Language and Memory

Second-language (L2) acquisition is generally thought to be constrained by maturational factors that circumscribe a critical period for nativelike attainment. Consistent with the maturational view are age effects among learners who begin L2 acquisition prior to, but not after, closure of the putative critical period. Also favoring the maturational account is the scarcity of late L2 learners at asymptote who perform like natives, and weak effects of native language-target language pairings. With Korean and Chinese learners of English, the experimental study of Johnson and Newport (1989) yielded just these types of evidence. Some subsequent studies do not support the critical period account of L2 acquisition constraints, however. Accordingly, we undertook a replication of Johnson and Newport (1989), using the exact methods and materials of the original experiment, and a sample of Spanish natives (n = 61). In keeping with recent research, L2 attainment negatively correlates with age of learning even if learning commences after the presumed end of the critical period. We also find modest evidence of nativelike attainment among late learners. Our data further suggest that the outcome of L2 acquisition may depend on L1-L2 pairings and L2 use.

This paper begins by considering problems that have plagued investigations of automatic or unconscious influences of perception and memory. A process dissociation procedure that provides an escape from those problems is introduced. The process dissociation procedure separates the contributions of different types of processes to performance of a task, rather than equating processes with tasks. Using that procedure, I provide new evidence in favor of a two-factor theory of recognition memory; one factor relies on automatic processes and the other relies on intentional processes. Recollection (an intentional use of memory) is hampered when attention is divided, rather than full, at the time of test. In contrast, the use of familiarity as a basis for recognition memory judgments (an automatic use of memory) is shown to be invariant across full versus divided attention, manipulated at test. Process dissociation procedures provide a general framework for separating automatic from intentional forms of processing in a variety of domains; including perception, memory, and thought.

The access of idiomatic expressions was investigated in three cross-modal priming experiments. When the idiomatic string was predictable, subjects were faster at performing a lexical decision to idiomatically related targets than to literally related targets (Experiment 1). When the string was not recognizable as idiomatic until its completion, then subjects were faster on the target literally related to the last word (Experiment 2). Lexical decision for the same materials used in Experiment 2, when target words were presented 300 ms after the end of idiom was heard, was faster both for targets related to the last word and for the idiomatic meaning of the string, relative to control targets (Experiment 3). Neither the direct access model nor the lexical representation model seems adequate to explain the present findings. A new hypothesis concerning the representation and the processing of idioms is presented. 63

We report five experiments that investigate syntactic priming (Bock, 1986b) using a written completion task. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that priming occurs if the prime and target contain different verbs, but that stronger priming occurs if the verb is repeated. Experiment 1 also showed that priming occurs even if the detailed structure of prime and target differ. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 found that priming was unaffected by whether tense, aspect, or number of the verb stayed the same or differed between prime and target. We argue that these results provide evidence about the representation of syntactic information within the lemma stratum. We use these results to extend the model proposed by . In particular, we argue that combinatorial information is phrasal in nature, is associated with the verb's lemma rather than a particular form of the verb, and is shared between different lemmas.

A common account of working memory capacity, and its development, incorporates the notion of limited mental resources being shared between processing and storage components. Working memory tasks are assumed to measure this capacity. However, recent data from children's performance at one such task, counting span, implicate forgetting over time as being more important than the capacity for resource-sharing. Three experiments investigated the role of temporal factors in more depth and breadth by varying the retention requirements in working memory tasks while holding constant the overall processing difficulty. Counting span, operation span, and reading span tests in 6-to 11-yearolds were all shown to decline as the retention interval of stimulus items is increased and, across tasks, there were no consistent effects from different concurrent storage loads on processing speed. It is suggested that among children, performance in these tasks does not reflect a trade-off between resources allocated to processing and storage and that caution should be adopted in interpreting working memory span in adult populations.

Since the 196Os, there has been controversy as to whether long-term learning might depend on some form of temporary short-term storage. Evidence that patients with grossly impaired memory span might show normal learning was, however, particularly problematic for such views. We reexamine the question by studying the learning capacity of a patient, P.V., with a very pure deficit in short-term memory. A series of experiments compare her learning capacity with that of matched controls. The fast experiment shows that her capacity to learn pairs of meaningful words is within the normal range. A second experiment examines her capacity to learn to associate a familiar word with an unfamiliar item from another language. With auditory presentation she is completely unable to perform this task. Further studies show that when visual presentation is used she shows evidence of learning, but is clearly impaired. It is suggested that short-term phonological storage is important for learning unfamiliar verbal material, but is not essential for forming associations between meaningful items that are already known. Implications for the possible role of a phonological short-term store in the acquisition of vocabulary by children are discussed. 0 1988 Academic 586 0749-596X/88 $3.00 Copyrisht 0 1988 by Academic Press, Inc. Au rights of regroduction in my fom reserved.

