Language and Cognitive Processes

Word and name retrieval failures increase with age, and this study investigated how priming impacts young and older adults' ability to produce proper names. The transmission deficit hypothesis predicts facilitation from related prime names, whereas the blocking and inhibition deficit hypotheses predict interference from related names, especially for older adults. On half of our experimental trials, we exposed participants to a prime name that is phonologically- and semantically-related to a target name. Related names facilitated production of targets overall, with older adults' naming ability improved at least as much as young adults'...

Judgments of linguistic unacceptability may theoretically arise from either grammatical deviance or significant processing difficulty. Acceptability data are thus naturally ambiguous in theories that explicitly distinguish formal and functional constraints. Here, we consider this source ambiguity problem in the context of Superiority effects: the dispreference for ordering a wh-phrase in front of a syntactically "superior" wh-phrase in multiple wh-questions, e.g. What did who buy? More specifically, we consider the acceptability contrast between such examples and so-called D-linked examples, e...

This study employs a naming task to examine the role of the syllable in speech production, focusing on a lesser-studied aspect of syllabic processing, the interaction of subsyllabic patterns (i.e. syllable phonotactics) and higher-level prosody, in this case, stress assignment in Spanish. Specifically, we examine a controversial debate in Spanish regarding the interaction of syllable weight and stress placement, showing that traditional representations of weight fail to predict the differential modulation of stress placement by rising versus falling diphthongs in Spanish nonce forms...

Providing evidence for the universal tendencies of patterns in the world's languages can be difficult, as it is impossible to sample all possible languages, and linguistic samples are subject to interpretation. However, experimental techniques such as artificial grammar learning paradigms make it possible to uncover the psychological reality of claimed universal tendencies. This paper addresses learning of phonological patterns (systematic tendencies in the sounds in language). Specifically, I explore the role of phonetic grounding in learning round harmony, a phonological process in which words must contain either all round vowels ([o, u]) or all unround vowels ([i, e])...

This investigation evaluated the familiarisation conditions required to promote subsequent and more long-term improvements in perceptual processing of dysarthric speech and examined the cognitive-perceptual processes that may underlie the experience-evoked learning response. Sixty listeners were randomly allocated to one of three experimental groups and were familiarised under the following conditions: (1) neurologically intact speech (control), (2) dysarthric speech (passive familiarisation), and (3) dysarthric speech coupled with written information (explicit familiarisation)...

Parallelism effects refer to the facilitated processing of a target structure when it follows a similar, parallel structure. In coordination, a parallelism-related conjunction triggers the expectation that a second conjunct with the same structure as the first conjunct should occur. It has been proposed that parallelism effects reflect the use of the first structure as a template that guides the processing of the second. In this study, we examined the role of parallelism in real-time anaphora resolution by charting activation patterns in coordinated constructions containing anaphora, Verb-Phrase Ellipsis (VPE) and Noun-Phrase Traces (NP-traces)...

The goal of this study was to examine how lexical association and discourse congruence affect the time course of processing incoming words in spoken discourse. In an ERP norming study, we presented prime-target pairs in the absence of a sentence context to obtain a baseline measure of lexical priming. We observed a typical N400 effect when participants heard critical associated and unassociated target words in word pairs. In a subsequent experiment, we presented the same word pairs in spoken discourse contexts...

Gesturing is ubiquitous in communication and serves an important function for listeners, who are able to glean meaningful information from the gestures they see. But gesturing also functions for speakers, whose own gestures reduce demands on their working memory. Here we ask whether gesture's beneficial effects on working memory stem from its properties as a rhythmic movement, or as a vehicle for representing meaning. We asked speakers to remember letters while explaining their solutions to math problems and producing varying types of movements...

Hungarian is a language with morphological case marking and relatively free word order. These typological characteristics make it a good ground for testing the crosslinguistic validity of theories on processing sentences with relative clauses. Our study focussed on effects of structural factors and processing capacity. We tested 43 typically developing children in two age groups (ages of 4;11-7;2 and 8;2-11;4) in an act-out task. Differences in comprehension difficulty between different word order patterns and different head function relations were observed independently of each other...

According to most theories of text comprehension, readers construct and store in memory at least two inter-related representations: a text base containing the explicit ideas in a text and a discourse model that contains the overall meaning or "gist" of a text. The authors propose a refinement of this view in which text representations are distinguished by both encoding and retrieval processes. Some encoding processes "unitize" concepts in a text and some "relate" units to one another. Units are retrieved based on familiarity processes in recognition, whereas related units are retrieved based on recollective processes...

