In this study, we asked how the emotional status, i.e., valence and arousal, and concreteness of idioms contribute to their processing. Additionally, we asked whether the contribution of emotional factors and concreteness is modulated by other linguistic constraints, specifically idiom familiarity and decomposability, that has been shown to impact…

Previous studies using artificial languages suggest that sentence production can be guided by verb-specific as well as verb-general statistics present in the language input. Here we investigated whether the statistical properties of ongoing input in the speakers' native language systematically affected their sentence production. Three experiments…

This article shows that first language (L1) transfer may not be effectively maintained in the interlanguage due to confounding factors in the second language (L2). When two factors, "A" and "B," are correlated in the L2, second language learners may only acquire "B," even if "A" is present in the L1.…

Purpose: We investigated whether rhythm discrimination is mainly driven by the native language of the listener or by the fundamental design of the human auditory system and universal cognitive mechanisms shared by all people irrespective of rhythmic patterns in their native language. Method: In multiple experiments, we asked participants to listen…

The morphological structure of the word has a central function in the organization of the mental lexicon and word recognition. Polymorphemic words in Arabic are composed of two non-concatenated morphemes: root and word-pattern. This study is the first to address the issue of nominal-pattern priming among young developing Arabic speakers. I…

Two experimental paradigms, a picture-naming task and a Stroop interference task, were employed to address the structure of the multilingual mental lexicon; more specifically, the process of multilingual non-selective lexical access. German-English-French speakers named objects in their native and most dominant language in a task that included a…

We present a series of experiments investigating English-speaking children's comprehension of "it"-clefts and "wh"-pseudoclefts. Previous developmental work has found children to have asymmetric difficulties interpreting object clefts. We show that these difficulties disappear when clefts are presented in felicitous contexts,…

Conventional expressions, a subset of multiword units, are the target of the current study, which aims to address questions concerning native and nonnative speakers' knowledge and processing of a set of such strings. To this end, 13 expressions identified as conventional in the southwest of France were tested in an online contextualized…

When studying verbal materials, both adults and children are often poor at accurately monitoring their level of learning and regulating their subsequent restudy of materials, which leads to suboptimal test performance. The present experiment investigated how monitoring accuracy and regulation of study could be improved when learning idiomatic…

Recent fMRI and TMS studies on idiom comprehension have shown that the prefrontal cortex is involved in idiom processing. Since schizophrenic patients exhibit prefrontal "structural" changes and dysexecutive "behavioural" deficits, we hypothesised an impairment in idiom comprehension, correlating with performance on executive…

What helps us determine whether a word is a noun or a verb, without conscious awareness? We report on cues in the way individual English words are spelled, and, for the first time, identify their neural correlates via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We used a lexical decision task with trisyllabic nouns and verbs containing…

This study investigated the effects of first language prosodic transfer on the perception and production of English lexical stress and the relation between stress perception and production by second language learners. To test the effect of Thai tonal distribution rules and stress patterns on native Thai speakers' perception and production of…

The present study investigated scrambling effects on the processing of Japanese sentences and priority information used among thematic roles, case particles and grammatical functions. Reaction times for correct sentence decisions were significantly prolonged for scrambled active sentences with transitive verbs in the first experiment and with…

Describes three experiments designed to determine whether grapheme-to-phoneme rules are automatically applied when a word pattern is encoded. Concludes that grapheme-to-phoneme translation is a natural response to written words, at least when naming is required, and that mediation by visual mechanisms can be ruled out. (Author/MES)

About 25 children in each of grades 3, 5, 7, 9, and 11 were tested in their ability to solve linear syllogisms, such as: John is taller than Mary. Mary is taller than Pete. Who is tallest--John, Mary, or Pete? Response latencies and error rates decreased across grade levels and sessions. Component latencies also generally decreased with increasing…