The processing of abbreviations in reading was examined with an eye movement experiment. Abbreviations were of 2 distinct types: acronyms (abbreviations that can be read with the normal grapheme-phoneme correspondence [GPC] rules, such as NASA) and initialisms (abbreviations in which the GPCs are letter names, such as NCAA). Parafoveal and foveal…

Very little is known about the neural underpinnings of language learning across the lifespan and how these might be modified by maturational and experiential factors. Building on behavioral research highlighting the importance of early word segmentation (i.e. the detection of word boundaries in continuous speech) for subsequent language learning,…

Although functional neuroimaging studies have supported the distinction between explicit and implicit forms of memory, few have matched explicit and implicit tests closely, and most of these tested perceptual rather than conceptual implicit memory. We compared event-related fMRI responses during an intentional test, in which a group of…

Bilinguals appear to have shared syntactic representations for similar constructions between languages but retain distinct representations for noncognate translation-equivalents (Schoonbaert, Hartsuiker, & Pickering, 2007). We inquire whether bilinguals have more integrated representations of cognate translation-equivalents. To investigate…

Many comprehension theories assert that increasing the distance between elements participating in a linguistic relation (e.g., a verb and a noun phrase argument) increases the difficulty of establishing that relation during on-line comprehension. Such "locality effects" are expected to increase reading times and are thought to reveal properties…

In laboratory experiments, infants are sensitive to patterns of visual features that co-occur (e.g., Fiser & Aslin, 2002). Once infants learn the statistical regularities, however, what do they do with that knowledge? Moreover, which patterns do infants learn in the cluttered world outside of the laboratory? Across 4 experiments, we show that…

We probed differences in the ability to detect and interpret social cues in adults and in children and young adolescents with and without autism spectrum disorders (ASD) by investigating the effect of various social and non-social contexts on the visual exploration of pictures of natural scenes. Children and adolescents relied more on social…

To test the extent to which learners performing a simple keyboard passage would be affected by directing their focus of attention to different aspects of their movements, 16 music majors performed a brief keyboard passage under each of four focus conditions arranged in a counterbalanced design--a total of 64 experimental sessions. As they…

Many music educators incorporate chamber music in their ensemble programs--an excellent way to promote musical independence. However, they rarely think of the large ensemble as myriad chamber interactions. Rehearsals become more productive when greater responsibility for music-making is placed on the individual student. This article presents some…

Much of what we think we know about the performance of humor relies on our intuitions about prosody (e.g., "it's all about timing"); however, this has never been empirically tested. Thus, the central question addressed in this article is whether speakers mark punch lines in jokes prosodically and, if so, how. To answer this question,…

English-learning 7.5-month-olds are heavily biased to perceive stressed syllables as word onsets. By 11 months, however, infants begin segmenting non-initially stressed words from speech. Using the same artificial language methodology as Johnson and Jusczyk (2001), we explored the possibility that the emergence of this ability is linked to a…

The spelling of many disyllabic English word endings holds cues to their grammatical category, beyond obvious inflectional endings such as "-ing" for verbs. For example, some letter sequences are clearly associated with nouns (e.g., "-oon") and others with verbs (e.g., "-erge"). This study extended recent research by Arciuli and Cupples (2006),…

In three experiments, we examined lexical competition effects using the phonological priming paradigm in a shadowing task. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that an inhibitory priming effect occurred when the primes mismatched the targets on the last phoneme (/bagar/-/bagaj/). In contrast, a facilitatory priming effect was observed when the primes…

In a previous study we showed a temporally graded retrograde amnesia after hippocampal lesions when rats learned a spatial reference memory task in which two types of signals simultaneously indicated the goal arm (shape of the experimental room and extramaze landmarks). To investigate the effect that the navigational demands of the task have on…

It has been suggested that young children can only reorient, locating a target object, when the geometry of an enclosed space provides distinctive shape information [e.g., Hermer, L., & Spelke, E. (1994). A geometric process for spatial reorientation in young children. "Nature," 370, 57-59]. Recently, however, young children were shown to specify…