We examined whether semantic activation by subliminally presented stimuli is dependent upon the extent to which participants assign attention to specific semantic stimulus features and stimulus dimensions. Participants pronounced visible target words that were preceded by briefly presented, masked prime words. Both affective and non-affective…

Two experiments explored the consolidation of spoken words, and assessed whether post-sleep novel competitor effects truly reflect engagement of these novel words in competition for lexical segmentation. Two types of competitor relationships were contrasted: the onset-aligned case (such as "frenzylk"), where the novel word is a close variant of…

Specific Language Impairment (SLI) is understood to be a disorder that predominantly affects phonology, morphosyntax and/or lexical semantics. There is little conclusive evidence on whether children with SLI are challenged with regard to Gricean pragmatic maxims and on whether children with SLI are competent with the logical meaning of quantifying…

A fundamental assumption regarding spoken language is that the relationship between sound and meaning is essentially arbitrary. The present investigation questioned this "arbitrariness" assumption by examining the influence of potential non-arbitrary mappings between sound and meaning on word learning in adults. Native English-speaking…

A structural priming experiment investigated whether grammatical encoding in production consists of one or two stages and whether oral bilingual language production is shared at the functional or positional level [Bock, J. K., Levelt, W. (1994). Language production. Grammatical encoding. In M. A. Gernsbacher (Ed.), "Handbook of psycholinguistics"…

Recent studies reveal that naming has powerful conceptual consequences within the first year of life. Naming distinct objects with the same word highlights commonalities among the objects and promotes object categorization. In the present experiment, we pursued the origin of this link by examining the influence of words and tones on object…

Everyday speech is littered with disfluency, often correlated with the production of less predictable words (e.g., Beattie & Butterworth [Beattie, G., & Butterworth, B. (1979). Contextual probability and word frequency as determinants of pauses in spontaneous speech. "Language and Speech, 22," 201-211.]). But what are the effects of disfluency on…

Studies of the biology of music (as of language) are highly interdisciplinary and demand the integration of diverse strands of evidence. In this paper, I present a comparative perspective on the biology and evolution of music, stressing the value of comparisons both with human language, and with those animal communication systems traditionally…