Set representations are explicitly expressed in natural language. For example, many languages distinguish between sets and subsets ("all" vs. "some"), as well as between singular and plural sets ("a cat" vs. "some cats"). Three experiments explored the hypothesis that these representations are language specific, and thus absent from the conceptual…

Syntactic priming during language production is pervasive and well-studied. Hearing, reading, speaking or writing a sentence with a given structure increases the probability of subsequently producing the same structure, regardless of whether the prime and target share lexical content. In contrast, syntactic priming during comprehension has proven…

The effects of age of acquisition and repetition priming on picture naming latencies and errors were studied in 22 children who stutter (CWS) and 22 children who do not stutter (CWNS) between the ages of 3;1 and 5;7. Children participated in a computerized picture naming task where they named pictures of both early and late acquired (AoA) words in…

The results of two text-change experiments are reported. The experiments were designed to investigate the syntactic representation of garden path sentences such as "While the man hunted the deer that was brown and graceful ran into the woods", specifically the claim that a significant number of misinterpretations of such sentences are due to…

Spatial demonstratives ("this/that") play a crucial role when indicating object locations using language. However, the relationship between the use of these proximal and distal linguistic descriptors and the near (peri-personal) versus far (extra-personal) perceptual space distinction is a source of controversy [Kemmerer, D. (1999). "Near" and…

Much recent psycho- and neuro-linguistic work has aimed to elucidate the mechanisms by which sentence meanings are composed by investigating the processing of semantic mismatch. One controversial case for theories of semantic composition is expressions such as "the clown jumped for ten minutes," in which the aspectual properties of a punctual verb…

The authors report a series of experiments in which they use the masked congruence priming paradigm to investigate the processing of masked primes in the manual and verbal response modalities. In the manual response modality, they found that masked incongruent primes produced interference relative to both congruent and neutral primes. This…

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…