According to the conjunction rule, the probability of A "and" B cannot exceed the probability of either single event. This rule reads "and" in terms of the logical operator [inverted v], interpreting A and B as an intersection of two events. As linguists have long argued, in natural language "and" can convey a wide range of relationships between…

Masked priming is used in psycholinguistic studies to assess questions about lexical access and representation. We present two masked priming experiments using MEG. If the MEG signal elicited by words reflects specific aspects of lexical retrieval, then one expects to identify specific neural correlates of retrieval that are sensitive to priming.…

The present study used the signal detection theory to test the hypothesis that the right hemisphere (RH) is more sensitive than the left hemisphere (LH) to the distant semantic relations in novel metaphoric expressions. In two divided visual field experiments, sensitivity (d') and criterion ([beta]) were calculated for responses to different types…

This review discusses the neurophysiology and neuroanatomy of the cortical control of reflexive and volitional saccades in humans. The main focus is on classical lesion studies and studies using the interference method of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). To understand the behavioural function of a region, it is essential to assess…

Counterfactual reasoning is valid reasoning arising from premises that are true in a hypothetical model, but false in actuality. Investigations of counterfactuals have concentrated on reasoning and production, but psycholinguistic research has been more limited. We report three eye-movement studies investigating the comprehension of counterfactual…

Four experiments in written and spoken dialogue tested the predictions of two distinct accounts of syntactic encoding in sentence production: a lexicalist, residual activation account and an implicit-learning account. Experiments 1 and 2 showed syntactic priming (i.e., the tendency to reuse the syntactic structure of a prime sentence in the…

A key question in language processing concerns the rule-like nature of many aspects of grammar. Much research on this topic has focused on English past tense morphology, which comprises a regular, rule-like pattern (e.g., bake-baked) and a set of irregular forms that defy a rule-based description (e.g., take-took). Previous studies have used past…

Importance and predictability each have been argued to contribute to acoustic prominence. To investigate whether these factors are independent or two aspects of the same phenomenon, naive participants played a verbal variant of Tic Tac Toe. Both importance and predictability contributed independently to the acoustic prominence of a word, but in…

Bailey and Ferreira (2003) hypothesized and reported behavioral evidence that disfluencies (filled and silent pauses) undesirably affect sentence processing when they appear before disambiguating verbs in Garden Path (GP) sentences. Disfluencies here cause the parser to "linger" on, and apparently accept as correct, an erroneous parse. Critically,…

Research on Processing Instruction (PI) has yielded consistently positive results across a variety of measures. In addition, in comparison to other instructional interventions, PI tends to yield superior results. The one difference is comparative research with Meaning-based Output Instruction (MOI) in which in a number of studies, MOI is seen to…

How are violations of phonological constraints processed in word comprehension? The present article reports the results of an event-related potentials (ERP) study on a phonological constraint of German that disallows identical segments within a syllable or word (CC[subscript i]VC[subscript i]). We examined three types of monosyllabic CCVC words:…

An empirical study is presented that tests a novel prediction generated by the Metaphor-by-Pattern-Completion (MPC) connectionist model of metaphor comprehension (Thomas & Mareschal, 2001). The MPC model predicts a developmental progression in the way that children process metaphors, from a preference for basic-level metaphors to a preference for…

Clustering coefficient--a measure derived from the new science of networks--refers to the proportion of phonological neighbors of a target word that are also neighbors of each other. Consider the words "bat", "hat", and "can", all of which are neighbors of the word "cat"; the words "bat" and…

There is a long-standing debate about the principles constraining the combinatorial properties of suffixes. Hay 2002 and Hay & Plag 2004 proposed a model in which suffixes can be ordered along a hierarchy of processing complexity. We show that this model generalizes to a larger set of suffixes, and we provide independent evidence supporting the…

A number of recent studies have questioned the idea that lexical selection during speech production is a competitive process. One type of evidence against selection by competition is the observation that in the picture-word interference task semantically related distractors may facilitate the naming of a picture, whereas the selection by…