In five experiments we examined the way in which readers reanalyze garden-path sentences, using grammaticality judgments as the dependent measure. The stimuli were twoclause sentences containing an ambiguous noun phrase which could function as either the object of the first clause or the subject of the second. Prior research has shown that the former analysis is generally preferred. In the first two experiments, we varied the number of words in the ambiguous phrase and found that reanalysis of garden-path sentences was more difficult with a longer ambiguous phrase. The third experiment established that this effect of phrase length is not attributable to the greater syntactic complexity of longer phrases. The fourth and fifth experiments demonstrated that the effect of phrase length is attributable to increasing the distance from the head of the ambiguous phrase to the disambiguating word of the garden-path sentence: Ambiguous phrases made long by the addition of prenominal adjectives were easy for the parser to reanalyze, but phrases made long by the addition of postnominal modifying prepositional phrases (Experiment 3) or relative clauses (Experiments 4 and 5) were hard for the parser to reanalyze. From these results, we argue that sentence comprehension requires the creation of phrase structure and the assignment of thematic roles to phrases, with the assignment taking place at the phrasal head. Reanalysis is affected by the ease with which thematic roles can be reassigned to misanafyzed phrases.

Three lexical decision experiments were carried out to investigate the nature of morphological decomposition in the lexical system. The first of these experiments compares the priming effect of inflectionally and derivationally related forms on a simple inflected word. Italian derived words like mutevole (changeable) were as effective as non-derived inllected words like mutarono (they changed) in priming the related form mutare (to change). The design of the remaining experiments is based on the stem homograph paradigm (Laudanna, Badecker, & Caramazza, 1989, Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 531-546). When an unambiguous word like mute (mute) is primed by a stem homograph like mutarono (they changed)-a morphologically unrelated word with a homographic stem-there is a robust inhibitory effect when compared with unrelated prime conditions. Experiments two and three compared the effect on forms like mute of priming by an inflected stem homograph (mutarono) and priming by a derived "root homograph" like mutevole-a morphologically unrelated derived word with a homographic root (mut-). While there was a consistent inhibitory effect with the inflected primes, there was no such effect with the derived primes. These results indicate that there is a level of lexical representation in the input lexicon at which inflected and derived words are analyzed in terms of their inflectional stems and affixes, but not also in terms of their derivational roots and affiies. It is argued that the inhibitory effects found in experiments two and three and the facilitation effects found in experiment one and elsewhere support the notion that there are multiple representational levels at which morphological structure is represented. o 1992 AC&AC press, I~C.

Four experiments investigated whether bilinguals activate spelling-to-sound correspondences in a nontarget language during word naming by examining whether the existence of word-body neighbors in the nontarget language impairs naming of the target language. Both English-French and French-English bilinguals were tested. In each experiment participants named a block of English experimental words, a block of French filler words, and then a second block of English experimental words. Results indicated that spelling-sound correspondences from both languages could be activated simultaneously, but whether they were depended on whether bilinguals were naming words in their dominant or less dominant language, whether English target words were named before or after the French filler words, and participants' fluency and experience with French.

In a series of picture-word interference experiments, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals named pictures in Catalan with distractor words printed either in Catalan (same-language pairs) or in Spanish (differentlanguage pairs). Naming was facilitated when the distractor was the name of the picture in both same-[e.g., taula-taula (table in Catalan)] and different-language pairs [e.g., taula-mesa (table in Spanish)]. We also found that the facilitation effect was larger for same-language pairs and that semantically related distractors in the same-vs different-language conditions were similarly interfering. These results are interpreted within a lexical model that assumes that only words of the target language are considered for lexical selection and can, therefore, compete for selection. Converging evidence from several experiments indicates that the facilitation asymmetry for same name distractors arises because same-language distractors can activate target phonemes via nonlexical, graphemephoneme conversion processes. Facilitation was obtained with phonologically related distractors for both same-and different-language conditions but not for their translations. The results suggest that nonlexical phonological processes contribute to the phonological facilitation effect.

Comparisons of bilinguals and monolinguals have typically found poorer performance by bilinguals in a variety of memory tasks. However, these studies have used bilinguals who were not native speakers of the monolingual's language, and who were often required to process both languages during the session. In the present study, Native English-speaking bilinguals were compared to English monolinguals on four verbal memory tasks: episodic recognition, lexical decision, object naming, and free recall. Only English words were used in the session to avoid activation of the second language. There were no differences in accuracy between groups on any task. Bilinguals were slower than monolinguals, but only for the list recognition and lexical decision tasks, where language-specific, data-driven pro-CeSSing predominates.

