A classic question in the recognition memory literature is whether retrieval is best described as a continuous-evidence process consistent with signal detection theory (SDT), or a threshold process consistent with many multinomial processing tree (MPT) models. Because receiver operating characteristics (ROCs) based on confidence ratings are…

In the domain of discourse processing, it has been claimed that older adults (60-0-year-olds) are less likely to encode and remember some kinds of information from texts than young adults. The experiment described here shows that they do make a particular kind of inference to the same extent that college-age adults do. The inferences examined were…

Speakers frequently make subject-verb number agreement errors in the presence of a local noun with a different number from the head of the subject phrase. A series of four experiments used a two-choice response time (RT) paradigm to investigate how the latency of correct agreement decisions is modulated by the presence of a number attractor, and…

The lexical bias effect (the tendency for phonological speech errors to create words more often than nonwords) has been debated for over 30 years. One account attributes the effect to a lexical editor, a strategic component of the production system that examines each planned phonological string, and suppresses it if it is a nonword. The…

Bloem and La Heij (2003) reported that in a word-translation task context words induce semantic interference whereas context pictures induce semantic facilitation. This finding was accounted for by a model of lexical access in which: (a) semantic facilitation is localized at the conceptual level, (b) semantic interference is localized at the…

Nonwords created by transposing two "adjacent" letters (i.e., transposed-letter (TL) nonwords like "jugde") are very effective at activating the lexical representation of their base words. This fact poses problems for most computational models of word recognition (e.g., the interactive-activation model and its extensions), which assume that exact…