This study investigates how academic disciplines impact second language (L2) lexical competencies. Prior L2 research has often overlooked the broader effects of disciplinary backgrounds on lexical development. To address this gap, this study utilized lexical decision, memory, and semantic fluency tasks to examine lexicon recognition, memory, and…

The present study investigated the effect of emotional valence on auditory word recognition memory in English as a foreign language. Participants included 48 native Spanish speakers whose foreign language was English. They viewed four emotionally negative, four positive, and four neutral videos that, in total, contained 48 emotionally valenced…

Gifted children are described as very talented children who achieve more than their age mates in one or more domains (Steiner and Carr in Educ Psychol Rev 15(3):215-246, 2003). These children potentially share a cognitive advantage enabling them to excel in language, but also in other domains. In the present study we explored whether gifted…

In a touch-screen paradigm, we recorded 3- to 7-year-olds' (N = 108) accuracy and response times (RTs) to assess their comprehension of 2-clause sentences containing "before" and "after". Children were influenced by order: performance was most accurate when the presentation order of the 2 clauses matched the chronological order…

Previous research has shown that processing words with an up/down association (e.g., bird, foot) can influence the subsequent identification of visual targets in congruent location (at the top/bottom of the screen). However, as facilitation and interference were found under similar conditions, the nature of the underlying mechanisms remained…

Prospective memory (PM) refers to memory for future intentions (e.g. remembering to press a button when you see an animal word). Researchers classify PM intentions in the laboratory as focal or nonfocal primarily in two ways. One way, task-appropriateness, refers to how the processing for the intention relates to the processing required for an…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

Event-based prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform intended actions after a delay. An important theoretical issue is whether and how people monitor the environment to execute an intended action when a target event occurs. Performing a PM task often increases the latencies in ongoing tasks. However, little is known about the…

The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in "J Mem Lang" 33: 149-174, 1994) or the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in "J Mem Lang" 51(1), 1-22, 2004)…

Agreement is a covariation in morphological form that reflects relations between words. A series of experiments were carried out in Italian during production and comprehension where an element interferes with agreement. The likelihood of interference found in both modalities is related to the markedness of the intervener and to its grammatical…

Semantic priming is typically enhanced by target degradation in both lexical decision and pronunciation tasks. Using these tasks, we examined this priming x target degradation interaction when the prime and target were related via symmetrical (SYM) associations (e.g., "east west"), as in previous research, or for the first time via forward…

Two experiments tested whether Russian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) are sensitive to gender agreement when performing a gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the presence of overt gender agreement between verbs and/or adjectival modifiers and postverbal subject nouns memory was varied. In Experiment 2, agreement…

Two studies that examine whether the forgetting caused by the processing demands of working memory tasks is domain-general or domain-specific are presented. In each, separate groups of adult participants were asked to carry out either verbal or nonverbal operations on exactly the same processing materials while maintaining verbal storage items.…

Learning a new word involves integration with existing lexical knowledge. Previous work has shown that sleep-associated memory consolidation processes are important for the engagement of novel items in lexical competition. In 3 experiments we used spaced exposure regimes to investigate memory for novel words and whether lexical integration can…

Decision-makers effortlessly balance the need for urgency against the need for caution. Theoretical and neurophysiological accounts have explained this tradeoff solely in terms of the "quantity" of evidence required to trigger a decision (the "threshold"). This explanation has also been used as a benchmark test for evaluating…