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…

This study explored the effect of thiamine deficiency during early infancy on the development of syntax and lexical retrieval. We tested syntactic comprehension and production, lexical retrieval abilities and conceptual abilities of 59 children aged 5-7 years who had been fed during their first year of life with a thiamine-deficient milk…

This article presents an overview of our studies in elderly and Alzheimer patients employing Kimura's dichotic digits paradigm as a measure for left hemispheric predominance for processing language stimuli. In addition to structural brain mechanisms, we demonstrated that attention modulates the direction and degree of ear asymmetry in dichotic…

In a previous study of single word reading, regions in the left supramarginal gyrus and left angular gyrus showed positive BOLD activity in children but significantly less activity in adults for high-frequency words [Church, J. A., Coalson, R. S., Lugar, H. M., Petersen, S. E., & Schlaggar, B. L. "A developmental fMRI study of reading and…

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 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 review examines whether similarity between the first language (L1) and second language (L2) influences the (morpho)syntactic processing of the L2, using both neural location and temporal processing information. Results from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and event-related potential (ERP) studies show that nonnative speakers can…

Generic sentences (e.g., "Birds lay eggs") convey generalizations about entire categories and may thus be an important source of knowledge for children. However, these sentences cannot be identified by a simple rule, requiring instead the integration of multiple cues. The present studies focused on 3- to 5-year-olds' (N = 91) use of…

Bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals at suppressing task-irrelevant information. The present study aimed to identify how processing linguistic ambiguity during auditory comprehension may be associated with inhibitory control. Monolinguals and bilinguals listened to words in their native language (English) and identified them among…

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…

Second-language (L2) sentence processing may differ from processing in a native language in a variety of ways, and it has been argued that one major difference is that L2 learners can only construct shallow representations that lack structural details (e.g., Clahsen & Felser, 2006). The present study challenges this hypothesis by comparing the…

References to the term "incidental vocabulary learning" have become very commonplace not only in second language (L2) acquisition research, but also in empirical research into second and foreign language pedagogy, very often in contrast to "intentional language learning". The former term is associated with more natural language…

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…

The prevalence of formulaicity in naturally occurring language use points to an important role in the way language is acquired, processed, and used. It is widely recommended that second-language instruction should ensure that learners develop a rich repertoire of formulaic sequences. If this is justified, it follows that learner failure to use…