Based on previous reports of bilinguals' reduced non-linguistic switch cost, we explored how bilingualism affects various task-switching mechanisms. We tested different groups of Spanish monolinguals and highly-proficient Catalan-Spanish bilinguals in different task-switching implementations. In Experiment 1 we disengaged the restart cost typically occurring after a cue from the switch cost itself using two cue-task versions varying in explicitness. In Experiment 2 we tested bilingualism effects on overriding conflicting response sets by including bivalency effects. In Experiment 3 we attempted to replicate the reduced switch cost of bilinguals with the same implementation as in previous studies. Relative to monolinguals, bilinguals showed a reduced restart cost in the implicit cue-task version of Experiment 1 and overall faster response latencies in Experiment 2. However, bilinguals did not show reduced switch cost in any experiment -not even in an omnibus analysis combining the standardized switch cost scores of 292 participants across the three experiments. These results qualify previous claims about bilingualism reducing non-linguistic switch costs.

The Battig and Montague (1969) category norms have been an invaluable tool for researchers in many fields, with a recent literature search revealing their use in over 1600 projects published in more than 200 different journals. Since 1969, numerous changes have occurred culturally that warrant the collection of new normative data. For instance, in the mid-1960s, the waltz was a popular dance, and undergraduates wore rubbers on their feet. To meet the need for updated norms, we report an expanded version of the Battig and Montague norms, based on responses from three different sites varying in geographical locations within the United States. The norms were expanded to include new categories (e.g., ad hoc categories) and new measures, most notably latencies for the generated responses. Analyses demonstrated high levels of geographical stability across the new sites, with lower and more variable levels of generational stability between the Battig and Montague norms and the current norms.

Hillsdale. NJ. Erlbaum). Causal network representations of the stories were derived for prediction of data on immediate and delayed recall, summarization, and judged importance of events. Properties of the networks were compared in multiple regression analyses with other factors, notably the story-grammar categories of the events. Whether or not an event was in a causal chain and the number of its causal connections were both found to account for substantial proportions of common and unique variance in all four measures. The story-grammar category of events also contributed unique variance but overlapped substantially with the causal factors. The concreteness. serial position, and argument overlap of an event failed to account uniquely for the data. A recursive transition network model is discussed that integrates story grammar. causal chain. causal network, and hierarchical problem-solving approaches to story representation.

AddresseesÕ eye movements were tracked as they followed instructions given by a confederate speaker hidden from view. Experiment 1 used objects in common ground (known to both participants) or privileged ground (known to the addressee). Although privileged objects interfered with reference to an identical object in common ground, addressees were always more likely to look at an object in common ground than privileged ground. Experiment 2 used definite and indefinite referring expressions with early or late points of disambiguation, depending on the uniqueness of the display objects. The speakerÕs and addresseeÕs perspectives matched when the speaker was accurately informed about the display, and mismatched when the speaker was misinformed. When perspectives matched, addressees identified the target faster with early than with late disambiguation displays. When perspectives mismatched, addressees still identified the target quickly, showing an ability to use the speakerÕs perspective. These experiments demonstrate that although addressees cannot completely ignore information in privileged ground, common ground and perspective each have immediate effects on reference resolution.

What role does mutual knowledge play in the comprehension process? We compare two answers to this question for the comprehension of definite reference. The Restricted Search hypothesis assumes that addressees rely on the principle of optimal design and understand definite reference by restricting the search for referents to entities in common ground. The Unrestricted Search hypothesis assumes that the search

Studies of elicited sentence production show that the occasional subject-verb agreement errors that speakers make are more likely to occur when a singular head noun is followed by a plural, as in The producer of the adventure movies have arrived, than when a plural head is followed by a singular (e.g., . The significance of this asymmetric pattern of errors depends on whether interference from plurals arises only during the production of sentences, or whether it also occurs in sentence comprehension tasks. Five reading experiments revealed the following: (1) patterns of reading times mirror the production error asymmetry; (2) a phrase which is conceptually plural but grammatically singular (e.g., The label on the bottles) produces no more reading difficulty than one which is conceptually and grammatically singular, a result which mimics Bock and Miller's 1991 production results; (3) interference from an intervening plural depends on a close syntactic link to the head noun phrase (e.g., The owner of the house who charmed the realtors). These results suggest that although the computation of agreement may be accomplished differently in the two systems, interference may arise whenever a structure containing a singular head and intervening plural is computed, whether during production or comprehension. ᭧ 1997 Academic Press Most human languages exhibit agreement ments are often separated by intervening words and phrases which may themselves bear of one sort or another; for example, many languages require that particular elements in a agreement features, agreement phenomena pose a challenge to the sentence processing sentence agree in terms of a specific feature, such as number, gender, and/or animacy. Typ-systems. From the standpoint of sentence production, the challenge is to produce the correct ically, one element controls agreement on a later-occurring one. Because the agreeing ele-form of the dependent or controlled element.

