Semantic similarity between stimuli can lead to false memories and can also potentially cause retroactive interference (RI) for veridical memories. Here, participants first learned spatial locations for "critical" words that reliably produce false memories in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Next, participants centrally viewed…

A large literature suggests that the organization of words in semantic memory, reflecting meaningful relations among words and the concepts to which they refer, supports many cognitive processes, including memory encoding and retrieval, word learning, and inferential reasoning. The co-activation of related items has been proposed as a mechanism by…

Heterogeneous effects of semantic distance in language production have sparked a debate on the central assumption of many language production models, namely that lexical selection is a competitive process. In the present ERP study, we manipulated semantic distance in the picture word interference (PWI) paradigm systematically within taxonomic…

Purpose: The study examined age-related differences in the use of semantic context and in the effect of semantic competition in spoken sentence processing. We used offline (response latency) and online (eye gaze) measures, using the "visual world" eye-tracking paradigm. Method: Thirty younger and 30 older adults heard sentences related…

When people read questions like "How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark?", many mistakenly answer "2" despite knowing that Noah sailed the ark. This "Moses illusion" occurs when names share semantic features. Two experiments examined whether shared "visual" concepts (facial features)…

In 4 experiments we showed that picture naming latencies are affected by beliefs about the task concurrently performed by another speaker. Participants took longer to name pictures when they believed that their partner concurrently named pictures than when they believed their partner was silent (Experiments 1 and 4) or concurrently categorized the…