This study aimed to determine whether attentional prioritization of stimuli associated with reward transfers across conceptual knowledge independently of physical features. Participants successively performed two color-word Stroop tasks. In the learning phase, neutral words were associated with high, low, or no monetary reward. In the…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

Previous studies report that children use color words haphazardly before acquiring conventional, adult-like meanings. The most common explanation for this is that children do not abstract color as a domain of linguistic meaning until several months after they begin producing color words, resulting in a stage during which they produce but do not…

Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal…

Stimulus-response (S-R) episodes are formed whenever a response is executed in close temporal proximity to a stimulus. Subsequent stimulus repetition will retrieve the episode from memory, reactivating the previous response. Whereas many research findings attest to the flexibility of representing stimulus features, only little is known about the…

Although it has been established that human beings process concrete and abstract words differently, it is still a matter of debate what factors contribute to this difference. Since concrete concepts are closely tied to sensory perception, perceptual experience seems to play an important role in their processing. The present study investigated the…

In this study, we examined the effects of emotional experience, a relatively new dimension of emotional knowledge that gauges the ease with which words evoke emotional experience, on abstract word processing in the Stroop task. In order to test the context-dependency of these effects, we accentuated the saliency of this dimension in Experiment 1A…

Dual route models of reading suggest there are 2 pathways for reading words: an orthographic-lexical pathway, used to read familiar regular words and exception words, and a grapheme-to-phoneme-conversion-(GPC)-sublexical pathway, used to read unfamiliar regular words, pseudohomophones (PHs), and nonwords. It is unclear, however, whether PHs…

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in…

In the current study, we explored the influence of synesthesia on memory for word lists. We tested 10 grapheme-color synesthetes who reported an experience of color when reading letters or words. We replicated a previous finding that memory is compromised when synesthetic color is incongruent with perceptual color. Beyond this, we found that,…

Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal "pre-semantic" tasks, e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are…

Since M. M. Chun and Y. Jiang's (1998) original study, a large body of research based on the contextual cuing paradigm has shown that the visuocognitive system is capable of capturing certain regularities in the environment in an implicit way. The present study investigated whether regularities based on the semantic category membership of the…

The validity of the linguistic relativity principle continues to stimulate vigorous debate and research. The debate has recently shifted from the behavioural investigation arena to a more biologically grounded field, in which tangible physiological evidence for language effects on perception can be obtained. Using brain potentials in a colour…

In 2 experiments, participants completed both an attentional control battery (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop tasks) and a modified semantic priming task. The priming task measured relatedness proportion (RP) effects within subjects, with the color of the prime indicating the probability that the to-be-named target would be related. In Experiment…

Do the viewpoint costs incurred when naming rotated familiar objects arise during initial identification or during consolidation? To answer this question we employed an attentional blink (AB) task where two target objects appeared amongst a rapid stream of distractor objects. Our assumption was that while both targets and distractors undergo…