Wordlikeness, the extent to which a sound sequence is typical of words in a language, affects language acquisition, language processing, and verbal short-term memory. Wordlikeness has generally been equated with phonotactic knowledge of the possible or probable sequences of sounds within a language. Alternatively, wordlikeness might be derived directly from the mental lexicon, depending only on similarity to known words. This paper tests these two cognitively different possibilities by comparing measures of phonotactic probability and lexical influence, including a new model of lexical neighborhoods, in their ability to explain empirical wordlikeness judgments. Our data show independent contributions of both phonotactic probability and the lexicon, with relatively greater influence from the lexicon. The influence of a lexical neighbor is found to be an inverted-Ushaped function of its token frequency. However, our results also indicate that current measures are limited in their ability to account for sequence typicality.

Baayen, R. H., T. Dijkstra, and R. Schreuder
Are regular morphologically complex words stored in the mental lexicon? Answers to this question have ranged from full listing to parsing for every regular complex word. We investigated the roles of storage and parsing in the visual domain for the productive Dutch plural suffix -en.Two experiments are reported that show that storage occurs for high-frequency noun plurals. A mathematical formalization of a parallel dual-route race model is presented that accounts for the patterns in the observed reaction time data with essentially one free parameter, the speed of the parsing route. Parsing for noun plurals appears to be a time-costly process, which we attribute to the ambiguity of -en,a suffix that is predominantly used as a verbal ending. A third experiment contrasted nouns and verbs. This experiment revealed no effect of surface frequency for verbs, but again a solid effect for nouns. Together, our results suggest that many noun plurals are stored in order to avoid the time-costly resolution of the subcategorization conflict that arises when the -ensuffix is attached to nouns.

The effect of presentation duration on false recall induced by presentation of semantically associated and phonologically associated word lists was examined. When 16-word lists comprised of semantically related words (e.g., bed, yawn) were presented at short durations (i.e., 20 or 250 ms/word), false recall of related but nonpresented words (e.g., sleep) increased with increasing duration. However, at longer presentation durations (i.e., 1000, 3000, or 5000 ms/word), false recall declined with increasing presentation duration. This pattern resolves discrepancies among previous experiments investigating the effects of presentation duration on associatively induced false recall. Further, these data constrain theoretical accounts of false recall in that single-process models cannot readily account for these effects. We propose a dual-process model that appears to account for these findings and much of the extant literature. Phonologically related lists (e.g., sweep, sleet) exhibited a very different pattern of results at the short presentation durations; specifically, false recall was exceedingly high at the fastest duration and declined as duration lengthened. Similarities and differences between the mechanisms underlying semantically and phonologically induced false recall are considered.

In four experiments the representation of words in a Dutch-English bilingual lexicon was examined. Within-and between-language repetition-priming and associative (semantic)priming effects were compared. In Experiments 1 and 2 only cognate words were presented, whereas in Experiments 3 and 4 also noncognates served as stimuli. In Experiment 1 the primes were presented unmasked; in Experiments 2 and 4 they were masked by means of a forward/backward masking technique; in Experiment 3 they occurred under both masked and unmasked presentation conditions. Within-and between-language repetition-priming and associative-priming effects were obtained, both under masked and unmasked presentation conditions, but in the masking condition the between-language associative priming effect for noncognates disappeared. The results suggest separate but connected lexical representations for Dutch-English translation equivalents, both for cognates and noncognates, shared conceptual representations for Dutch-English cognate translations, and separate conceptual representations for noncognate translations.

The present study investigated the cognitive nature of second language (L2) lexical processing in sentence context. We examined bilinguals' L2 word recognition performance for language-ambiguous words [cognates (e.g., piano) and homographs (e.g., pan)] in two sentence context experiments with highly proficient Spanish-English bilinguals living in a bilingual community (Experiment 1) and with intermediate proficiency Spanish-English bilinguals living in a monolingual community (Experiment 2). To determine the influence of sentence constraint on cross-language activation, the critical words and their matched controls were inserted in low-and high-constraint sentences. In low-constraint sentences significant cognate facilitation was observed, suggesting that both languages were active and influencing processing. In high-constraint sentences, the effects of cognate facilitation were eliminated. This interaction between cognate status and sentence constraint demonstrates that sentence context can restrict non-selectivity when there is sufficient semantic information to suppress the non-target language. The fact that this interaction was observed for both bilingual groups suggests that even less proficient bilinguals, who do not communicate daily in the L2, can use context to constrain crosslanguage lexical competition. Implications for current models of bilingual lexical access are discussed.

