Three experiments examined disambiguation effect, the attachment of novel nouns to unfamiliar objects, and the effect of preexposure to similar sounding words in 2-year olds. Preexposure was found to alter subjects' disambiguation of novel nouns, attesting to the importance of phonological working memory in toddlers' decisions about the likely…

The sentence The secretary began the memo requires specifying what event the secretary began, because the memo does not refer to an event. McElree, Traxler, Pickering, Seely, and Jackendoff (2001) and Traxler, Pickering, and McElree (2002) found evidence from both self-paced reading and eye-tracking that such sentences caused processing…

Much experimental work in psycholinguistics suggests that fully specified syntactic and semantic interpretations are obtained incrementally. The finding that interpretation takes place incrementally is very robust and underlies our own view of sentence processing as well; however, most of this work tends to test very simple interpretive judgments…

It has been claimed that the typical RVF/LH advantage for word recognition is reduced or eliminated for imageable, as compared to nonimageable, nouns. To determine whether such word-class effects vary depending on the stimulus list context in which the words are presented, we varied the proportion of high- and low-image words presented in a…

Similarity between component speech sounds influences language processing in numerous ways. Explanation and detailed prediction of linguistic performance consequently requires an understanding of these basic similarities. The research reported in this paper contrasts two broad classes of approach to the issue of phoneme similarity-theoretically…

In this study, the recurrent perseverative errors produced by 44 speakers without impairment were examined in picture naming and reading aloud tasks under a fast response deadline. The proportion of perseverative relative to non-perseverative errors was greater in picture naming, the more error-prone task, than in reading aloud. Additionally,…

This study probes the effects of allomorphy on access to Arabic roots and word patterns in two cross-modal priming experiments. Experiment 1 used strong roots which undergo no allomorphy, and weak roots which undergo allomorphy and surface with only two of their three consonants in some derivations. Word pairs sharing a root morpheme prime each…

Repetition blindness (RB) refers to the failure to detect the second occurrence of a repeated item in rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). In two experiments using RSVP, the ability to report two critical characters was found to be impaired when these two characters were identical (Experiment 1) or similar by sharing one repeated component…

This study investigates the automatic-controlled nature of early semantic processing by means of the Recognition Potential (RP), an event-related potential response that reflects lexical selection processes. For this purpose tasks differing in their processing requirements were used. Half of the participants performed a physical task involving a…

In a post hoc analysis, we investigate differences in event-related potentials of two studies (Drenhaus et al., 2004, to appear; Saddy et al., 2004) by using the symbolic resonance analysis (Beim Graben & Kurths, 2003). The studies under discussion, examined the failure to license a negative polarity item (NPI) in German: Saddy et al. (2004a)…

We report an experiment that evaluates whether "BLANK" or an unrelated prime is a more suitable baseline for assessing priming for an ERP study. Sixteen subjects performed a lexical decision task with a 1 s prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony. Increased amplitude for the N400 was observed for targets in the unrelated prime condition whereas…

Recent research in learning technologies has demonstrated many promising contributions from the use of ontologies and semantic web technologies for the development of advanced learning environments. In spite of those benefits, ontology development and maintenance remain the key research challenges to be solved before ontology-enhanced learning…

Feedback on assessment tasks has an important part to play in underpinning student learning. Online assessment enables instantaneous feedback to be given so that the student can act on it immediately. However, concern has been expressed that e-assessment tasks (especially multiple-choice questions) can encourage surface-learning. Several projects…

Background: Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) does not feature in mainstream diagnostic classifications such as the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition" (DSM-IV), but is frequently diagnosed in the United States, Australia and New Zealand, and is becoming more frequently diagnosed in the United Kingdom. Aims: To…