The present research explores working memory (WM) development in monolingual as well as emergent bilingual children immersed in an L2 at school. Evidence from recent years suggests that bilingualism may boost domain-general executive control, but impair nonexecutive linguistic processing. Both are relevant for verbal WM, but different paradigms…

Many studies have previously reported that the recognition of a stem target (e.g., "teach") is facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a prime consisting of a derived form of it (e.g., "teacher"). We conducted two lexical decision experiments to investigate masked morphological priming in Spanish. Experiment 1 showed…

In Spanish, objects and events at subject position constrain the selection of different forms of the auxiliary verb "to be": locative predicates about objects require "estar en", while those relating to events require "ser en", both translatable as "to be in". Subjective ratings showed that while the "object + ser + en" is considered as incorrect,…

Recent research suggests that there is a processing distinction between consonants and vowels in visual-word recognition. Here we conjointly examine the time course of consonants and vowels in processes of letter identity and letter position assignment. Event related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in…

A commonly shared assumption in the field of visual-word recognition is that retinotopic representations are rapidly converted into abstract representations. Here we examine the role of visual form vs. abstract representations during the early stages of word processing--as measured by masked priming--in young children (3rd and 6th Graders) and…

The goal of the present study was to investigate the electrophysiological correlates of second-language (L2) morphosyntactic processing in highly proficient late learners of an L2 with long exposure to the L2 environment. ERPs were collected from 22 English-Spanish late learners while they read sentences in which morphosyntactic features of the L2…

Unagreement patterns consist in a person feature mismatch between subject and verb that is nonetheless grammatical in Spanish. The processing of this type of construction gives new insights into the understanding of agreement processes during language comprehension. Here, we contrasted oscillatory brain activity triggered by Unagreement in…

Grammatical agreement makes different demands on speakers of different languages. Being widespread in the languages of the world, the features of agreement systems offer valuable tests of how language affects deep-seated domains of human cognition and categorization. Number agreement is one such domain, with intriguing evidence that typological…

Studies from many languages consistently report that subject relative clauses (SR) are easier to process than object relatives (OR). However, Hsiao and Gibson (2003) report an OR preference for Chinese, a finding that has been contested. Here we report faster OR versus SR processing in Basque, an ergative, head-final language with pre-nominal…

Word reading in alphabetic languages involves letter identification, independently of the format in which these letters are written. This process of letter "regularization" is sensitive to word context, leading to the recognition of a word even when numbers that resemble letters are inserted among other real letters (e.g., M4TERI4L). The present…

Letter identities and number identities are usually thought to imply different cortical mechanisms. Specifically, the left fusiform gyrus responds more to letters than to digits (T. A. Polk et al., 2002). However, a widely circulated statement on the internet illustrates that it is possible to use numbers (leet digits) as parts of words, 4ND TH3…

To investigate the neural bases of consonant and vowel processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed in three different conditions: (i) simultaneous presentation of all letters (baseline condition); (ii) presentation of all letters,…

This paper investigates whether the semantic and phonological levels in speech production are specific to spoken languages or universal across modalities. We examined semantic and phonological effects during Catalan Signed Language (LSC: Llengua de Signes Catalana) production using an adaptation of the picture-word interference task: native and…

In the present visual-world experiment, participants were presented with visual displays that included a target item that was a semantic associate of an abstract or a concrete word. This manipulation allowed us to test a basic prediction derived from the qualitatively different representational framework that supports the view of different…

Lexical access is concerned with how the spoken or visual input of language is projected onto the mental representations of lexical forms. To date, most theories of lexical access have been based almost exclusively on studies of spoken languages and/or orthographic representations of spoken languages. Relatively few studies have examined how…