, especially those with intellectual disabilities, have usually been recommended to learn and use only one language, despite perhaps coming from bilingual families or living in multilingual environments. This common practice, however, is not backed by empirical…

The processing advantage of Subject-gapped relative clause (SRC) versus Object-gapped relative clause (ORC) has been advocated by competing processing accounts. Using a self-paced listening paradigm, this study investigates what Chinese RC online processing asymmetry looks like under concurrent memory load manipulation. Both On-line listening…

During the temporal delay between the filler and gap sites in long-distance dependencies, the "active filler" strategy can be implemented in two ways: the filler phrase can be actively maintained in working memory ("maintenance account"), or it can be retrieved only when the parser posits a gap ("retrieval account").…

Previous studies have found that bilinguals differ in their response times on the bilingual version of Stroop Task. Automaticity and control and Language proficiency have emerged as important factors that lead to differences in the response time. This study aimed to understand Stroop Effect in Hindi-English bilinguals on the computerized version…

The present behavioral study aimed to examine the impact of language control expertise on two domain-general control processes, i.e. active inhibition of competing representations and overcoming of inhibition. We compared how Simultaneous Interpreters (SI) and Highly Proficient Bilinguals--two groups assumed to differ in language control…

Four picture-word interference experiments aimed to test the role of grammatical class in lexical production. In Experiment 1 target nouns and verbs were produced in presence of semantically unrelated distractors that could also be nouns and verbs. Participants were slower when the distractor was of the same grammatical category of the target. To…

The automaticity level and attention priority/strategy are two major theories that have attempted to explain the mechanism underlying the Stroop effect. Training is an effective way to manipulate the experience with the two dimensions (ink color and color word) in the Stroop task. In order to distinguish the above two factors (the automaticity or…

This study examined the temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in noise and background speech. In two visual-world experiments, English participants listened to target words while looking at four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. "candle"), an onset competitor (e.g. "candy"), a rhyme competitor (e.g.…

Psycholinguistic experiments conducted with the picture-word interference paradigm are typically preceded by a phase during which participants learn the words they will have to produce in the experiment. In Experiment 1, the pictures (e.g., a frog) were to be named and were presented with a categorically related (e.g., "cat") or…

The complicated cognitive processes involved in natural (primary) bilingualism lead to significant cognitive development. Executive functions as a fundamental component of human cognition are deemed to be affected by language learning. To date, a large number of studies have investigated how natural (primary) bilingualism influences executive…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the impact of part-whole (e.g., "car-motor") and functional associations (e.g., "car-garage") on single word (Experiment 1) and sentence production (Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, a classical picture-word task was used. In Experiment 2, the same stimuli and distractors were embedded into a sentence.…

We report two picture-word interference experiments investigating conceptual and lexical activation, and response selection, in speaking. We varied stimulus onset asynchrony to investigate potential fine-grained activation and competition effects. Morphologically related existing and pseudoword adjectives, as well as associatively related…

The study aimed to examine whether Kurdish-Persian early Bilingual university students (EBL) and Persian Monolingual university students (ML) differ on tasks of executive function (EF). Thirty male EBL and 30 male ML students from Ferdowsi University of Mashhad completed a Persian Stroop Color-Word task (SCWT), Backward Digit Span Test (BDST),…