We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones…

Retrieval of proper names is a cause of concern and complaint among elderly adults and it is an early symptom of patients suffering from neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease (AD). While it is well established that AD patients have deficits of proper name retrieval, the nature of such impairment is not yet fully understood.…

Bilingual speakers generally manifest slower word recognition than monolinguals. We investigated the consequences of the word processing speed on semantic access in bilinguals. The paradigm involved a stream of English words and pseudowords presented in succession at a constant rate. English-Welsh bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to…

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late…

Several studies have shown that concepts spread activation to words of both of a bilingual's languages. Therefore, a central issue that needs to be clarified is how a bilingual manages to restrict his speech production to a single language. One influential proposal is that when speaking in one language, the other language is inhibited. An…

In this article we aimed to assess how Alzheimer's disease (AD), which is neurodegenerative, affects the linguistic performance of early, high-proficient bilinguals in their two languages. To this end, we compared the Picture Naming and Word Translation performances of two groups of AD patients varying in disease progression (Mild and Moderate)…

We report the naming performance of a Spanish patient (AQF) suffering from Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA). AQF's performance revealed a grammatical category-specific deficit, with poorer performance in verb than in noun naming. Furthermore, this dissociation was only present in written naming. Importantly, the patient's dissociation between…

Several naming studies show that distractor pictures, even when intentionally ignored by the speaker, are still capable of activating their respective phonological representations. However results from word translation studies suggest that distractor pictures are only conceptually activated. Here we tested the reliability of the word translation…

We describe the performance of an aphasic individual who showed a selective impairment affecting his comprehension of auditorily presented number words and not other word categories. His difficulty in number word comprehension was restricted to the auditory modality, given that with visual stimuli (written words, Arabic numerals and pictures) his…

Closed-class word selection was investigated by focusing on determiner production. Native speakers from three different languages named pictures of objects using determiner plus noun phrases (e.g., in French "la table" (the [subscript feminine] table), while ignoring distractor determiners printed on the pictures (e.g., "le"…

Most current models of speech production predict interference from related context words in picture-naming tasks. However, Glaser and Dungelhoff (1984) reported semantic facilitation when the task was changed from basic-level naming to category-level naming. The authors explore two proposals to account for this change in polarity of the semantic…

In this article we discuss different views about how information flows through the lexical system in bilingual speech production. In the first part, we focus on some of the experimental evidence often quoted in favor of the parallel activation of the bilinguals' two languages from the semantic system in the course of language production. We argue…

Explored the effects of two variables in the picture-word interference paradigm: semantic relatedness and the level of categorization of distracts relative to pictures' names. Results suggest that the effect of semantically related distractors depends on the level of categorization at which the response has to be given. Semantically unrelated…

Four experiments are reported exploring whether distractor pictures activate their phonological properties in the course of speech production. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with two pictures and were asked to name one while ignoring the other. Distractor pictures were phonologically related, semantically related or unrelated to the…