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate the time course and distribution of brain activity while adults performed (a) a sequential learning task involving complex structured sequences, and (b) a language processing task. The same positive ERP deflection, the P600 effect, typically linked to difficult or ungrammatical syntactic processing, was found for structural incongruencies in both sequential learning as well as natural language, and with similar topographical distributions. Additionally, a left anterior negativity (LAN) was observed for language but not for sequential learning...

The current study explored how listeners map the variable acoustic input onto a common sound structure representation while being able to retain phonetic detail to distinguish among the identity of talkers. An adaptation paradigm was utilized to examine areas which showed an equal neural response (equal release from adaptation) to phonetic change when spoken by the same speaker and when spoken by two different speakers, and insensitivity (failure to show release from adaptation) when the same phonetic input was spoken by a different speaker...

Speakers choose a particular expression based on many factors, including availability of the referent in the perceptual context. We examined whether, when expressing referents, monolingual English- and Turkish-speaking children: (1) are sensitive to perceptual context, (2) express this sensitivity in language-specific ways, and (3) use co-speech gestures to specify referents that are underspecified. We also explored the mechanisms underlying children's sensitivity to perceptual context. Children described short vignettes to an experimenter under two conditions: The characters in the vignettes were present in the perceptual context (perceptual context); the characters were absent (no perceptual context)...

We investigated the relevance of linguistic and perceptual factors to sign processing by comparing hearing individuals and deaf signers as they performed a handshape monitoring task, a sign-language analogue to the phoneme-monitoring paradigms used in many spoken-language studies. Each subject saw a series of brief video clips, each of which showed either an ASL sign or a phonologically possible but non-lexical "non-sign," and responded when the viewed action was formed with a particular handshape. Stimuli varied with respect to the factors of Lexicality, handshape Markedness (Battison, 1978), and Type, defined according to whether the action is performed with one or two hands and for two-handed stimuli, whether or not the action is symmetrical...

A growing body of evidence suggests that semantic access is obligatory. Several studies have demonstrated that brain activity associated with semantic processing, measured in the N400 component of the event-related brain potential (ERP), is elicited even by meaningless, orthographically illegal strings, suggesting that semantic access is not gated by lexicality. However, the downstream consequences of that activity vary by item type, exemplified by the typical finding that N400 activity is reduced by repetition for words and pronounceable nonwords but not for illegal strings...

Although it is often claimed that verbal abilities are relatively well maintained across the adult lifespan, certain aspects of language production have been found to exhibit cross-sectional differences and longitudinal declines. In the current project age-related differences in controlled and naturalistic elicited language production tasks were examined within the context of a reference battery of cognitive abilities in a moderately large sample of individuals aged 18-90. The results provide support for age-related increases in lexical sophistication and diversity at the discourse level, and declines in grammatical complexity in controlled and naturalistic contexts...

Previous evidence suggests that when speakers produce sentences from memory or as picture descriptions, their choices of sentence structure are influenced by how easy it is to retrieve sentence material (accessibility). Three experiments assessed whether this pattern holds in naturalistic, interactive dialogue. Pairs of speakers took turns asking each other questions, the responses to which allowed mention of an optional "that" before either repeated (accessible) or unrepeated (inaccessible) material. Speakers' "that" mention was not sensitive to the repetition (accessibility) manipulation...

In a quantitative meta-analysis, using the activation likelihood estimation method, we examined the neural regions involved in bilingual cognitive control, particularly when engaging in switching between languages. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the bilingual cognitive control model based on a qualitative analysis [Abutalebi, J., & Green, D. W. (2008). Control mechanisms in bilingual language production: Neural evidence from language switching studies. Language and Cognitive Processes, 23, 557-582...

Two eyetracking experiments examined the real-time production of verb arguments and adjuncts in healthy and agrammatic aphasic speakers. Verb argument structure has been suggested to play an important role during grammatical encoding (Bock & Levelt, 1994) and in speech deficits of agrammatic aphasic speakers (Thompson, 2003). However, little is known about how adjuncts are processed during sentence production. The present experiments measured eye movements while speakers were producing sentences with a goal argument (e...

How are the meanings of concepts represented and processed? We present a cognitive model of conceptual representations and processing - the Conceptual Structure Account (CSA; Tyler & Moss, 2001) - as an example of a distributed, feature-based approach. In a first section, we describe the CSA and evaluate relevant neuropsychological and experimental behavioral data. We discuss studies using linguistic and non-linguistic stimuli, which are both presumed to access the same conceptual system. We then take the CSA as a framework for hypothesising how conceptual knowledge is represented and processed in the brain...