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 metaphor comprehension in the broader context of task-difference effects and manipulation of processing difficulty. We predicted that right hemisphere recruitment would show greater specificity to processing difficulty rather than metaphor comprehension. Previous metaphor processing studies have established that the left…

The aim of this experiment was to investigate the time course of orthographic facilitation on picture naming in Chinese. We used a picture-word paradigm to investigate orthographic and phonological facilitation on monosyllabic spoken word production in native Mandarin speakers. Both the stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) and the picture-word…

For over a century, a link between left prefrontal cortex and language processing has been accepted, yet the precise characterization of this link remains elusive. Recent advances in both the study of sentence processing and the neuroscientific study of frontal lobe function suggest an intriguing possibility: The demands to resolve competition…

Two grammatical classes are commonly distinguished in psycholinguistic research. The open-class includes content words such as nouns, whereas the closed-class includes function words such as determiners. A standing issue is to identify whether these words are retrieved through similar or distinct selection mechanisms. We report a comparative…

Focal brain lesions are assumed to produce language deficits by two basic mechanisms: local cortical dysfunction at the lesion site, and remote cortical dysfunction due to disruption of the transfer and integration of information between connected brain regions. However, functional imaging studies investigating language outcome after aphasic…

We investigated the relation of two dimensions of attentional functioning (sustained auditory attention and resource capacity/allocation) and complex sentence comprehension of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and a group of typically developing (TD) children matched for age. Twenty-six school-age children with SLI and 26 TD peers…

In this paper we describe a simple software system that allows students to practise their critical thinking skills by constructing argument maps of natural language arguments. As the students construct their maps of an argument, the system provides automatic, real time feedback on their progress. We outline the background and theoretical framework…

Purpose: This study describes a post hoc analysis of segmental, stress, and syllabification errors in third graders' productions of derived English words with the stress-changing suffixes "-ity" and "-ic." We investigated whether (a) derived word frequency influences error patterns, (b) stress and syllabification errors always co-occur, and (c)…

Language requires both storage and composition. However, exactly what is retrieved from memory and what is assembled remains controversial, especially for inflected words. Here, "imageability effects" is introduced as a new diagnostic of storage and a complement to frequency effects. In 2 studies of past-tense morphology, more reliable…

Purpose: This study was designed to test the word learning abilities of adults with typical language abilities, those with a history of disorders of spoken or written language (hDSWL), and hDSWL plus attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (+ADHD). Methods: Sixty-eight adults were required to associate a novel object with a novel label, and then…