Chronometric studies of language and memory processing typically emphasize changes in mean response time (RT) performance across conditions. However, changes in mean performance (or the lack thereof) may reflect distinct patterns at the level of underlying RT distributions. In seven experiments, RT distributional analyses were used to better understand how distributions change across related an...

What mechanisms underlie children's language production? Structural priming--the repetition of sentence structure across utterances--is an important measure of the developing production system. We propose its mechanism in children is the same as may underlie analogical reasoning: structure-mapping. Under this view, structural priming is the result of making an analogy between utterances, such t...

This study used medium-term auditory repetition priming to investigate word-recognition processes. Highly fluent Catalan-Spanish bilinguals whose first language was either Catalan or Spanish were tested in a lexical decision task involving Catalan words and nonwords. Spanish-dominant individuals, but not Catalan-dominant individuals, exhibited repetition priming for minimal pairs differing in o...

An essential step to create phonology according to the language production model by Levelt, Roelofs and Meyer is to assemble phonemes into a metrical frame. However, recently, it has been proposed that different languages may rely on different grain sizes of phonological units to construct phonology. For instance, it has been proposed that, instead of phonemes, Mandarin Chinese uses syllables a...

Theories of embodied language comprehension have proposed that language processing includes perception simulation and activation of sensorimotor representation. Previous studies have used a numerical priming paradigm to test the priming effect of semantic size, and the negative result showed that the sensorimotor representation has not been activated during the encoding phase. Considering that ...

The phenomenon of syntactic priming is well studied in the literature, but the mechanisms behind it are still under debate. In this study, we trained English-speaking participants in artificial language sequences with dependencies that are either adjacent or non-adjacent. The participants then wrote completions to relative clause (RC) fragments. We found that participants who learn non-adjacent...

Embodied theories of language postulate that language meaning is stored in modality-specific brain areas generally involved in perception and action in the real world. However, the temporal dynamics of the interaction between modality-specific information and lexical-semantic processing remain unclear. We investigated the relative timing at which two types of modality-specific information (acti...

For bicultural individuals, visual cues of a setting's cultural expectations can activate associated representations, switching the frames that guide their judgments. Research suggests that cultural cues may affect judgments through automatic priming, but has yet to investigate consequences for linguistic performance. The present studies investigate the proposal that heritage-culture cues hinde...

Structural priming occurs when interlocutors copy the syntactic structure of their partners’ utterances, and is diagnostic of their underlying representations. We trained adult participants on an artificial ‘alien’ language in which nouns appeared with adjectives or numerals in two-word phrases; participants then used that language to communicate with an alien interlocutor. Input languages had ...