Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Word age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects reading. The mapping hypothesis predicts AoA effects when input--output mappings are arbitrary. In Spanish, the orthography-to-phonology mappings required for word naming are consistent; therefore, no AoA effects are expected. Nevertheless, AoA effects have been found, motivating the present investigation of…

In bilingual language processing, the parallel activation hypothesis suggests that bilinguals activate their two languages simultaneously during language processing. Support for the parallel activation mainly comes from studies of lexical (word-form) processing, with relatively less attention to phonological (sound) processing. According to…

Indicates that phonological information of both whole-character and of sub-word components (radicals) was automatically activated despite experimental tasks in which subjects were given little incentive to execute phonetic processing. Concludes that the interaction of figurative and phonological processing is due to mutual activation of the whole…

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…

Finds that, when only one reading is possible, subjects make a judgment directly, but when multiple readings exist for a given character the subjects first compare the possible readings and make inferences; only when this process is complete do they apply a strategy to identify a reading as On (borrowed from Chinese) or Kun (native Japanese). (SR)

Finds that words were named faster in kana than in kanji but were translated faster in kanji than in kana. Shows that semantic access takes places 10 to 19 msec earlier in kanji words than in kana words, whereas phonological access takes places 27 to 31 msec earlier in kana words than in kanji words. (SR)

Examines, through an investigation of the effect of word frequency on lexical decision, alternative views of how the internal lexicon is structured and searched. A model is developed based on two internal lists: one a ready-access list, the other a complete list. (Author/AM)

The target article represents a significant advance in the level of sophistication applied to models of bilingual word recognition, and Dijkstra and van Heuven are to be congratulated on this endeavour. Bearing in mind the success of the (computational) BIA model in capturing detailed patterns of experimental data, I look forward to future…

A set of experiments are reported in which it was found that most subjects were better at identifying both meaning and wording changes in concrete sentences and subjects took significantly longer to encode and decode the abstract sentences. Implications of these findings are discussed. (Author/RM)

The author has developed a functional model for some aspects of language behavior which attempts to link a number of experimental findings within a relatively simple framework. In this paper the author sets out to "axiomatise some features of the model" (which had its origins in an attempt to account for a range of phenomena concerned…

This paper examines several ways in which the morphological structure of words might enter their lexical representation or processing. It addresses possibilities such as representational economy, efficiency of processing, and module-external motivations. (55 references) (MDM)

The definition of "orthographic neighbors" in word recognition research was analyzed in two experiments using a variety of the three-field technique. Only orthographically related pairs differing from the prime by the third or fourth letter showed inhibitory relatedness effects compared with unrelated word condition. Results suggest…

A study was made to assess the effect of comprehension on the recognition of meaning and wording changes with concrete and abstract sentences. The results of the experiment were discussed in light of recent models which propose different storage mechanisms for concrete and abstract sentences. (Author/RM)