Age of Acquisition (AoA) scores approximate the age at which a language speaker fully understands a word's semantic meaning and represent a quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of words in a language. AoA word lists exist across various languages, with English having the most complete lists that capture the largest percentage of the…

Age of Acquisition (AoA) scores approximate the age at which a language speaker fully understands a word's semantic meaning and represent a quantitative measure of the relative difficulty of words in a language. AoA word lists exist across various languages, with English having the most complete lists that capture the largest percentage of the…

Humans can pronounce a nonword (e.g., rint). Some researchers have interpreted this behavior as requiring a sequential mechanism by which a grapheme-phoneme correspondence rule is applied to each grapheme in turn. However, several parallel-distributed processing (PDP) models in English have simulated human nonword reading accuracy without a…

This study aims to examine language dominance and language switching effects in a series of monolingual and multilingual lexical decisions in which participants have to decide if the presented letter string is a word or not, regardless of language. Thirty participants (12 French-English bilinguals and 18 French-English-Spanish trilinguals) were…

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…

S. O'Malley and D. Besner (2008) showed that additive effects of stimulus degradation and word frequency in reading aloud occur in the presence of nonwords but not in pure word lists. They argued that this dissociation presents a major challenge to interactive computational models of reading aloud and claimed that no currently implemented model is…

Pavlenko urges the community of language researchers to modify their conceptions of the mental lexicon, based on findings from bilingualism and emotions. She makes a compelling case. While reading her article, one can temporarily forget that in contemporary practice, emotion is not regarded as relevant to the theoretical question of the structure…

Focuses on understanding the mechanisms that underlie the production of homophone confusions in writing. The article overviews five experiments demonstrating that the homophone effect can be experimentally induced in French adults. Findings are interpreted in the framework of an activation model. (45 references) (Author/CK)