ABSTRACT Recent constituent priming experiments show that Dutch and German prefixed verbs prime their stem, regardless of semantic transparency (e.g. Smolka et al. [(2014). ‘Verstehen’ (‘understand’) primes ‘stehen’ (‘stand’): Morphological structure overrides semantic compositionality in the lexical representation of German complex verbs. Journal of Memory and Language, 72, 16–36. https://doi.org/10

ABSTRACT In this paper, we demonstrate the effects of Information Theory measures on the processing of polysemous nouns and reveal that the sensitivity to multiple related senses can be learned from the linguistic context. We collected large-scale data and applied a correlation design to show that an increase in sense uncertainty (or sense diversity) is followed by a faster visual lexical decision

ABSTRACT Previous research suggests that native listeners may be more tolerant to syntactic errors when they are produced in a foreign accent. However, studies investigating this topic within the semantic domain remain conflicting. The current study examined the effects of mispronunciations leading to semantic abnormality in foreign-accented speech. While their EEG was recorded, native speakers of

ABSTRACT To reveal the underlying cause of disfluency, several authors related the pattern of disfluencies to difficulties at specific levels of production, using a Network Task. Given that disfluencies are multifactorial, we combined this paradigm with eye-tracking to disentangle disfluency related to word preparation difficulties from others (e.g. stalling strategies). We manipulated lexical and

ABSTRACT The present study investigates how morphological information is processed and represented in the bilingual lexicon. We employed a masked cross-language morphological priming paradigm to examine morphological decomposition and semantic transparency in bilingual lexical processing. A robust and reliable morphological priming effect was observed for both transparent compounds and opaque compounds

ABSTRACT Across three experiments, we investigated how different markers of contrastive focus affect text encoding and retention. Prior work suggests that some contrastive focus markers (e.g. contrastive pitch accents) can enhance long-term memory for discourse; we tested whether this arises from contrast alone or the realisation of linguistic focus in particular. Participants read texts containing

ABSTRACT In this preregistered study, we investigate whether themes conveyed by task partners’ narratives reveal semantic relationships between objects that would otherwise be perceived as unrelated. Such ad-hoc formation of thematic relations should result in semantic interference when naming objects related to the theme in a blocked-cyclic naming paradigm. Participants watch pre-recorded videos of

ABSTRACT Listeners can successfully interpret the intended meaning of an utterance even when it contains errors or other unexpected anomalies. The present work combines an online measure of attention to sentence referents (visual world eye-tracking) with offline judgments of sentence meaning to disclose how the interpretation of anomalous sentences unfolds over time in order to explore mechanisms of

ABSTRACT Much previous research has investigated the effect of domain-general memory processes on production and comprehension in conversation. In this paper, we present a paradigm in which common ground targets are kept consistent between a participant and two different speakers, and demonstrate a speaker effect that draws participants’ attention away from the common ground target in Experiment 1

ABSTRACT Cognitive Reserve (CR) refers to cognitive resources acquired through experiences along the lifespan that allow for flexibility in coping with neurocognitive changes. Investigating the role of CR measures across well-established psycholinguistic features can provide new insight into how CR interplays with cognition. Sixty-five Italian older adults performed a Lexical Decision, a Semantic Matching

ABSTRACT T3 sandhi in Mandarin is a phonological alternation where two adjacent T3-T3 tones are not allowed and become T[2]-T3. Although this phenomenon has been extensively studied in previous work, concerns about how T3 sandhi is represented in the mental lexicon remain controversial. We approached the issue of representation in a series of cross-modal priming experiments, including two semantic

ABSTRACT Older adults are able to implicitly pick up structural regularities in the environment despite declining cognitive abilities. Here, we investigated elderly’s abilities to implicitly pick up novel linguistic constraints in speech production. Across four training days, young and healthy older Dutch-speaking adults were asked to rapidly recite Dutch phonotactic syllables. Two unrestricted consonants

ABSTRACT During language comprehension, comprehenders form mental representations of the described events. We investigate discourse-level and verb-level cues that guide this process. In particular, we investigate how comprehenders represent object states when events are described with manner verbs that do not entail change-of-state (e.g. hit, wash): a potential change-of-state of the object can be

ABSTRACT Research suggests that coherence processing of narratives produced by speakers with traumatic brain injury is dissociated from processing of inter-sentential cohesion and intra-sentential production. The goal of this study was to investigate the relationships between microlinguistic abilities and macrolinguistic operations in narratives produced by individuals with TBI. Narratives with variable

ABSTRACT We investigated whether semantic context effects in speech production and comprehension are sensitive to language dominance and whether they involve domain-general executive control. We indexed these effects using semantic blocking within the cyclical semantic paradigm (corresponding to poorer performance in semantically related contexts compared to unrelated contexts) in a study that addressed

ABSTRACT Higher cognitive functions such as linguistic comprehension must ultimately relate to perceptual systems in the brain, though how and why this forms remains unclear. Different brain networks that mediate perception when hearing have recently been proposed to respect a taxonomic neurobiological model for the processing of different acoustic-semantic categories of real-world natural sounds.