Experiments were designed to produce illusions of immediate memory and of perception, in order to demonstrate that subjective experience of familiarity and perceptual quality may rely on an unconscious attribution process. Subjects saw a short and rapidly presented list of words, then pronounced and judged a target word. We influenced the fluency of pronouncing the target through independent manipulation of repetition and visual clarity. Judgments of repetition were influenced by clarity (Experiments 1 and 2), but not when subjects knew that clarity was manipulated (Experiment 3). Conversely, judgments of clarity were influenced by repetition (Experiment 4). We interpret these symmetric illusions to mean that fluent performance is unconsciously attributed to whatever source is apparent and that feelings of familiarity and perceptual quality result when fluency is attributed respectively to past experience or CUITent CirCUIIISktnCeS.

This study examines how the cross-linguistic similarity of translation equivalents affects bilingual word recognition. Performing one of three tasks, Dutch-English bilinguals processed cognates with varying degrees of form overlap between their English and Dutch counterparts (e.g., lamp-lamp vs. flood-vloed vs. song-lied). In lexical decision, reaction times decreased going from translation equivalents without any cross-linguistic orthographic overlap to very similar but non-identical cognates. Identical cognates showed a large discontinuous processing advantage and were subject to facilitation from phonological similarity. In language decision, the effect of orthographic similarity reversed: A cognate inhibition effect arose, the size of which increased with orthographic similarity. Here identical cognates were markedly slower than other cognates. In progressive demasking, no orthographic similarity effect was found for non-identical cognates, but a semantic similarity effect arose. In addition, there was a facilitation effect for identical cognates of low English frequency. The task-dependent result patterns are interpreted in terms of four accounts of cognate representation and provide evidence in favor of a localist connectionist account.

The influence of memory on the subjective experience of later problem solving was investigated in two experiments. Study of the solution words to anagrams in the first phase of the experiments lead to faster solution of those anagrams in a second phase. Participants interpreted their easy solution of old anagrams as due to characteristics of the anagrams and judged them as easier for others to solve, relative to new anagrams. When participants were deprived of the subjective experience of solving the anagrams by presenting the solution with the anagram, they switched to an alternative basis for judgment such as a theory or rules, which lead to a different ordering of items according to judged difficulty (Experiment 1). Requiring participants to recognize whether solution words had been presented in the first phase did not eliminate the effect of prior presentation on judged difficulty, but requiring recognition judgments and warning participants of the nature of the effect did eliminate it (Experiment 2). We discuss the usefulness of the distinction between judgments based on subjective experience versus theory, introduce ways to diagnose when different bases for judgments are used, and discuss how memory spoils subjective experience as a basis for judgment. ᭧

Five experiments are reported in which the picture naming performance of bilingual speakers in a languageswitching task was explored. In Experiment 1, Spanish learners of Catalan and Korean learners of Spanish were asked to perform a switching task between their first and dominant language (L1, Spanish or Korean) and their second language (L2, Catalan or Spanish). For these two groups switching from the weaker language (L2) to the more dominant language (L1) was harder than vice versa. This asymmetrical switching cost was not present when highly proficient Spanish-Catalan bilinguals performed the task either in their two dominant languages (Experiments 2 and 3) or in their dominant language (L1) and in their much weaker language (L3 English; Experiment 4). Furthermore, highly proficient bilinguals showed faster naming latencies in their weaker languages (L2 and L3) than in their dominant language (L1). Experiment 5 tested whether a bias in the triggering of lexicalization is at the basis of such a difference. Together these results reveal that the switching performance of highly proficient bilinguals does not seem to be subject to the same mechanisms as that of L2 learners.

Thinking about the meaning of studied words (deep processing) enhances memory on typical recognition tests, relative to focusing on perceptual features (shallow processing). One explanation for this levels-of-processing effect is that deep processing leads to the encoding of more distinctive representations (i.e., more unique semantic or conceptual features that can be recollected to differentiate the words). This recollective distinctiveness hypothesis predicts that deep processing should reduce false recognition errors, because expecting more distinctive recollections can facilitate retrieval monitoring accuracy (i.e., a distinctiveness heuristic). We report several experiments confirming this prediction, while ruling out explanations based on familiarity or overall memory strength. Additional support for the distinctiveness hypothesis was that a manipulation designed to selectively enhance the distinctiveness of words in the shallow condition eliminated the levels-of-processing effect on false recognition. These findings suggest that conceptual processing can elicit the distinctiveness heuristic, and that recollective distinctiveness drives levels-of-processing effects.

