Two visual-world eye-movement experiments investigated the nature of syntactic priming during comprehension--specifically, whether the priming effects in ditransitive prepositional object (PO) and double object (DO) structures (e.g., "The wizard will send the poison to the prince/the prince the poison") are due to anticipation of structural…

Five experiments were conducted to investigate how subsyllabic, syllabic, and prosodic information is processed in Cantonese monosyllabic word production. A picture-word interference task was used in which a target picture and a distractor word were presented simultaneously or sequentially. In the first 3 experiments with visually presented…

When speakers detect a problem in what they are saying, they must decide whether or not to interrupt themselves and repair the problem, and if so, when. Speakers will maximize accuracy if they interrupt themselves as soon as they detect a problem, but they will maximize fluency if they go on speaking until they are ready to produce the repair.…

Pavlenko urges the community of language researchers to modify their conceptions of the mental lexicon, based on findings from bilingualism and emotions. She makes a compelling case. While reading her article, one can temporarily forget that in contemporary practice, emotion is not regarded as relevant to the theoretical question of the structure…

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and…

Recent work addressing the phenomenon of perceptual simulation offers new and exciting avenues of investigating how to model knowledge representation. From the perspective of language, the simulation approach has given rise to new impetus to work on models of language understanding (e.g., Zwaan, 2004, and references therein), and provides a way of…

What does mass-count syntax contribute to the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs), and how much of NP meaning is contributed by lexical items alone? Many have argued that count syntax specifies reference to countable individuals (e.g., "cats") while mass syntax specifies reference to unindividuated entities (e.g., "water"). We evaluated this…

Two experiments are reported which investigated morphological processing in English using bilexemic compound words. Long and short compound words were presented in neutral sentences and eye movements were recorded while participants read the sentences to investigate the time course of compound word recognition. In Experiment 1, the frequency of…

Time course estimates from eye tracking during spoken language processing (the "visual world paradigm", or VWP) have enabled progress on debates regarding fine-grained details of activation and competition over time. There are, however, three gaps in current analyses of VWP data: consideration of time in a statistically rigorous manner,…

This paper discusses some basic properties of intercultural communication (treated from the point of view of linguistic pragmatics as fundamentally similar to any other form of communication, and emphasising the need to move radically away from any essentialist substantiation of "culture") against the background of contexts of migration. Three…

It is generally accepted that formulaic sequences like "take the bull by the horns" serve an important function in discourse and are widespread in language. It is also generally believed that these sequences are processed more efficiently because single memorized units, even though they are composed of a sequence of individual words, can be…

The effects of within- versus between-languages (English-French) study and test on rates of bilingual children's and adults' true and false memories were examined. Children aged 6 through 12 and university-aged adults participated in a standard Deese-Roediger-McDermott false memory task using free recall and recognition. Recall results showed…

Previous studies examining explicit semantic processing have consistently shown activation of the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). In contrast, implicit semantic processing tasks have shown activation in posterior areas including the superior temporal gyrus (STG) and the middle temporal gyrus (MTG) with less consistent activation in the IFG.…

Harmonic priming studies have provided evidence that musical expectations influence sung phoneme monitoring, with facilitated processing for phonemes sung on tonally related (expected) chords in comparison to less-related (less-expected) chords [Bigand, Tillmann, Poulin, D'Adamo, and Madurell (2001). "The effect of harmonic context on phoneme…

How are signed languages processed by the brain? This review briefly outlines some basic principles of brain structure and function and the methodological principles and techniques that have been used to investigate this question. We then summarize a number of different studies exploring brain activity associated with sign language processing…