ABSTRACT Given the association between multisensory information and inner attention, the quality of multisensory information is hypothesised to modulate the neuronal activity associated with language comprehension. To verify, we investigated the interaction effect between multisensory quality (sensory enrichment) and semantic (in)congruency during L2 sentence comprehension. English words were selected

ABSTRACT Sentences with filler-gap dependency are more difficult to process than those without, as reflected by event-related brain potentials (ERPs) such as sustained left anterior negativity (SLAN). The cognitive processes underlying SLAN may support associating a filler with a temporally distant gap in syntactic representation. Alternatively, processing filler-gap dependencies in the absence of

ABSTRACT This study aimed at examining morphological processing mechanisms involved in lexical access across the lifespan in the morphologically complex Russian language. We conducted an unprimed lexical decision experiment using number-dominant nouns in participants of a wide age range (n = 190, 9–87 years old), analysing age as a continuous factor. Additionally, we tested whether morphological processing

ABSTRACT Skilled readers may misinterpret “you that read wrong” for “you read that wrong”: a transposed-word effect. This relatively novel finding, which supports parallel word processing during sentence reading, is attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. The present study focussed on the contribution of syntactic constraints in driving

ABSTRACT This study aimed at examining morphological processing mechanisms involved in lexical access across the lifespan in the morphologically complex Russian language. We conducted an unprimed lexical decision experiment using number-dominant nouns in participants of a wide age range (n = 190, 9–87 years old), analysing age as a continuous factor. Additionally, we tested whether morphological processing

ABSTRACT Skilled readers may misinterpret “you that read wrong” for “you read that wrong”: a transposed-word effect. This relatively novel finding, which supports parallel word processing during sentence reading, is attributed to a combination of noisy bottom-up word position coding and top-down syntactic constraints. The present study focussed on the contribution of syntactic constraints in driving

ABSTRACT This study investigated brain responses to verbal action mismatches (e.g. The brother catches/*bites the sister) and role relation mismatches (e.g. The sister catches the brother ) in a picture-sentence verification task in Korean using event–related potentials (ERPs). EEG data collected from 30 native Korean speakers revealed a large N400 at the verb for the action mismatch, but an early

ABSTRACT The present study investigated the impact of the MRI environment on eye-movement measures in the visual-world paradigm. 24 neurotypical young adults performed a linguistic prediction task in a typical lab setting (Lab) and 22 did so during MRI scanning (Scanner). Data analyses focused on eye-tracking data quality and the time course and magnitude of prediction effects. Data quality was reduced

ABSTRACT Memory is fundamental for comprehending and segmenting the flow of activity around us into units called “events”. Here, we investigate the effect of the movement dynamics of actions (ceased, ongoing) and the inner structure of events (with or without object-state change) on people's event memory. Furthermore, we investigate how describing events, and the meaning and form of verb predicates

ABSTRACT Two experiments test how phrasal prominence influences listeners' perception of vowel contrasts and how prominence information and vowel formant cues are integrated in processing. Experiment 1 finds that listeners incorporate phrasal prominence in their perception of vowels, in line with how spectral structure is modulated by prominence in speech. Experiment 2 explores how prominence information

ABSTRACT This research explores patterns of lexical activation of both languages of a bilingual when producing spoken words. Specifically, it investigates the influence of within- and cross-language measures of phonological neighbourhood, on the English picture naming performance of a diverse group of French (L1) – English (L2) late bilinguals. A novel phonological neighbourhood density measure was

ABSTRACT An important question in psycholinguistics is whether or not the semantic transparency of words plays any role during the processing of compound words. Studies of different languages have produced mixed results suggesting that semantic properties of compounding do not have a universal effect. This paper uses masked priming at three different SOAs to study the possible effects of semantic transparency

ABSTRACT Theories of language and cognition develop iteratively from ideas, experiments and models. The abstract nature of “cognitive processes” means that computational models play a critical role in this, yet bridging the gaps between models, data, and interpretations is challenging. While the how and why computations are performed is often the primary research focus, the conclusions drawn from models

ABSTRACT Monologic spoken discourse allows us to evaluate every day speech while retaining some experimental constraint. It also has clinical relevance, providing cognitive-linguistic information not measured on typical standardised tests. Here, we leverage big behavioural data (AphasiaBank) to understand how discourse genres (narrative, procedural, expositional), and unique tasks within those genres

