Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…

In three structural priming experiments, we investigated whether deaf and hearing writers differ in the processes and representations underlying written language production. Experiment 1 showed that deaf writers of Mandarin Chinese exhibited comparable extents of structural priming and comparable lexical boosts, suggesting that syntactic encoding…

Do we structure object-related conceptual information according to real-world sensorimotor experience, or can it also be shaped by linguistic information? This study investigates whether a feature of language coded in grammar--numeral classifiers--affects the conceptual representation of objects. We compared speakers of Mandarin (a classifier…

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that…

Semantic and phonological similarity effects provide critical constraints on the mechanisms underlying language production. In the present study, we jointly investigated effects of semantic and phonological similarity using the continuous naming task. In the semantic condition, Chinese Mandarin speakers named a list of pictures composed of 12…

Languages differ in the importance of acoustic dimensions for speech categorization. This poses a potential challenge for second language (L2) learners, and the extent to which adult L2 learners can acquire new perceptual strategies for speech categorization remains unclear. This study investigated the effects of extensive English L2 immersion on…

Phonological interference during written-word meaning judgments occurs in both Chinese and English, suggesting that word-level phonological activation is universal rather than dependent on the sublexical structures that vary with writing systems. To accommodate this universality, we distinguish two sources of phonological congruence between a…

People often experience difficulties when they first hear a novel accent. Prior research has shown that relatively fast natural accent accommodation can occur. However, there has been little investigation of the underlying perceptual mechanism that drives the learning. The current study examines whether phonemic boundary changes play a central…

The "gleam-glum effect" is a novel sound symbolic finding that words with the /i:/-phoneme (like "gleam") are perceived more positive emotionally than matched words with the /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/-phoneme (like "glum"). We provide data that not only confirm the effect but also are consistent with an…

Knowledge about how characters are written has been argued to play a particularly important role in how children learn to read Chinese. In the current study, we investigate the role that knowledge about writing characters plays in visual word processing in skilled adult readers. While there is clear neuropsychological evidence against the strong…

Previous studies on spoken word production have shown that native English speakers used phoneme-sized units (e.g., a word-initial phoneme, C) to produce English words, and native Mandarin Chinese speakers employed syllable-sized units (e.g., a word-initial consonant and vowel, CV) as phonological encoding units in Chinese. With spoken word…

This article examines the influence of gradient foreign accentedness on lexical competition during spoken word recognition. Using native and Mandarin-accented English words ranging in degree of foreign accentedness, we investigate the effect of increased accentedness on (a) the size of the competitor space and (b) the strength and duration of…

Convergent evidence suggests that syllables play a primary and distinctive role in the phonological phase of Mandarin Chinese word production. Specifically, syllables are selected before other phonological components and guide subsyllabic encoding. The proximity of phonological syllables to word representations in Chinese languages ensures that…

Evidence from both alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages has suggested the role of orthography in the processing of spoken words in individuals' native language (L1). Less evidence has existed for such effects in nonnative (L2) spoken-word processing. Whereas in L1 orthographic representations are learned only after phonological representations…

Prior research suggesting that longer bilingual experience benefits inhibitory control and monitoring has been criticized for a lack of control over confounding variables. We addressed this issue by using a propensity-score matching procedure that enabled us to match early and late bilinguals on 18 confounding variables--for example, demographic…