Tip-of-the-tongue states (TOTs) in proficient Hebrew-English bilinguals were compared to those of age-matched monolinguals. Monolinguals retrieved words in English, and bilinguals retrieved words from both languages. Results showed an increased TOT rate in bilinguals. (Author/VWL)

We assessed the impact of visual similarity on written word identification by having participants learn new words (e.g. BANARA) that were neighbours of familiar words that previously had no neighbours (e.g. BANANA). Repeated exposure to these new words made it more difficult to semantically categorize the familiar words. There was some evidence of…

This study uses the morphological family size effect as a tool for exploring the degree of isomorphism in the networks of morphologically related words in the Hebrew and Dutch mental lexicon. Hebrew and Dutch are genetically unrelated, and they structure their morphologically complex words in very different ways. Two visual lexical decision…

The lexical-semantic and syntactic abilities of a group of individuals with chronic nonthalamic subcortical (NS) lesions following stroke (n=6) were investigated using the Western Aphasia Battery (WAB) picture description task [Kertesz, A. (1982). "The Western aphasia battery." New York: Grune and Stratton] and compared with those of a…

Two experiments investigated sensory/motor-based functional knowledge of man-made objects: manipulation features associated with the actual usage of objects. In Experiment 1, a series of prime-target pairs was presented auditorily, and participants were asked to make a lexical decision on the target word. Participants made a significantly faster…

Boolean systems still constitute most of the installed base of online public access catalogues (OPACs) in the French universities even if many studies have shown that Boolean operators are not frequently used by non-librarian users (by contrast with professional librarians). The first study examined the use of Boolean operators by French…

It has been claimed that speakers of Spanish and English have different patterns of thinking for speaking about motion both linguistically and gesturally (Stam 1998; McNeill and Duncan 2000; McNeill 2000; Kellerman and van Hoof 2003; Neguerela et al. 2004). For example, Spanish speakers' path gestures tend to occur with path verbs, while English…

A fundamental problem for those interested in human communication is to determine how ideas and the various units of language structure are communicated through speaking. The physiological concepts involved in the control of muscle contraction and movement are theoretically distant from the processing levels and units postulated to exist in…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…

The study examined whether people can extract speech related information from the talker's upper face that was presented using either normally textured videos (Experiments 1 and 3) or videos showing only the outlined of the head (Experiments 2 and 4). Experiments 1 and 2 used within- and cross-modal matching tasks. In the within-modal task,…

This research provides further data regarding non-literal language comprehension following right hemisphere damage (RHD). To assess the impact of RHD on the processing of non-literal language, ten participants presenting with RHD and ten matched healthy control participants were administered tasks tapping humour appreciation and pragmatic…

The authors report 4 experiments exploring the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals in a picture-naming task. In Experiment 1, they tested the impact of language similarity and age of 2nd language acquisition on the language-switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals. Experiments 2, 3, and 4 assessed the…

An important psycholinguistic discussion centers on the question of whether bilinguals use the same representations and mechanisms for the languages they speak (the interactive view) or whether the representations and mechanisms for each language are kept strictly separated (the modular view). Empirical investigations of this question have focused…

Sentence processing in American Sign Language (ASL) was investigated as a function of age of first language acquisition with a timed grammatical judgement task. Participants were 30 adults who were born deaf and first exposed to a fully perceptible language between the ages of birth and 13 years. Stimuli were grammatical and ungrammatical examples…

This article provides a selective overview of theoretical issues and empirical findings relating to the question of age and second language acquisition (L2A). Both behavioral and brain-based data are discussed in the contexts of neurocognitive aging and cognitive neurofunction in the mature individual. Moving beyond the classical notion of…