Bilinguals are slower when naming a picture in their second language than when naming it in their first language. Although the phenomenon has been frequently replicated, it is not known what causes the delay in the second language. In this article we discuss at what processing stages a delay might arise according to current models of bilingual…

In three experiments, we explore the effects of phonological properties such as neighbourhood density and frequency on speech production in Spanish. Specifically, we assess the reliability of the recent observation made by Vitevitch and Stamer (2006), according to which the neighbourhood effect in Spanish has a reverse polarity to that observed in…

In typical interactions, speakers frequently produce utterances that appear to reflect beliefs about the common ground shared with particular addressees. Horton and Gerrig (2005a) proposed that one important basis for audience design is the manner in which conversational partners serve as cues for the automatic retrieval of associated information…

Most current models of speech production predict interference from related context words in picture-naming tasks. However, Glaser and Dungelhoff (1984) reported semantic facilitation when the task was changed from basic-level naming to category-level naming. The authors explore two proposals to account for this change in polarity of the semantic…

Monitored eye movements of subjects who were following spoken instructions to click on a pictured object with a computer mouse. Subjects were slower to fixate on the target picture when the onset of the target word came from a competitor word than from a nonword as predicted by models of spoken-word recognition that incorporate lexical…

In three experiments we investigated the locus of the frequency effect in lexical access and the mechanism of gender feature selection. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to produce gender-marked verb plus pronominal clitic utterances in Italian (e.g., "portalo" (bring it [masculine]) in response to a written verb and pictured object. We…

Investigated the influence of morphologically complex and simple words on the production of morphologically complex and simple picture names in five picture-word interference studies. Two variants of picture-word interference were employed to separate morphological from semantic and phonological effects. (Author/VWL)