A major open question in natural language research is the role of communicative efficiency in the origin and on-line processing of language structures. Here, we use word pairs like "chimp/chimpanzee", which differ in length but have nearly identical meanings, to investigate the communicative properties of lexical systems and the communicative…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…

College students learned artificial grammar under two conditions: paired associate learning (PA), and observation of exemplars (OBS). OBS induced abstract representation of the rules of grammar. PA produced very different learning--subjects knew some whole items but detected little structure. Grammar was learned largely by analogy rather than…

An experiment was conducted to examine whether perceptual information, specifically the shape of objects, is activated during semantic processing. Subjects judged whether a target word was related to a prime word. Prime-target pairs that were not associated, but whose referents had similar shapes (e.g. LADDER-RAILROAD) yielded longer ''no''…