The present study investigated the role of emotional tone of voice in the perception of spoken words. Listeners were presented with words that had either a happy, sad, or neutral meaning. Each word was spoken in a tone of voice (happy, sad, or neutral) that was congruent, incongruent, or neutral with respect to affective meaning, and naming…

What is the root cause of word frequency effects on lexical decision times? W. S. Murray and K. I. Forster (2004) argued that such effects are linear in rank frequency, consistent with a serial search model of lexical access. In this article, the authors (a) describe a method of testing models of such effects that takes into account the…

Electrophysiological techniques were used to assess the generalizability of concreteness effects on word processing across word class (nouns and verbs) and different types of lexical ambiguity (syntactic only and combined syntactic/semantic). The results replicated prior work in showing an enhanced N400 response and a sustained frontal negativity…

The functional specificity of the brain region known as the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) was examined using fMRI. We explored whether this area serves a general role in processing symbolic stimuli, rather than being selective for the processing of words. Brain activity was measured during a visual 1-back task to English words, meaningful symbols…

Life themes, general events, and event-specific episodes, together with autobiographical knowledge, form autobiographical memory. Each of these memory structures is described, and research that has investigated the storage and retrieval of temporal information for life events, such as place in time, duration, and order, is examined. The general…

Several recent papers have reported long-term structural priming effects in experiments where previous patterns of experience with the double object and prepositional object constructions are shown to affect later patterns of language production for those constructions. The experiments reported in this paper address the extent to which these…

An evidential causal relation like, "Because most distinguished students got bad grades, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers," is more difficult to process than a factual one like, "Because he got tired after a long semester, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers" (Noordman & de Blijzer,…

This paper reviews research on the production of referential expressions, examining the choice between explicit and attenuated lexical forms (e.g., pronouns vs. names), and between acoustically prominent and attenuated pronunciations. Both choices can be explained in terms of addressee-design, in that explicit expressions tend to be used in…

Retrieving a word in a sentence requires speakers to overcome syntagmatic, as well as paradigmatic interference. When accessing "cat" in "The cat chased the string", not only are similar competitors such as "dog" and "cap" activated, but also other words in the planned sentence, such as "chase" and "string". We hypothesise that both types of…

Two experiments examined the role of common ground in the production and on-line interpretation of wh-questions such as "What's above the cow with shoes?" Experiment 1 examined unscripted conversation, and found that speakers consistently use wh-questions to inquire about information known only to the addressee. Addressees were sensitive to this…

The joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency in lexical decision were examined in 4 experiments as a function of nonword type (legal nonwords, e.g., BRONE, vs. pseudohomophones, e.g., BRANE). When familiarity was a viable dimension for word-nonword discrimination, as when legal nonwords were used, additive effects of stimulus quality…

English and German children aged 2 years 4 months and 4 years heard both novel and familiar verbs in sentences whose form was grammatical, but which mismatched the event they were watching (e.g., "The frog is pushing the lion", when the lion was actually the "agent" or "doer" of the pushing). These verbs were then elicited in new sentences. All…

Word frequency and orthographic familiarity were independently manipulated as readers' eye movements were recorded. Word frequency influenced fixation durations and the probability of word skipping when orthographic familiarity was controlled. These results indicate that lexical processing of words can influence saccade programming (as shown by…

This study investigated the effectiveness of three kinds of vocabulary instruction. Seventy learners in the classes of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) were divided into three different groups receiving different instructions: Focus on Form Instruction (FoF) (Dictogloss task), Focus on Meaning Instruction (FoM) (Reading and Discussion task),…

The aim of the present paper was to investigate the effects of processing instruction and traditional instruction on Iranian EFL learners' writing ability. Thirty participants who were non-randomly selected out of 63 Intermediate EFL learners, taking English courses in a language institute in Khoy-Iran, participated in this quasi-experimental…