While known to influence visual lexical processing, the semantic information we associate with words has recently been found to influence auditory lexical processing as well. The present work explored the influence of "semantic richness" in auditory lexical decision. Study 1 recreated an experiment investigating semantic richness effects…

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., "committee," "team"), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they…

Using computational simulations, this work demonstrates that it is possible to learn a systematic relation between words' sound and their meanings. The sound-meaning relation was learned from a corpus of phonologically transcribed child-directed speech by using the linear discriminative learning (LDL) framework (Baayen, Chuang, Shafaei-Bajestan,…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

The question of whether language affects thought is long-standing, with grammatical gender being one of the most contended instances. Empirical evidence focuses on the gender congruency effect, according to which referents of masculine nouns are conceptualized more strongly as male and those of feminine nouns more strongly as female. While some…

Eye tracking and event-related potentials (ERPs) have complementary advantages in the study of reading processes. We used eye tracking to extend ERP evidence of Helder et al. (2020) that word-to-text integration at the beginnings and ends of sentences is primarily determined by local text factors (antecedents in a previous sentence) but that…

Can a single adjective immediately influence message-building during sentence processing? We presented participants with 168 sentence contexts, such as "His skin was red from spending the day at the …" Sentences ended with either the most expected word ("beach") or a low cloze probability completion ("pool"). Nouns…

The spelling of an English word may reflect its part of speech, not just the sounds within it. In 2 preregistered experiments, we asked whether university students are sensitive to 1 effect of part of speech that has been observed by linguists: that content words (e.g., the noun "inn") must be spelled with at least 3 letters, whereas…

Recent research has found that maintaining an item in working memory improves subsequent long-term memory performance. The present study explored the role of working memory consolidation in long-term recognition. Participants completed a stimuli-identification task followed by a surprise delayed recognition task. Participants first identified…

Drawing a picture of the referent of a word produces considerably better recall and recognition of that word than does a baseline condition, such as repeatedly writing the word, a phenomenon referred to as the drawing effect. Although the drawing effect has been the focus of much recent research, it is not yet clear what underlies the beneficial…

Three experiments investigated the relationship between future thinking and false memories. In Experiment 1, participants remembered familiar events (e.g., a holiday) from their past, imagined planning the same events in the future, or took part in a control condition in which they visualized typical events. They then rated a series of…

Response onset latencies for sentences that start with a conjoined noun phrase are typically longer than for sentences starting with a simple noun phrase. This suggests that advance planning has phrasal scope, which may or may not be lexically driven. All previous studies have involved spoken production, leaving open the possibility that effects…

Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory, with evidence from lexical prediction as a primary source. Less work has focused on whether comprehenders also make structural predictions above the lexical level. Previous research shows that processing is facilitated for syntactic structures which…

Reading development involves several changes in orthographic processing. A key question is, "how does the coding of letters develops in children learning to read?" Masked priming effects of transposition and substitution primes have been taken to index the importance of letter position and identity coding. Somewhat contradicting results…

It is generally assumed that bare numerals (e.g., "three") have two readings: the "exactly" and the "at least" reading. It has been a matter of debate whether one of these two readings is derived from the other pragmatically. To shed light on this question research has aimed at characterizing the processing demands…