Vocabulary researchers have started expanding their assessment toolbox by incorporating timed tasks and psycholinguistic instruments (e.g., priming tasks) to gain insights into lexical development (e.g., Elgort, 2011; Godfroid, 2020b; Nakata & Elgort, 2020; Vandenberghe et al., 2021). These timed sensitive and implicit word measures differ…

Two lines of evidence emerged in the past suggesting that lexical form seemed to play a more important role in the organization of the second language (L2) mental lexicon than in that of the first language (L1) lexicon. They were masked orthographic priming in L2 word recognition and an elevated proportion of form-related responses in L2 word…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

When native speakers judge the acceptability of novel sentences, they appear to implicitly take competing formulations into account, judging novel sentences with a readily available alternative formulation to be less acceptable than novel sentences with no competing alternative. Moreover, novel sentences with a competing alternative are more…

This study explores the time-course of word processing by grammatical class (verbs vs. nouns) and meaning (action vs. non-action) by means of an ERP experiment. The morphology of Spanish words allows for a noun (e.g., "bail"-e [a dance]) or a verb (e.g., "bail"-ar [to dance]) to be formed by simply changing the suffix attached…

Constructionist research on L2 learning has focused on the degrees to which skewed frequency (Goldberg, Casenhiser & White, 2007; Casenhiser & Goldberg, 2005; Goldberg, Casenhiser, & Sethuraman 2004) in a person's linguistic environment can facilitate "entrenchment," "schematization," and "contingency…

Participants' eye movements were monitored while they read sentences in which high-frequency and low-frequency target words were presented either in normal font (e.g., account) or case alternated (e.g., aCcOuNt). The influence of the word frequency and case alternation manipulations on fixation times was examined. Although both manipulations had…

Psycholinguistic studies dealing with Alzheimer's disease (AD) commonly consider verbal aspects of language. In this article, we investigated both verbal and non-verbal aspects of speech production in AD. We used pauses and hesitations as markers of planning difficulties and hypothesized that AD patients show different patterns in the process of…

Many theories of language production and perception assume that in the normal course of processing a word, additional non-target words (lexical neighbors) become active. The properties of these neighbors can provide insight into the structure of representations and processing mechanisms in the language processing system. To infer the properties of…

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…

Shows how language processing is intimately tuned to input frequency. Examples are given of frequency effects in the processing of phonology, phonotactics, reading, spelling, lexis, morphosyntax, formulaic language, language comprehension, grammaticality, sentence production, and syntax. (Author/VWL)

Traditionally, the study of language patterns has been viewed primarily in terms of rules of grammar and discourse and of vocabulary choice. Researchers are now exploring the nature of collocations, or patterns of word sequence or co-occurrence in discourse. Most of the attention has been focused on colorful collocations, not on more ordinary…