We examined the effect of localized brain lesions on processing of the basic speech acts (BSAs) of question, assertion, request, and command. Both left and right cerebral damage produced significant deficits relative to normal controls, and left brain damaged patients performed worse than patients with right-sided lesions. This finding argues…

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the…

Phoneme identification with audiovisually discrepant stimuli is influenced by information in the visual signal (the McGurk effect). Additionally, lexical status affects identification of auditorily presented phonemes. The present study tested for lexical influences on the McGurk effect. Participants identified phonemes in audiovisually discrepant…

Five experiments are reported in which standard naming and tempo-naming tasks were used to investigate mechanisms of control over the time course of lexical processing. The time course of processing was manipulated by asking participants to time their responses with an audiovisual metronome. As the tempo of the metronome increased, results showed…

When accounting for the usage of some linguistic form, one can refer to its discourse profile, all concomitant features frequently co-occurring with that form in discourse, or abstract a more general claim about its discourse function, referring only to the necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper occurrence of the form. This article…

We join other responders in thanking Clahsen and Felser (CF) for pulling together these observations about the development of language processing. We are especially impressed by the generality and inclusiveness of CF's treatment of development in L1 and L2. Because most of their specifics concerned comprehension processes, our contribution will…

In their Keynote Article, Clahsen and Felser (CF) provide a detailed summary and comparison of grammatical processing in adult first language (L1) speakers, child L1 speakers, and second language (L2) speakers. CF conclude that child and adult L1 processing makes use of a continuous parsing mechanism, and that any differences found in processing…

The proposal by Clahsen and Felser (CF) has the potential of marking a turning point in second language (L2) acquisition research. Contrary to much L2 research to date, it suggests that some of the differences between native and (advanced) nonnative speakers may be at the level of grammatical processing, rather than grammatical representations.…

In this article, the authors lay out an impressive body of evidence that supports two main claims. First, they favor the continuity hypothesis, according to which children's parsing mechanisms are essentially the same as adults'. Parsing strategies change little over time, and those changes that occur are attributed to differences in lexical…

The first report of a connection between vocabulary learning and phonological short-term memory was published in 1988 (Baddeley, Papagno, & Vallar, 1988). At that time, both Susan Gathercole and I were involved in longitudinal studies, investigating the relation between nonword repetition and language learning. We both found a connection. Now,…

Schreuder and Baayen (Schreuder. R., & Baayen, R. H. (1997). How complex simplex words can be. "Journal of Memory and Language" 37, 118-139) report that lexical decision times to nouns are not sensitive to the cumulative frequency of the noun's morphological derivatives in its ''morphological family'', even though such a cumulative frequency…

Two striking contrasts currently exist in the sentence processing literature. First, whereas adult readers rely heavily on lexical information in the generation of syntactic alternatives, adult listeners in world-situated eye-gaze studies appear to allow referential evidence to override strong countervailing lexical biases (Tanenhaus,…

We examined the influence of semantic transparency on morphological facilitation in English in three lexical decision experiments. Decision latencies to visual targets (e.g., CASUALNESS) were faster after semantically transparent (e.g., CASUALLY) than semantically opaque (e.g., CASUALTY) primes whether primes were auditory and presented…

The semantic category effect represents a category dissociation between biological and nonbiological objects in picture naming. The aim of this preliminary study was to further examine this phenomenon, and to explore the possible association between the effect and subjective emotional valence for the named objects. Using a speeded picture naming…

Stress assignment to three- and four-syllable Italian words is not predictable by rule, but needs lexical look-up. The present study investigated whether stress assignment to low-frequency Italian words is determined by stress regularity, or by the number of words sharing the final phonological segment and the stress pattern (stress neighborhood…