In seven experiments, we investigated whether compensated and uncompensated adults with dyslexia show different patterns of deficits in magnocellular visual processing and in language processing tasks. In four visual tasks, we failed to find evidence of magnocellular deficits in either group. However, both groups of adults with dyslexia showed…

In her Keynote Article, Gathercole (2006) presents a theoretical framework intended to account for evidence regarding the relation between nonword repetition and word learning. This framework stems from an impressive amount and breadth of research on this topic, including findings from adults and children with typical language abilities as well as…

We present a new model for lexical decision, REM-LD, that is based on REM theory (e.g., Shiffrin & Steyvers, 1997). REM-LD uses a principled (i.e., Bayes' rule) decision process that simultaneously considers the diagnosticity of the evidence for the 'WORD' response and the 'NONWORD' response. The model calculates the odds ratio that the presented…

Linguists distinguish between words formed from free stems (e.g., "actor": "act") and those formed from bound stems (e.g., "spectator": "spect"). In a forward masked priming task, we observed significant morphological facilitation for prime-target pairs that shared either a free (e.g., "deform"--"CONFORM") or a bound (e.g., "revive"--"SURVIVE")…

Gender assignment relates to a native speaker's knowledge of the structure of the gender system of his/her language, allowing the speaker to select the appropriate gender for each noun. Whereas categorical assignment rules and exceptional gender assignment are well investigated, assignment regularities, i.e., tendencies in the gender distribution…

Two experiments investigate whether relations that link the constituents of compounds during compound formation (e.g., "teapot" is formed by combining "tea" and "pot" using the relation "head noun FOR modifier") also influence the processing of familiar compounds. Although there is evidence for the use of such relations in forming compounds,…

The effects of lexicality on auditory change detection based on auditory sensory memory representations were investigated by presenting oddball sequences of repeatedly presented stimuli, while participants ignored the auditory stimuli. In a cross-linguistic study of Hungarian and German participants, stimulus sequences were composed of words that…

In the paper, we discuss the importance of network interactions between brain regions in mediating performance of sensorimotor and cognitive tasks, including those associated with language processing. Functional neuroimaging, especially PET and fMRI, provide data that are obtained essentially simultaneously from much of the brain, and thus are…

We address the possibility of combining the results from hemodynamic and electrophysiological methods for the study of cognitive processing of language. The hemodynamic method we use is Event-Related fMRI, and the electrophysiological method measures Event-Related Band Power (ERBP) of the EEG signal. The experimental technique allows us to…

Consistent with converging experimental evidence, we assume that foveal information is initially split across the two cerebral hemispheres. We have previously presented the SERIOL model of letter-position coding, which specifies how the resulting two halves of a letter string are integrated into an abstract representation of letter order. This…

Most words in English are ambiguous between different interpretations; words can mean different things in different contexts. We investigate the implications of different types of semantic ambiguity for connectionist models of word recognition. We present a model in which there is competition to activate distributed semantic representations. The…

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia may have difficulty with verb production in comparison to nouns. Additionally, they may have greater difficulty producing verbs that have fewer semantic components (i.e., are semantically "light") compared to verbs that have greater semantic weight. A connectionist verb-production model proposed by Gordon and…

A number of recent electrophysiological studies of sentence processing have shown that a subclass of syntactic violations elicits very rapid ERP responses, occurring within around 200 ms of the onset of the violation. Such findings raise the question of how it is possible to diagnose violations so quickly. This paper suggests that very rapid…

Magnetic resonance imaging was used to produce midsagittal images of the corpus callosum of 19 right-handed adult male and female subjects. The preliminary findings of this study indicate that significant adaptation in the anterior midbody of the corpus callosum has occurred to accommodate multiple language capacity in bilingual individuals…

Today, it is generally accepted that unconscious stimuli can activate a response code, which leads to a response congruency effect (RCE) on a subsequent target. However, it is not yet clear whether this is due to the semantic processing of the primes or to the formation of direct stimulus-response (S-R) associations bypassing the semantic system.…