Slippery slope arguments (SSAs) have a bad philosophical reputation. They seem, however, to be widely used and frequently accepted in many legal, political, and ethical contexts. argued that distinguishing strong and weak SSAs may have a rational basis in Bayesian decision theory. In this paper three experiments investigated the mechanism of the slippery slope showing that they may have an objective basis in category boundary re-appraisal. When the beginning and the end of a slippery slope are more similar, the probability that they are perceived to belong in the same category is higher and the SSA is stronger. Experiment 1 established a robust effect of probability on SSA evaluation. Experiments 2 and 2A showed that when similar items are classified in the same category this leads to stronger SSAs. In Experiment 3, in a correlational analysis, it was shown that participants' confidence in their categorisation judgements predicted the perceived strength of an SSA and that this relationship was moderated by similarity between the ends of the slippery slope. We conclude that an important aspect of many SSAs may have an objective basis in well-established and rational cognitive theories.

In a series of picture-word interference experiments, Catalan-Spanish bilinguals named pictures in Catalan with distractor words printed either in Catalan (same-language pairs) or in Spanish (differentlanguage pairs). Naming was facilitated when the distractor was the name of the picture in both same-[e.g., taula-taula (table in Catalan)] and different-language pairs [e.g., taula-mesa (table in Spanish)]. We also found that the facilitation effect was larger for same-language pairs and that semantically related distractors in the same-vs different-language conditions were similarly interfering. These results are interpreted within a lexical model that assumes that only words of the target language are considered for lexical selection and can, therefore, compete for selection. Converging evidence from several experiments indicates that the facilitation asymmetry for same name distractors arises because same-language distractors can activate target phonemes via nonlexical, graphemephoneme conversion processes. Facilitation was obtained with phonologically related distractors for both same-and different-language conditions but not for their translations. The results suggest that nonlexical phonological processes contribute to the phonological facilitation effect.

In describing the phonotactics (patterning of phonemes) of English syllables, linguists have focused on absolute restrictions concerning which phonemes may occupy which slots of the syllable. To determine whether probabilistic patterns also exist, we analyzed the distributions of phonemes in a reasonably comprehensive list of uninflected English CVC (consonant-vowelconsonant) words, some 2001 words in all. The results showed that there is a significant connection between the vowel and the following consonant (coda), with certain vowel-coda combinations being more frequent than expected by chance. In contrast, we did not find significant associations between the initial consonant (onset) and the vowel. These findings support the idea that English CVC syllables are composed of an onset and a vowel-coda rime. Implications for lexical processing are discussed. ᭧ 1997 Academic Press

We first show that in a word-translation task, context words induce semantic interference whereas context pictures induce semantic facilitation. Experiments 2 and 3 show that this finding is not due to differences between context words and context pictures in terms of (a) relative speed of lexical activation or (b) the category level of the activated concepts. To account for our findings, we propose that conceptually-driven lexical access is confined to the selected target concept (or ''preverbal message''). A version of Starreveld and La HeijÕs (1996) connectionist model in which this proposal was implemented successfully simulated the polarity and the time course of the semantic context effects observed. In Experiment 4 the prediction that context pictures do not induce lexical context effects was tested and confirmed.

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated processing of unbounded dependency constructions. Experiment 1 employed sentences like That's the garage/pistol with which the heartless killer shot the man yesterday afternoon. Readers experienced greater processing difficulty in implausible sentences than in plausible sentences immediately after encountering the verb shot. This demonstrated that they did not wait until the purported gap location after man before forming the unbounded dependency. Experiment 2 considered sentences which locally appear to have an unbounded dependency that turns out to be incorrect. Data from this experiment demonstrated that readers formed the unbounded dependency immediately, even though they had to reanalyze later. However, there was no evidence that readers formed this unbounded dependency when it was rendered ungrammatical by island-constraint information. We argue that the processor constructs unbounded dependencies in a manner that is maximally efficient from the point of view of incremental processing.

