Following two individually mentioned characters in a text it is possible to successfully refer to either the individuals, or the set of two. Various factors, syntactic and pragmatic, have been found to affect the ease with which these types of reference can be made, however. This is therefore an interesting puzzle for those attempting to work out…

In this response to Demestre's comment, we first discuss the terms "legal" and "prohibited," applied to syntactic structures, stressing that there are boundaries in which the legality of certain constructions appears imprecise and is a matter of discussion. This coalesces with actual and daily use by native speakers of a language, who can normally…

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence…

Contradictory results have been found in Chinese as to whether subject relative clauses are easier to process than object relative clauses. One major disagreement concerns the region where the difficulty arises. In this study, a "maze" task was used to localise processing difficulty by requiring participants to make a choice between two…

This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the sixth MOrphological PROcessing Conference (MOPROC), which was kept in June 2009 in Turku, Finland. The issue contains 13 articles by leading scholars in the field of morphological processing. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and…

The papers in this special issue of "Language and Cognitive Processing" on the neural bases of language production illustrate two general approaches in current cognitive neuroscience. One approach focuses on investigating cognitive issues, making use of the logic of associations/dissociations or the logic of neural markers as key investigative…

The P600 is an event-related brain potential (ERP) typically associated with the processing of grammatical anomalies or incongruities. A similar response has also been observed in fully acceptable long-distance "wh"-dependencies. Such findings raise the question of whether these ERP responses reflect common underlying processes, and what…

Lexical access was examined in English-Spanish bilinguals by monitoring eye fixations on target and lexical competitors as participants followed spoken instructions in English to click on one of the objects presented on a computer (e.g., "Click on the beans"). Within-language lexical competitors had a phoneme onset in English that was shared with…

This paper reviews research on the production of referential expressions, examining the choice between explicit and attenuated lexical forms (e.g., pronouns vs. names), and between acoustically prominent and attenuated pronunciations. Both choices can be explained in terms of addressee-design, in that explicit expressions tend to be used in…

Two experiments investigated 4-year-olds' use of descriptive sentences to learn non-obvious properties of unfamiliar kinds. Novel creatures were described using generic or nongeneric sentences (e.g., "These are pagons. Pagons/These pagons are friendly"). Children's willingness to extend the described property to a new category member was then…

The study reports the results of a masked priming experiment with morphologically complex Russian nouns. Participants performed a lexical decision task to a visual target that differed from its prime in one consonant. Three conditions were included: (1) "transparent," in which the prime was morphologically related to the target and contained the…

A key question in bilingual language production research is how bilingual individuals control the use of their two languages. The psycholinguistic literature concerning language control is unresolved. It is a matter of controversy whether (a) issues to do with control are central to understanding bilingual language processing; and (b) if they are,…

This study longitudinally investigated developmental changes in the frame of reference used by children in their gestures and speech. Fifteen children, between 4 and 6 years of age, were asked once a year to describe their route home from their nursery school. When the children were 4 years old, they tended to produce gestures that directly and…

The aim of this study was to examine processing interactions between segmental (consonant, vowel) and suprasegmental (tone) dimensions of Mandarin Chinese. Using a speeded classification paradigm, processing interactions were examined between each pair of dimensions. Listeners were asked to attend to one dimension while ignoring the variation…

Two Finnish language comprehension experiments are presented which suggest that the referential properties of pronouns and demonstratives cannot be reduced straightforwardly to the salience level of the antecedent. The findings, from a sentence completion study and visual world eye-tracking study, reveal an asymmetry in which features of the…