According to the body-specificity hypothesis, people associate positive things with the side of space that corresponds to their dominant hand and negative things with the side corresponding to their nondominant hand. Our aim was to find out whether this association holds also true for a response time study using linguistic stimuli, and whether…

This study investigates the impact of working memory (WM) load on response conflicts arising from spatial (non) correspondence between irrelevant stimulus location and response location (Simon effect). The dominant view attributes the Simon effect to automatic processes of location-based response priming. The automaticity view predicts…

Recently, it was proposed that the Simon effect would result not only from two interfering processes, as classical dual-route models assume, but from three processes. It was argued that priming from the spatial code to the nonspatial code might facilitate the identification of the nonspatial stimulus feature in congruent Simon trials. In the…

We report a series of investigations into the effects of common names, physical identity, and physical similarity on visual detection time. The effect of these factors on the capacity of the system processing the signals was also examined. We used a redundant targets design with separate testing of the target-distractor (single target),…

In 3 experiments, the authors compared duration judgments of filled stimuli (tones) with unfilled ones (intervals defined by clicks or gaps in tones). Temporal generalization procedures (Experiment 1) and verbal estimation procedures (Experiments 2 and 3) all showed that subjective durations of the tones were considerably longer than those of…

Many models of spoken word recognition posit the existence of lexical and sublexical representations, with excitatory and inhibitory mechanisms used to affect the activation levels of such representations. Bottom-up evidence provides excitatory input, and inhibition from phonetically similar representations leads to lexical competition. In such a…

Four experiments investigated activation of semantic information in action preparation. Participants either prepared to grasp and use an object (e.g., to drink from a cup) or to lift a finger in association with the object's position following a go/no-go lexical-decision task. Word stimuli were consistent to the action goals of the object use…

Five reaction time experiments explored word frequency effects in word-nonword decision tasks and in pronunciation and memory tasks. Analysis of the response latencies using Sternberg's additive-factors approach indicates that frequency effects consist of both effects in encoding and in retrieval from memory. (Editor/RK)

Four experiments are reported investigating previous findings that speech perception interferes with concurrent verbal memory but difficult nonverbal perceptual tasks do not, to any great degree. (Editor)

Two studies investigated how components of speaking rate, articulation rate and pause rate, combine to influence processing of the silence-duration cue for the voicing distinction in medial stop consonants. Listeners adjust for both articulation rate and pause rate changes in articulation rate had more effect on phonetic judgments. (Author/RD)

A. Pollatsek, E. D. Reichle, and K. Rayner argue that the critical findings in A. W. Inhoff, B. M. Eiter, and R. Radach are in general agreement with core assumptions of sequential attention shift models if additional assumptions and facts are considered. The current authors critically discuss the hypothesized time line of processing and indicate…

This study concerned discriminating between ear of entry and apparent spatial position as possible determinants of lateral asymmetries in the recall of simultaneous speech messages. (Editor/RK)

Studies the processing of pictures and words as symbols. Shows that the superiority of pictures results from the fact that pictures are interpreted more quickly than words, but that after the interpretation is made, processing is the same. Also gives evidence that pictures and words are both processed in terms of linguistic codes rather than…

Two experiments are presented in which lateralization of monaural, auditory input affected the evaluation of verbal passages. Discusses lateral differences in evaluating auditory stimuli in the framework of the left hemisphere's specialization for the holistic processing of objective information and the right hemisphere's specialization for the…