We present the first experimental evidence of a phenomenon in speech communication we call "analog acoustic expression." Speech is generally thought of as conveying information in two distinct ways: discrete linguistic-symbolic units such as words and sentences represent linguistic meaning, and continuous prosodic forms convey information about…

The processing costs involved in regional accent normalization were evaluated by measuring differences in lexical decision latencies for targets placed at the end of sentences with different French regional accents. Over a series of 6 experiments, the authors examined the time course of comprehension disruption by manipulating the duration and…

A perceptual learning experiment provides evidence that the mental lexicon cannot consist solely of detailed acoustic traces of recognition episodes. In a training lexical decision phase, listeners heard an ambiguous [f-s] fricative sound, replacing either [f] or [s] in words. In a test phase, listeners then made lexical decisions to visual…

When participants are asked to make sensibility judgments on sentences that describe action toward the body (i.e., "Mark dealt the cards to you") or away from the body (i.e., "You dealt the cards to Mark"), they are faster to respond when the response requires an arm movement in the same direction as the action described by the sentence. This…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) have written a fairly comprehensive review of the current literature on on-line second language (L2) processing, presenting data from eye movement, self-paced reading, and event-related potential (ERP) studies with the aim of evidencing possible differences between native language (L1) and L2 processing. The thrust of the…

Clahsen and Felser (CF) have written a beautiful and important paper. I applaud their integrative empirical approach, and believe that their theoretical account is largely correct, if not in some of its specific claims, at least in its broader assumptions. CF directly compare their shallow structure hypothesis (SSH) with a model that my colleagues…

Because words represent the building blocks upon which the facility to produce and comprehend language at all levels is based, the capacity of a child to learn words has immense impact on his or her developing abilities to communicate and engage properly with the outside world. Both the Keynote Article and the Commentaries in this issue…

Emerging evidence suggests that a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in childhood may disrupt the ability to abstract the central meaning or gist-based memory from connected language (discourse). The current study adopts a novel approach to elucidate the role of immediate and working memory processes in producing a cohesive and coherent gist-based text…

An eye movement study of temporarily ambiguous closure sentences confirmed that the early closure penalty in a sentence like "While John hunted the frightened deer escaped" is larger for a simple past verb ("hunted") than for a past progressive verb ("was hunting"). The results can be explained by the observation that simple past tense verbs…

Chinese inflection differs from that of European languages in that it is fully parsable in the orthography, which raises the possibility that Chinese inflected forms may not show the surface frequency effects found in other languages. Five lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine this issue. They showed that surface frequency did…

The aim of this study was to determine whether Hebrew readers reference phonological information for the silent processing of unpointed Hebrew nouns. A research paradigm in which participants were required to perform consecutive same/different judgments regarding the identicalness of members of stimulus pairs was used for answering this question.…

The simultaneous presence in a learner's grammar of two features that should be mutually exclusive (optionality) typifies second language acquisition. But generative approaches have no good means of accommodating the phenomenon. The paper proposes one approach, based on Truscott and Sharwood Smith's (2004) MOGUL framework. In this framework,…

When asked to recall the words from a just-presented target list, subjects occasionally recall words that were not on the list. These intrusions either appeared on earlier lists (prior-list intrusions, or PLIs) or had not appeared over the course of the experiment (extra-list intrusions). The authors examined the factors that elicit PLIs in free…

This article evaluates 2 competing models that address the decision-making processes mediating word recognition and lexical decision performance: a hybrid 2-stage model of lexical decision performance and a random-walk model. In 2 experiments, nonword type and word frequency were manipulated across 2 contrasts (pseudohomophone-legal nonword and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a computational approach and a toolset to infer spatial displacements as they occur in route narrative documents and report on first experiments done to produce computer-aided learning (CAL) applications and instructional design editors that exploit the inferred georeferenced itineraries.…