ABSTRACT There is increasing evidence showing distinct neurocognitive underpinnings of different deficits of written language processing. This study investigated whether functional brain mechanisms related to isolated spelling problems can be distinguished from those observed for the combined profile of reading and spelling deficits (dyslexia). Two cognitive accounts explaining isolated spelling deficits

ABSTRACT The ability to predict upcoming actions is a hallmark of cognition. It remains unclear, however, whether the predictive behaviour observed in controlled lab environments generalises to rich, everyday settings. In four virtual reality experiments, we tested whether a well-established marker of linguistic prediction (anticipatory eye movements) replicated when increasing the naturalness of the

ABSTRACT The current longitudinal study investigated how classroom second language (L2) learning modulates the neural correlates of bilingual language control during language production. Chinese college freshmen majoring in English undertook two test sessions (i.e. pre-learning and post-learning) over the course of one year. Specifically, while in the scanner, participants were instructed to name pictures

ABSTRACT We investigated how deafness and sign language experience affect the human brain by comparing neuroanatomical structures across congenitally deaf signers (n = 30), hearing native signers (n = 30), and hearing sign-naïve controls (n = 30). Both voxel-based and surface-based morphometry results revealed deafness-related structural changes in visual cortices (grey matter), right frontal lobe

ABSTRACT Coherence relations are often assumed to hold between clauses, but restrictive relative clauses (RCs) are usually not granted discourse segment status because they are syntactically and conceptually integrated in their matrix clauses. This paper investigates whether coherence relations can be inferred between restrictive RCs and their matrix clauses. Three experiments provide converging evidence

ABSTRACT Real-time speech comprehension is challenging because communicatively relevant information is distributed throughout the entire utterance. In five mouse tracking experiments on German and American English, we probe if listeners, in principle, use non-local, early intonational information to anticipate upcoming referents. Listeners had to select a speaker-intended referent with their mouse

ABSTRACT Various types of arm-and-hand movements co-occurring with speech give rise to diverse cross-modal semantic relations. This study investigated how the brain processes self-adaptors, emblems, and iconic gestures with the same speech by using fMRI. Gestures with speech evoked bilateral fusiform gyrus and left supramarginal gyrus in visual and multisensory processing. These regions were involved

ABSTRACT In the picture-word interference (PWI) task, semantically related distractors slow production, while translation-equivalent distractors speed it, possibly implying a language-specific bilingual production system [Costa, A., Miozzo, M., & Caramazza, A. (1999). Lexical selection in bilinguals: Do words in the bilingual's two lexicons compete for selection? Journal of Memory and Language, 41(3)

ABSTRACT Increasing the neighbourhood density of a word typically facilitates lexical decision responses and interferes in sentence reading. The Multiple Read-Out Model accounts for such variation by postulating that word responses in the lexical decision task can be made via two mechanisms – identifying the word or using the global lexical activity that it generates. Here, we asked whether adding

ABSTRACT Semantic processing theories propose activation of concepts via semantic features, with interference from semantic neighbours arising due to shared features. Semantic impairment has been explained as damage to activation and interference mechanisms, and linked to impaired semantic control. This study investigated semantic activation and interference in 20 people with aphasia. We found normal

ABSTRACT Prior research suggests that prediction supports language processing and learning. However, the ecological validity of such findings is unclear because experiments usually include constrained stimuli. While theoretically suggestive, previous conclusions will be largely irrelevant if listeners cannot generate predictions in response to complex and variable perceptual input. Taking a step toward

ABSTRACT Mindfulness can reduce anxiety and improve attentional control, so we tested for relationships between mindfulness and performance on word retrieval tasks. In Study 1, college students experienced a 10-min mindful breathing exercise or control condition, and participants in the mindful breathing condition correctly named more pictures than participants in the control condition. Participants

ABSTRACT Mindfulness can reduce anxiety and improve attentional control, so we tested for relationships between mindfulness and performance on word retrieval tasks. In Study 1, college students experienced a 10-min mindful breathing exercise or control condition, and participants in the mindful breathing condition correctly named more pictures than participants in the control condition. Participants

ABSTRACT Referring to a specific object sometimes requires using multiple adjectives. The ordering of the adjectives is assumed to be constrained by universal hierarchies (grammatical or conceptual). It is therefore predicted that different languages will present similar ordering preferences. The ordering in languages where adjectives appear after the noun is further expected to mirror the ordering

ABSTRACT Could meaning be read from acoustics, or from the refraction rate of pyramidal cells innervated by the cochlea, everyone would be an omniglot. Speech does not contain sufficient acoustic cues to identify linguistic units such as morphemes, words, and phrases without prior knowledge. Our target article (Meyer, L., Sun, Y., & Martin, A. E. (2019). Synchronous, but not entrained: Exogenous and