Individuals often claim that they vividly remember information with negative emotional content. At least two types of information could lead to this sense of enhanced vividness: Information about the emotional item itself (e.g., the exact visual details of a snake) and information about the context in which the emotional item was encountered (e.g., the fact that the snake was sitting on a branch in a forest). The present study focused on the former, investigating how exposure duration at study and emotional content of an object affected the likelihood of remembering an itemÕs specific visual details. Participants studied neutral objects (e.g., a barometer) and negative arousing objects (e.g., a grenade) and were later shown either the identical object or a different photo of the same type of object (e.g., another barometer). Across two experiments, emotional content enhanced the likelihood that specific visual details were remembered: Individuals were more likely to correctly indicate that an item was identical to the object studied earlier if it was an emotional object than if it was a neutral object. This memory benefit for the emotional items was most robust when items were shown for longer exposure durations (500 or 1000 ms) rather than only briefly (for 250 ms). Thus, with sufficient processing time, negative arousing content appears to enhance the likelihood that visual details are remembered about an object.

A standard view of language processing holds that lexical forms are arbitrary, and that nonarbitrary relationships between meaning and form such as onomatopoeias are unusual cases with little relevance to language processing in general. Here we capitalize on the greater availability of iconic lexical forms in a signed language (British Sign Language, BSL), to test how iconic relationships between meaning and form affect lexical processing.

Two eye-tracking experiments investigated processing of VP-NP attachment ambiguities. Experiment 1 tested sentences in which there was an initial bias toward VP attachment. Readers experienced more difficulty when semantic information disambiguated the sentences to NP attachment than when it disambiguated them to VP attachment or when it was consistent with either analysis. Experiment 2 tested sentences in which there was no initial bias toward either VP or NP attachment. Readers experienced more difficulty when semantic information disambiguated the sentences to NP attachment or VP attachment than when it was consistent with either analysis. We argue that these results challenge theories that assume a competition mechanism, such as constraint-based lexicalist accounts (e.g.

Three eye movement studies examined the role of punctuation in reading. In Experiment 1, although a comma at the end of a clause facilitated overall reading times for the sentence, first pass times were longer at the end of commamarked clauses than clauses without a comma (or the same material in clause medial position). The data supported the dwell time hypothesis which claims that readers pause at punctuation marks. To explore the possibility that dwell time/wrap-up effects are really due to pausing at the ends of intonational phrases, Experiment 2 tested non-redundant punctuation in structures where a comma corresponds to an obligatory intonational phrase boundary in speech. The intonation hypothesis was supported for vocatives and parentheticals but not for non-restrictive relative clauses. Relative clauses were further investigated in Experiment 3. Overall, the data were consistent with the intonation explanation for wrap-up effects but only if it is assumed that non-restrictive relatives and other asides receive less attention than do other parts of a sentence.

In two experiments, participants were given, in an initial session, three trials of training on French-English vocabulary pairs and then were tested on these pairs. In a second session 1 week later, they were retested and then retrained on the same pairs. Both translation directions were employed (English-French and French-English). In Experiment 1, the vocabulary pairs were either blocked by category or mixed, and in Experiment 2, participants were pretrained on half of the French words before vocabulary learning. There was enhanced savings during relearning when initial learning involved the more difficult English-French translation direction or no pretraining on French words. Further, when learning involved the more difficult English-French translation direction or mixed pairs, forgetting across the 1-week delay was reduced. © 2001 Elsevier Science (USA)

The effects of briefly presented, masked, and orthographically and/or phonologically related nonword primes on the recognition of subsequently presented target words were investigated in different experimental tasks. Robust effects of orthographic and phonological priming were observed in both the lexical decision and the perceptual identification tasks, with no such effects appearing in the word naming task, except for orthographic priming effects at the shortest prime exposures. Further investigation of this marked dissociation across experimental tasks showed that word naming is particularly sensitive to shared onsets in the masked priming paradigm and that robust rhyme priming does occur when primes and targets have different onsets. The lexical decision task, on the other hand, showed priming effects independently of whether prime and targets shared onsets. These results are discussed within the framework of a bimodal interactive activation model of visual word recognition and naming. ᭧

This paper begins by considering problems that have plagued investigations of automatic or unconscious influences of perception and memory. A process dissociation procedure that provides an escape from those problems is introduced. The process dissociation procedure separates the contributions of different types of processes to performance of a task, rather than equating processes with tasks. Using that procedure, I provide new evidence in favor of a two-factor theory of recognition memory; one factor relies on automatic processes and the other relies on intentional processes. Recollection (an intentional use of memory) is hampered when attention is divided, rather than full, at the time of test. In contrast, the use of familiarity as a basis for recognition memory judgments (an automatic use of memory) is shown to be invariant across full versus divided attention, manipulated at test. Process dissociation procedures provide a general framework for separating automatic from intentional forms of processing in a variety of domains; including perception, memory, and thought.

