Most research on mental lexical representations (lemmas) assumes they are discrete and correspond in number to a word’s number of distinct meanings. Thus, homophones (bat), whose meanings are unrelated, have separate lemmas for each meaning (one for …
Interpreting a sentence can be characterized as a rational process in which comprehenders integrate linguistic input with top-down knowledge (e.g., plausibility). One type of evidence for this is that comprehenders sometimes reinterpret sentences to …
Grammatical encoding refers to the processes involved in organizing a non-linguistic message into ordered set of representations that can then go through phonological spell-out and eventually be articulated. This includes the selection and retrieval …
Speakers show syntactic priming – that is, a tendency to repeat syntactic constructions they have recently comprehended or produced – and this tendency is even stronger when adjacent utterances share the same main verb, termed the lexical boost. Some …
Linguistic analyses suggest that there are two types of intransitive verbs: unaccusatives, whose sole argument is a patient or theme (e.g., fall), and unergatives, whose sole argument is an agent (e.g., jump).1 Past psycholinguistic experiments …
Understanding the nature of linguistic representations undoubtedly will benefit from multiple types of evidence, including structural priming. Here, we argue that successfully gaining linguistic insights from structural priming requires us to better …
Does producing syntactic agreement rely on syntactic or memory-based retrieval processes? The present study investigated the extent to which syntactic processing deficits and working memory (WM) deficits predict susceptibility to agreement attraction …
Every word signifies multiple senses. Many studies using comprehension‐based measures suggest that polysemes’ senses (e.g., paper as in printer paper or term paper) share lexical representations, whereas homophones’ meanings (e.g., pen as in …
Considerable work has used language-switching tasks to investigate how bilinguals manage competition between languages. Language-switching costs have been argued to reflect persisting inhibition or persisting activation of a non-target language. …
Many influential models of sentence production (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994; Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987; Levelt, 1989) emphasize the central role of verbs in structural encoding, and thus predict that verbs should be selected early in sentence …