It is well-established that linguistic processing is primarily a left-hemisphere activity, while emotional prosody processing is lateralized to the right hemisphere. Does attention, directed at different regions of the talker's face, reflect this pattern of lateralization? We investigated visuospatial attention across a talker's face with a…

It has recently been shown that interhemispheric communication is needed for the processing of foveally presented words. In this study, we examine whether the integration of information happens at an early stage, before word recognition proper starts, or whether the integration is part of the recognition process itself. Two lexical decision…

Verbal working memory (WM) tasks typically involve the language production architecture for recall; however, language production processes have had a minimal role in theorizing about WM. A framework for understanding verbal WM results is presented here. In this framework, domain-specific mechanisms for serial ordering in verbal WM are provided by…

Two experiments explored the mapping between language and mental representations of visual scenes. In both experiments, participants viewed, for example, a scene depicting a woman, a wine glass and bottle on the floor, an empty table, and various other objects. In Experiment 1, participants concurrently heard either "The woman will put the glass…

French children program the words they write syllable by syllable. We examined whether the syllable the children use to segment words is determined phonologically (i.e., is derived from speech production processes) or orthographically. Third, 4th and 5th graders wrote on a digitiser words that were mono-syllables phonologically (e.g.…

The Italian demonstrative pronouns "questo/a" ("this[subscript [mas/fem]]") and "quello/a" ("that[subscript [mas/fem]]") implicitly convey information about objects' distance with respect to the speaker. Our study investigated the referents of "questo/a" ("this[subscript [mas/fem]]") and "quello/a" ("that[subscript [mas/fem]]") by analysing their…

The current review focuses on recent event-related brain potential (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in L2 syntactic processing data. To this end, critical factors influencing both the dynamics of neural mechanisms (ERPs) and critical functional brain correlates (fMRI) are discussed. These entail the critical period…

Although children with Williams syndrome have relatively good structural language and concrete vocabulary abilities, they have difficulty with pragmatic aspects of language. To investigate the impact of pragmatic difficulties on listener-role referential communication, we administered a picture placement task designed to measure ability to…

The standard task used to study inflectional processing of verbs involves presentation of the stem form from which the participant is asked to generate the past tense. This task reveals a processing disadvantage for irregular relative to regular English verbs, more pronounced for lower-frequency items. Dual- and single-mechanism theories of…

The present study investigated the influence of within- and between-ear congruency on interference and laterality effects in an auditory semantic/prosodic conflict task. Participants were presented dichotically with words (e.g., mad, sad, glad) pronounced in either congruent or incongruent emotional tones (e.g., angry, happy, or sad) and…

Spoken word recognition shows gradient sensitivity to within-category voice onset time (VOT), as predicted by several current models of spoken word recognition, including TRACE (McClelland, J., & Elman, J. (1986). The TRACE model of speech perception. "Cognitive Psychology," 18, 1-86). It remains unclear, however, whether this sensitivity is…

Traditional theories of Semitic morphology hold that two abstract morphemic units, the root (e.g., "k-t-b") and the word pattern (e.g., "-i-aa-"), are the basis for word formation (e.g., "kitaab" [book]). Previous lexical processing studies in Hebrew and Arabic have confirmed the independent morphemic status of these two units, and the root in…

We consider the problem of checking whether an organization conforms to a body of regulation. Conformance is studied in a runtime verification setting. The regulation is translated to a logic, from which we synthesize monitors. The monitors are evaluated as the state of an organization evolves over time, raising an alarm if a violation is…

A study of near-native sentence processing was carried out using the self-paced reading method. Twenty-three near-native speakers of Spanish were identified on the basis of native-like proficiency, age of onset of acquisition after 15 years, and a minimum of three years ongoing residency in Spanish-speaking countries. The sentence comprehension…

Although software testing has been well-studied in computer science, it has received little attention in natural language processing. Nonetheless, a fully developed methodology for glass box evaluation and testing of language processing applications already exists in the field methods of descriptive linguistics. This work lays out a number of…