Two tasks were used to study the syllabification of intervocalic consonants like the /V's of melon and collide. In an oral task, subjects reversed the syllables in words; in a written task, they selected between alternative syllabifications. Even in the oral task, subjects' responses were influenced by whether their spellings of the words contained a single letter (r) or a double letter (10. Responses in the two tasks were also affected by the stress pattern of the word, the phonetic category of the intervocalic consonant, and the nature of the preceding vowel. The results are discussed in relation to theories of syllabification. o 1988

The time-course with which readers use event-specific world knowledge (thematic fit) to resolve structural ambiguity was explored through experiments and implementation of constraintbased and two-stage models. In a norming study, subjects completed fragments that ended in the ambiguous region of a reduced relative clause (The crook arrested/by/the/detective). Completion proportions up to and including the were influenced by thematic fit. The results were simulated using a competition model in which independently quantified syntactic and semantic constraints simultaneously influenced interpretation. Predictions were then generated for a self-paced reading task using model parameter values established by the off-line simulations. The pattern of reading times matched the predictions of the constraint-based version of the model but differed substantially from a one-region delay garden-path version. In addition, a garden-path model with a very short delay simulated the data better than the one-region delay model, but not as closely as the constraint-based version. The experiment and modeling illustrate that thematic fit is computed and used immediately in on-line sentence comprehension. Furthermore, the modeling highlighted the difficulty of interpreting sentence comprehension experiments without both quantifying the relevant constraints and implementing the mechanisms involved. ᭧ 1998 Academic Press Real-time language comprehension re-comprehension, models of sentence processing make different claims about the timequires that comprehenders access and intecourse with which different types of informagrate a variety of types of knowledge, includtion exert their influence. In particular, models ing knowledge that is primarily linguistic and differ in their claims about what information knowledge that is primarily conceptual (Clifis used initially to structure the input when ton, 1993; Swinney, 1979; Tanenhaus & readers and listeners encounter one of the nu-Trueswell, 1995). Although there is little dismerous temporary syntactic ambiguities that agreement about the integrative nature of arise because linguistic input is presented sequentially. The goal of the present research was to use experimental data in conjunction This work was supported by NSERC Grant OGP0155704 to the first author, and NIH Grant HD27206 with computational modeling to evaluate to the third author. We thank Keith Rayner and two anonclaims made by different models about the ymous reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft. time-course with which semantic/conceptual Address correspondence and reprint requests to Ken information about thematic fit is used in on-McRae, Department of Psychology, Social Science Cenline sentence comprehension. tre,

Most current models of language production assume that information about gender is selected only in phrasal contexts, and that the phonological form of a noun can be accessed without selecting its syntactic properties. In this paper, we report a series of picture-word interference experiments with Italian-speaking participants where the grammatical gender of nouns and the phonological transparency of suYxes have been manipulated. The results showed a consistent and robust eVect of grammatical gender in the production of bare nouns. Naming times were slower to picture-word pairs sharing the same grammatical gender. As reported in studies with Romance languages, the gender congruity eVect disappeared when participants were required to produce the noun preceded by the deWnite determiner. Our results suggest that the selection of grammatical gender reXects a competitive process preceding the access to morpho-phonological forms and that it is mandatory, i.e., it occurs also when the noun has to be produced outside a sentential context. 

Similarity between component speech sounds influences language processing in numerous ways. Explanation and detailed prediction of linguistic performance consequently requires an understanding of these basic similarities. The research reported in this paper contrasts two broad classes of approach to the issue of phoneme similarity-theoretically driven measures based on phonological features, and empirically derived measures based on confusability. Two experiments are used to test a variety of measures from both classes for their ability to predict judgments of similarity between English consonants. The simplest featural measure is the best on these tests. This recommends it as the basis for further explorations, and improvements to the basic feature model are identified. The paper concludes by examining the extent to which confusability depends on phoneme similarity.

A series of experiments explored whether chunking in short-term memory for verbal materials depends on attentionally limited executive processes. Secondary tasks were used to disrupt components of working memory and chunking was indexed by the sentence superiority effect, whereby immediate recall is better for sentences than word lists. To facilitate comparisons and maximise demands on working memory, materials were constrained by re-sampling a small set of words. Experiment 1 confirmed a reliable sentence superiority effect with constrained materials. Experiment 2 showed that secondary tasks of concurrent articulation and visual choice reaction impaired recall, but did not remove or reduce the sentence superiority effect. This was also the case with visual and verbal n-back concurrent tasks (Experiment 3), and with concurrent backward counting (Experiment 4). Backward counting did however interact with mode of presenting the memory materials, suggesting that our failure to find interactions between concurrent task and materials was not attributable to our methodology. We conclude that executive processes are not crucial for the sentence chunking advantage and we discuss implications for the episodic buffer and other theoretical accounts of working memory and chunking.