While known to influence visual lexical processing, the semantic information we associate with words has recently been found to influence auditory lexical processing as well. The present work explored the influence of "semantic richness" in auditory lexical decision. Study 1 recreated an experiment investigating semantic richness effects…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

This article examines how the radio drama, or "Hörspiel", might be successfully implemented in the German classroom to train students' ability to listen for context. "Hörspiele" can help students reduce their dependency on visual stimuli, develop critical and discerning listening skills, and acquire familiarity with a…

Learning spoken word forms is a vital part of second language learning, and CALL lends itself well to this training. Not enough is known, however, about how auditory variation across speech tokens may affect receptive word learning. To find out, 144 Thai university students with no knowledge of the Patani Malay language learned 24 foreign words in…

We tested the dual process and unequal variance signal detection models by jointly modeling recognition and source confidence ratings. The 2 approaches make unique predictions for the slope of the recognition memory zROC function for items with correct versus incorrect source decisions. The standard bivariate Gaussian version of the unequal…

Access to morphological structure during lexical processing has been established across a number of languages; however, it remains unclear which constituents are held as mental representations in the lexicon. The present study examined the auditory recognition of different noun types across 2 experiments. The critical manipulations were…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) are sometimes influenced by factors that do not impact actual memory performance. One recent proposal is that perceptual fluency during encoding affects metamemory and is a basis of metacognitive illusions. In the present experiments, participants identified aurally presented words that contained inter-spliced silences…

A spoken language eye-tracking methodology was used to evaluate the effects of sentence context and proficiency on parallel language activation during spoken language comprehension. Nonnative speakers with varying proficiency levels viewed visual displays while listening to French sentences (e.g., "Marie va decrire la poule" [Marie will…