Compared online processing of Catalan phonemic contrasts in Spanish-dominant and Catalan-dominant Catalan-Spanish bilingual undergraduate students. Results supported hypothesis that L1 (first language) shapes the perceptual system at early stages of development in such a way that it will determine the perception of nonnative phonemic contrasts,…

Reports the results of three experiments that used vowel and tone monitoring tasks to investigate the role of tone information in processing Mandarin. (Author/VWL)

Gives a brief characterization of the ways second-language acquisition researchers use the computer to elicit second-language (L2) production data or to record how L2 learners process L2 input. Eight tasks and/or techniques are described. Discusses the use of computer technology in ongoing investigations that pertain to the acquisition of…

Explored in three experiments children's understanding of emotion in speech. Found gradual developmental change from 4-year-olds' focus on content to adult's focus on paralanguage. Children exhibited greater response latencies to utterances with conflicting cues than to those with nonconflicting cues. They accurately labeled affective paralanguage…

Derived equivalence relations, it has been argued, provide a behavioral model of semantic or symbolic meaning in natural language, and thus equivalence relations should possess properties that are typically associated with semantic relations. The present study sought to test this basic postulate using semantic priming. Across three experiments,…

The present investigation focussed on the neural substrates underlying linguistic distinctions that are signalled by prosodic cues. A production experiment was conducted to examine the ability of left- (LHD) and right- (RHD) hemisphere-damaged patients and normal controls to use temporal and fundamental frequency cues to disambiguate sentences…

Noveck (2001) argued that children even as old as 11 do not reliably endorse a scalar interpretation of weak scalar terms ("some", "might", "or") (cf. Braine & Rumain, 1981; Smith, 1980). More recent studies suggest, however, that children's apparent failures may depend on the experimental demands (Papafragou…

Research on adult age differences in language production has traditionally focused on either the production of single words or the properties of language samples. Older adults are more prone to word retrieval failures than are younger adults (e.g., Burke, MacKay, Worthley, & Wade, 1991). Older adults also tend to produce fewer ideas per utterance…

Purpose: This study explored the use of assessment tasks to examine underlying phonological representations in preschool children with speech impairment. The study also investigated the association between performance on phonological representation tasks and phonological awareness development. Method: The performance of 9 children (aged 3;09…

Communication abilities are known to decline with age. In daily life, such abilities are frequently of the non-literal type, which require more cognitive resources to be processed. Since these resources tend to diminish with age, this study seeks to identify a possible effect of age on non-literal language abilities. Forty young and 40 older…

In two experiments, naive participants took turns telling each other to click on a target picture while gaze was monitored. Critical trials included a "contrast" picture that differed from the target only in size. In both experiments, the timing of speakers' fixations on the contrast predicted whether the contrast was encoded in a phrase with a…

In this study, we tested the predictions of 2 opposing perspectives on the nature of the deficit in specific language impairment (SLI): the domain-general, cognitive/perceptual processing view and the domain-specific, linguistic representational view. Data consisted of spontaneous speech samples from French-English bilingual children with SLI;…

Despite anecdotal data on lexical interference among the languages of multilingual speakers, little research evidence about the lexical connections among multilinguals' languages exists to date. In the present paper, two experiments with a multilingual speaker who had suffered aphasia are reported. The first experiment provides data about…

The present study characterizes the neural correlates of noun and verb imageability and addresses the question of whether components of the neural network supporting word recognition can be separately modified by variations in grammatical class and imageability. We examined the effect of imageability on BOLD signal during single-word comprehension…

The observation of a syllable frequency effect in naming latencies has been an argument in favor of a functional role of stored syllables in speech production. Accordingly, various theoretical models postulate that a repository of syllable representations is accessed during phonetic encoding. However, the direct empirical evidence for locating the…