Novel word learning and consolidation was studied in inexperienced language learners, to conceptually replicate and extend a similar study in experienced learners by Bakker, Takashima, Van Hell, Janzen, and McQueen (2015). Participants learned definitions for novel words on Day 1 and for another set of novel words on Day 2. Brain potentials…

The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in "J Mem Lang" 33: 149-174, 1994) or the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in "J Mem Lang" 51(1), 1-22, 2004)…

The current study examined how morpho-semantic processing of derivational morphology develops from later childhood through adolescence to adulthood in Finnish. Finnish is a synthetic language rich both in derivation and inflection. It has been suggested that children gradually acquire the ability to process morphologically complex word structures.…

This study investigated the effects of the Arabic root in the visual word recognition process among young readers in order to explore its role in reading acquisition and its development within the structure of the Arabic mental lexicon. We examined cross-modal priming of words that were derived from the same root of the target…

The interconnectedness of bilingual memory remains a topic of great debate. Semantic priming provides a powerful methodological tool with which to investigate this issue in early bilingual toddlers. Semantic priming effects were investigated in 21 bilingual toddlers (2.5 years) within and across each of their languages. Results revealed the first…

Previous research suggests that English-speaking children comprehend agent-patient verb passives earlier than experiencer-theme verb passives (Maratsos, Fox, Becker, & Chalkley, 1985). We report three experiments examining whether such effects reflect delayed acquisition of the passive syntax or instead are an artifact of the experimental task,…

In this plenary paper, we present a review of language research in children with cochlear implants along with an outline of a 5-year project designed to examine the lexical access for production and recognition. The project will use auditory priming, picture naming with auditory or visual interfering stimuli (Picture-Word Interference and…

The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a…

Words differ considerably in the amount of associated semantic information. Despite the crucial role of meaning in language, it is still unclear whether and how this variability modulates language learning. Here, we provide initial evidence demonstrating that implicit learning in repetition priming is influenced by the amount of semantic features…

Our aim was to investigate whether developing language system, as measured by a priming task for spoken words, is organized by semantic categories. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a priming task for spoken words in 18- and 24-month-old monolingual French learning children. Spoken word pairs were either semantically related…

The relation between the maturation of brain mechanisms responsible for the N400 elicitation in the event-related brain potential (ERP) and the development of behavioral language skills was investigated in 12-month-old infants. ERPs to words presented in a picture-word priming paradigm were analyzed according to the infants' production and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to contribute to the current understanding of how children with specific language impairment (SLI) organize their mental lexicons. The study examined semantic and phonological priming in children with and without SLI. Method: Thirteen children (7;0-11;3 [years;months]) with SLI and 13 age-matched children…