Semantic richness theory predicts that words with richer, more distinctive semantic representations should facilitate performance in a word recognition memory task. We investigated the contribution of multiple aspects of sensorimotor experience--those relating to the body, communication, food, and objects--to word recognition memory, by analyzing…

Contemporary theories of semantic representation posit that social experience is an important source of information for deriving meaning. However, there is a lack of behavioral evidence in support of this proposal. The aim of the present work was to test whether words' degree of social relevance, or "socialness", influences…

During language acquisition, children are tasked with the challenge of determining which words can appear in which syntactic constructions. This has been long recognized as a learnability paradox. On one hand, there are generalizations that children must learn. On the other hand, language is known for its arbitrariness, so children also need to…

Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar-sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar-sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

Research on alphabetic reading presents conflicting findings concerning the timing of orthographic and meaning processes in reading morphologically complex words. Chinese characters offer distinct visual cues for morphemes, enabling straightforward manipulations to examine orthographic and meaning processes. Guided by the Character-Word Dual…

Current understanding of word-finding (WF) difficulties in children and their underlying language processing deficit is poor. Authors have proposed that different underlying deficits may result in different profiles. The current study aimed to better understand WF difficulties by identifying difficult tasks for children with WF difficulties and by…

Incentives can decrease performance by undermining intrinsic motivation. How such an interplay of external reinforcers and internal self-regulation influences memory processes, however, is less known. Here, we investigated their interaction on memory performance while learning the meaning of new-words from their context. Specifically, participants…

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…

To compare the influences of concreteness and imageability on Chinese two-character (2C) word recognition, two experiments were conducted in a primed task on a cohort of skilled readers. In addition to PRIME (2C words or their transposed constituent characters) and DIRECTION (forward or backward collocations between prime words and targets),…

Most printed Chinese words are compounds built from the combination of meaningful characters. Yet, there is a poor understanding of how individual characters contribute to the recognition of compounds. Using a megastudy of Chinese word recognition (Tse et al., 2017), we examined how the lexical decision of existing and novel Chinese compounds was…

It is widely assumed that subliminal word priming is case insensitive and that a short SOA (< 100 ms) is required to observe any effects. Here we attempted to replicate results from an influential study with the inclusion of a longer SOA to re-examine these assumptions. Participants performed a semantic categorisation task on visible word…

We examined whether word recognition accuracy and latency of words children encounter during primary school across the upper primary school grades can be predicted from word form (word length, mean Levenshtein distance, and mean frequency of neighbors), word meaning (free association network markers) and word exposure (corpus frequency and…

The efficiency of cognitive component skills is typically assessed with speeded performance tests. Interpreting only effective ability or effective speed as efficiency may be challenging because of the within-person dependency between both variables (speed-ability tradeoff, SAT). The present study measures efficiency as effective ability…

We investigated whether native Finnish speakers can grasp the meaning of Russian onomatopoeic words without any prior knowledge of the Russian language. In Experiment 1, elicitation test, naïve listeners generated associations for the acoustic events depicted by onomatopoeic words they heard. A cluster analysis suggested presence of different…