Considers specific aspects of phonological and orthographic processing in Chinese that may differ from those in English. Emphasizes that early phonological processes and phonological mediation are two different questions in the identification-with-phonology hypothesis. Shows that "mediation" and "prelexical phonology," two very…

Finds phonological priming effects on compound targets (characters containing separate radical components); no evidence of phonological priming on integrated targets (those not containing separate radicals); semantic priming effects on both compound and integrated target recognition, suggesting that phonological and semantic activation are…

Investigates how a person comprehends a subject-verb-object sentence. Obtains effects of both reference scope and location of superordinates. Supports a slot-filling model of sentence comprehension (which should apply to English as well as Chinese sentences) in which subjects successively create a slot for filling the previously integrated unit in…

Finds that, because kanji morphemes of opposite and similar concepts are semantically activated both as morpheme units and compound-word units, semantic representations of the two morphemes and the compound word which they create compete with each other at the concept level, which slows down lexical decision and naming of the compound word. (SR)

Focuses on the role of cognitive structures in the reader's knowledge. Argues that causality is an important category in structuring human knowledge and that this property has consequences for text processing. Discusses research illustrating that the more the information in the text reflects causal categories, the more easily the information is…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) have written a fairly comprehensive review of the current literature on on-line second language (L2) processing, presenting data from eye movement, self-paced reading, and event-related potential (ERP) studies with the aim of evidencing possible differences between native language (L1) and L2 processing. The thrust of the…

Because words represent the building blocks upon which the facility to produce and comprehend language at all levels is based, the capacity of a child to learn words has immense impact on his or her developing abilities to communicate and engage properly with the outside world. Both the Keynote Article and the Commentaries in this issue…

In a recent "Cognition" paper ("Cognition" 85 (2002) B21), Bornkessel, Schlesewsky, and Friederici report ERP data that they claim "show that online processing difficulties induced by word order variations in German cannot be attributed to the relative infrequency of the constructions in question, but rather appear to reflect the application of…

In the present study, we looked at cross-modal priming effects produced by auditory presentation of morphologically complex pseudowords in order to investigate semantic integration during the processing of French morphologically complex items. In Experiment 1, we used as primes pseudowords consisting of a non-interpretable combination of roots and…

Listeners rely on native-language rhythm in segmenting speech; in different languages, stress-, syllable- or mora-based rhythm is exploited. The rhythmic similarity hypothesis holds that where two languages have similar rhythm, listeners of each language should segment their own and the other language similarly. Such similarity in listening was…

P. Bloom's (1990) data on subject omission are often taken as strong support for the view that child language can be explained in terms of full competence coupled with processing limitations in production. This paper examines whether processing limitations in learning may provide a more parsimonious explanation of the data without the need to…

Recognizing the specific speech act ( Searle, 1969) that a speaker performs with an utterance is a fundamental feature of pragmatic competence. Past research has demonstrated that native speakers of English automatically recognize speech acts when they comprehend utterances (Holtgraves & Ashley, 2001). The present research examined whether this…

Ute Bohnacker's (2006) article on the acquisition of the verb second (V2) property in German by native speakers of Swedish (also a V2 language) is an attempted rebuttal of Hakansson et al.'s (2002) work on first language (L1) transfer and aspects of the underlying theory on which the work is based: Processability Theory (Pienemann, 1998). The…

Event-related brain potentials were recorded while subjects listened to sentences containing a controlled infinitival complement. Subject and object control items were used, both with 2 potential antecedents in the upper clause. Half of the sentences had a gender agreement violation between the null subject of the infinitival complement and an…

Many recent models of language comprehension have stressed the role of distributional frequencies in determining the relative accessibility or ease of processing associated with a particular lexical item or sentence structure. However, there exist relatively few comprehensive analyses of structural frequencies, and little consideration has been…