In three priming experiments, we investigated whether the meanings of ambiguous morphemes were activated during word recognition. Using a meaning generation task, Experiment 1 demonstrated that the dominant meaning of individually presented ambiguous morphemes was reported more often than did other less frequent meanings. Also, participants tended…

Normative word frequency and context variability affect memory in a range of episodic memory tasks and place constraints on theoretical development. In four experiments, we independently manipulated the word frequency and context variability of the targets (to-be-generated items) and cues in a cued recall paradigm. We found that high frequency…

Three experiments examine whether a naturalistic reading task can induce long-lasting changes of syntactic patterns in memory. Judgment of grammatical acceptability is used as an indirect test of memory for sentences that are identical or only syntactically similar to those read earlier. In previous research (Luka & Barsalou, 2005) both sorts of…

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…

Emotionality is a key component of subjective experience that influences memory. We tested how the emotionality of words affects memory monitoring, specifically, judgments of learning, in both cued recall and free recall paradigms. In both tasks, people predicted that positive and negative emotional words would be recalled better than neutral…

The relation between intrusions in several different recall tasks was examined in the current study. Intrusions from these tasks were moderately correlated and formed a unitary intrusion factor. This factor was related to other cognitive ability measures including working memory capacity, judgments of recency, and general source-monitoring…

This study investigated whether Foygel and Dell's (2000) interactive two-step model of speech production could simulate the number and type of errors made in picture-naming by 68 children of elementary-school age. Results showed that the model provided a satisfactory simulation of the mean error profile of children aged five, six, seven, eight and…

We used an off-line story continuation task and an online ERP reading task to investigate coreferential processing following sentences that portrayed transfer-of-possession events as either ongoing or completed, using imperfective and perfective verb aspect (e.g., Amanda was shifting/shifted some poker chips to Scott). The story continuation task…

Theories of confidence judgments have embraced the role random error plays in influencing responses. An important next step is to identify the source(s) of these random effects. To do so, we used the stochastic judgment model (SJM) to distinguish the contribution of encoding and retrieval processes. In particular, we investigated whether dividing…

In this study, we investigate the relevance of inflectional paradigms and inflectional classes for lexical processing. We provide an information-theoretical measure of the divergence in the frequency distributions of two of the paradigms to which a word simultaneously belongs: the paradigm of the stem and the more general paradigm of the nominal…

Four dual-task experiments examined visuospatial, articulatory, and central executive working memory involvement during the development and application of spatial mental models. In Experiments 1 and 2 participants read route and survey spatial descriptions while undertaking one of four secondary tasks targeting working memory components.…

Four experiments examined subjective experience during retrieval in the DRM false memory paradigm [Deese, J. (1959). "On the prediction of occurrence of particular verbal intrusions in immediate recall." "Journal of Experimental Psychology," 58, 17-22; Roediger, H. L., & McDermott, K. B. (1995). "Creating false memories: Remembering words not…

One key issue for models of bilingual memory is to what degree the semantic representation from one of the languages is shared with the other language. In the present paper, we examine whether there is an early, automatic semantic priming effect across languages for noncognates with highly proficient (Basque/Spanish) bilinguals. Experiment 1 was a…

The nature of persisting spreading activation from list presentation in eliciting false recognition in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm was examined in two experiments. We compared the time course of semantic priming in the lexical decision task (LDT) and false alarms in speeded recognition under identical study and test conditions. The…

Four experiments examined whether studying a single Deese/Roediger-McDermott (DRM) list produces semantic priming for nonstudied critical items (CIs) and semantic + repetition priming for studied associates. After 30 s of mental arithmetic that followed the study of a DRM list, priming was assessed in a lexical decision task when the nonwords were…