Translation in fluent bilinguals requires comprehension of a stimulus word and subsequent production, or retrieval and articulation, of the response word. Four repetition-priming experiments with Spanish-English bilinguals (N = 274) decomposed these processes using selective facilitation to evaluate their unique priming contributions and factorial…

The influence of semantic processing on the serial ordering of items in short-term memory was explored using a novel dual-task paradigm. Participants engaged in 2 picture-judgment tasks while simultaneously performing delayed serial recall. List material varied in the presence of phonological overlap (Experiments 1 and 2) and in semantic content…

Purpose: Individuals with probable Alzheimer disease (pAD) are frequently impaired at picture naming. This study examined whether a semantic elaboration task would facilitate naming in pAD, and whether training either semantically typical or atypical stimulus items facilitated generalized improvement in picture naming and category generation…

This study investigated the effects of three factors (the number of collocates per node word, the position of the node word, synonymy) on learning collocations. Japanese students studying English as a foreign language learned five sets of 12 target collocations. Each collocation was presented in a single glossed sentence. The number of collocates…

Computer analyses of text characteristics are often used by reading teachers, researchers, and policy makers when selecting texts for students. The authors of this article identify components of language, discourse, and cognition that underlie traditional automated metrics of text difficulty and their new Coh-Metrix system. Coh-Metrix analyzes…

This investigation examined the ability of 44 preschool children to acquire novel words embedded in storybook contexts. Previous investigations of word learning have typically consisted of novel words for which synonyms exist. It is argued that the acquisition of unfamiliar words that refer to existing concepts that already have labels is not…

In individuals with ASD, difficulties with language comprehension are most evident when higher-level semantic-pragmatic language processing is required, for instance when context has to be used to interpret the meaning of an utterance. Until now, it is unclear at what level of processing and for what type of context these difficulties in language…

Embodied semantic theories suppose that representation of word meaning and actual sensory-motor processing are implemented in overlapping systems. According to this view, association and dissociation of different word meaning should correspond to dissociation and association of the described sensory-motor processing. Previous studies demonstrate…

This study investigated the use of a narrative-based language intervention program for teaching perspective-taking skills to students with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The participants consisted of 18 students between the ages of 9 years 7 months and 12 years 2 months (M = 10:8) who had a diagnosis of an ASD. Students received 500 minutes of…

This study investigated compound processing and cross-language activation in a group of Chinese-English bilingual children, and they were divided into four groups based on the language proficiency levels in their two languages. A lexical decision task was designed using compound words in both languages. The compound words in one language contained…

This study examined how English learners in second-language (SL) and foreign-language (FL) contexts employ tense backshifting in indirect reported speech. Participants included 35 international students in the United States, 37 Bulgarian speakers of English, 38 Bosnian speakers of English, and 41 native English speakers. The instrument involved…

While many behavioural studies on refractory phenomena in lexical/semantic access have focused on the mechanisms involved in the oral production of names, comprehension tasks have been almost exclusively used in neuropsychological studies on brain damaged patients. We report the results of two experiments on healthy participants conducted by means…

The ability to detect a change, to accurately assess the magnitude of the change, and to react to that change in a commensurate fashion are of critical importance in many decision domains. Thus, it is important to understand the factors that systematically affect people's reactions to change. In this article we document a novel effect: Decision…

Few studies have directly compared the clinical and anatomical characteristics of patients with progressive aphasia to those of patients with aphasia caused by stroke. In the current study we examined fluent forms of aphasia in these two groups, specifically semantic dementia (SD) and persisting Wernicke's aphasia (WA) due to stroke. We compared…

Two approaches to systematic word review were integrated into an 18-week program of extended vocabulary instruction with kindergarten students from three high-need urban schools. Words in the embedded and semantically related review conditions received systematic and distributed review. In the embedded review condition, brief word definitions were…