ABSTRACT Incremental language processing means that listeners confront temporary ambiguity about how to structure the input, which can generate misinterpretations. In four “visual-world” experiments, we tested whether engaging cognitive control – which detects and resolves conflict – assists revision during comprehension. We recorded listeners’ eye-movements and actions while following instructions

ABSTRACT Turkish university students who had learned English via classroom instruction read six ethical dilemmas (three in English, three in Turkish) while skin conductance was recorded. Ratings of agreement with selfish actions were higher in the foreign language; agreement with ethical actions were higher in the native language. The skin conductance responses (SCRs) elicited by selfish statements

ABSTRACT Older adults often experience difficulties comprehending speech in noisy backgrounds, which hearing loss does not fully explain. It remains unknown how cognitive abilities, brain networks, and age-related hearing loss may uniquely contribute to speech in noise comprehension at the sentence level. In 31 older adults, using cognitive measures and resting-state fMRI, we investigated the cognitive

ABSTRACT Previous studies have demonstrated a reliable effect of parallelism in a variety of domains. These studies have suggested that parallelism is preferred during both production and comprehension, and that parallelism can result in facilitation during sentence processing. There is, however, some debate about whether such effects are truly limited to coordination. In both coordinate and subordinate

ABSTRACT How language users become able to process forms they have never encountered in input is central to our understanding of language cognition. A range of models, including rule-based models, stochastic models, and analogy-based models have been proposed to account for this ability. Despite the fact that all three models are reasonably successful, we argue that productivity in language is more

The picture word interference (PWI) paradigm and ERPs were used to investigate whether lexical selection in deaf and hearing ASL-English bilinguals occurs via lexical competition or whether the response exclusion hypothesis (REH) for PWI effects is supported. The REH predicts that semantic interference should not occur for bimodal bilinguals because sign and word responses do not compete within an

ABSTRACT Whether neural networks can capture relational knowledge is a matter of long-standing controversy. Recently, some researchers have argued that (1) classic connectionist models can handle relational structure and (2) the success of deep learning approaches to natural language processing suggests that structured representations are unnecessary to model human language. We tested the Story Gestalt

ABSTRACT Languages constantly change. This requires variants that are initially rare to become dominant. A prime question is how such changes come about. Here we propose that the inter-connectivity of people’s contacts, and people’s failure to take it into account leads them to over-weigh the informativity of repeated information. In Experiment 1 we find that people do not sufficiently account for

German verb stems may be combined with a particle or a prefix, forming particle and prefixed verbs, respectively. Both types of verbs are morphologically complex, yet particles are free morphemes, which are routinely separated from their stem and can stand alone in a sentence, whereas prefixes are bound morphemes, which are attached to their stem and cannot stand alone in a sentence. Morphologically

ABSTRACT German verb stems may be combined with a particle or a prefix, forming particle and prefixed verbs, respectively. Both types of verbs are morphologically complex, yet particles are free morphemes, which are routinely separated from their stem and can stand alone in a sentence, whereas prefixes are bound morphemes, which are attached to their stem and cannot stand alone in a sentence. Morphologically

ABSTRACT Does the processing of words with a transparent morphological structure benefit from this structure? Here we show that the flankers task provides an interesting novel angle on this well-researched issue. Participants saw transparent suffixed target words flanked by their stem (e.g. farm farmer farm), as well as pseudo-suffixed words and non-suffixed words flanked by their embedded word (e

Speakers learning a second language show systematic differences from native speakers in the retrieval, planning, and articulation of speech. A key challenge in examining the interrelationship between these differences at various stages of production is the need for manual annotation of fine-grained properties of speech. We introduce a new method for automatically analysing voice onset time (VOT), a

ABSTRACT A picture-naming task and ERPs were used to investigate effects of iconicity and visual alignment between signs and pictures in American Sign Language (ASL). For iconic signs, half the pictures visually overlapped with phonological features of the sign (e.g. the fingers of CAT align with a picture of a cat with prominent whiskers), while half did not (whiskers are not shown). Iconic signs

ABSTRACT Deaf individuals who learned a spoken language with the aid of a cochlear implant (CI) often experience difficulties with reading. In the present study, we investigate this issue by assessing the impact of lexical and orthographic predictors on visual word recognition in early and late deaf CI-users. Early deaf CI-users were comparable to age-matched hearing controls, for both response accuracy

ABSTRACT In the field of neurobiology of language, neuroimaging studies are generally based on stimulation paradigms consisting of at least two different conditions. Designing those paradigms can be very time-consuming and this traditional approach is necessarily data-limited. In contrast, in computational and corpus linguistics, analyses are often based on large text corpora, which allow a vast variety