Contradictory results have been found in Chinese as to whether subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. One major disagreement concerns the region where the difficulty arises. In this study, a "maze" task was used to localise processing difficulty by requiring participants to make a choice between two…

This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the sixth MOrphological PROcessing Conference (MOPROC), which was kept in June 2009 in Turku, Finland. The issue contains 13 articles by leading scholars in the field of morphological processing. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and…

The papers in this special issue of "Language and Cognitive Processing" on the neural bases of language production illustrate two general approaches in current cognitive neuroscience. One approach focuses on investigating cognitive issues, making use of the logic of associations/dissociations or the logic of neural markers as key investigative…

The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance "wh"-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what…

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

This paper reviews research on the production of referential expressions, examining the choice between explicit and attenuated lexical forms (e.g., pronouns vs. names), and between acoustically prominent and attenuated pronunciations. Both choices can be explained in terms of addressee-design, in that explicit expressions tend to be used in…

The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

A key question in bilingual language production research is how bilingual individuals control the use of their two languages. The psycholinguistic literature concerning language control is unresolved. It is a matter of controversy whether (a) issues to do with control are central to understanding bilingual language processing; and (b) if they are,…

The aim of this study was to examine processing interactions between segmental (consonant, vowel) and suprasegmental (tone) dimensions of Mandarin Chinese. Using a speeded classification paradigm, processing interactions were examined between each pair of dimensions. Listeners were asked to attend to one dimension while ignoring the variation…

In psycholinguistic research, there is still considerable debate about whether the type or token count of the frequency of a particular unit of language better predicts word recognition performance. The present study extends this distinction of type and token measures to the investigation of possible causes underlying syllable frequency effects.…

Three experiments investigated the psychological status of the "ego-moving" and "time-moving" metaphors by asking subjects to carry out temporal inferences stated in terms of spatial metaphors. Results provide evidence that people use spatial metaphors in temporal reasoning. Implications for the status of metaphoric systems are discussed.…

Four experiments examined the time course of phoneme monitoring in internally and externally generated speech. Aimed to replicate and extend previous findings of Wheeldon and Levelt (1995), who required their Dutch participants to monitor their own prearticulatory speech in order to investigate the generation of an abstract phonological code.…

Proposes that the P600 component in event related potential research is not restricted to reanalysis processes, but reflects difficulty with syntactic integration processes in general. (Author/VWL)

Discusses the importance, validity, and implications of the identity thesis that the P600 component of the scalp-recorded event-related potential is identical with the P3b, a domain-general component elicited by improbable task-related events. Explores epistemological complexities of the issue and discusses what the identity thesis does and does…

Examined whether context marked for grammatical gender can constrain the processing of homphone words in French. Homophones whose different meaning are associated with words of different genders were used in two cross-modal semantic priming experiments. (Author/VWL)