It has been suggested that music and speech maintain entirely dissociable mental processing systems. The current study, however, provides evidence that there is an overlap in the processing of certain shared aspects of the two. This study focuses on fundamental frequency (pitch), which is an essential component of melodic units in music and lexical and/or intonational units in speech. We hypoth...

One interpretation of levels of processing effects (LOP) on priming in implicit tests of memory is in terms of deficits in lexical processing during shallow study tasks. In two experiments the extent of lexical processing engaged in during standard shallow encoding tasks was manipulated by placing the encoding question either before or after the target stimulus. Clear evidence was found in expl...

Native Japanese readers were found to rely heavily on visual codes and scarcely on phonological codes in letter/word processing (Mizuno, Matsui, & Bellezza, 2007). This study aimed to determine if this processing feature of native Japanese readers influenced their process of lexical access by lexical decision tasks using visually misleading transposedletter (TL) nonwords, phonologically mislead...

This study used repetition priming to examine the influence of lexical processing on sentence comprehension processing. In order to do that the effect of the lexical priming of nouns and verbs on active compared to passive sentences was investigated. The results revealed that facilitating lexical access resulted in the facilitation of sentence comprehension processes. More specifically it was f...

Previous research using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) suggested that phonological processing in visual word recognition occurs rather late, typically after semantic or syntactic processing. Here, we show that phonological activation in visual word recognition can be observed much earlier. Using a lexical decision task, we show that ERPs to pseudohomophones (PsHs) (e.g., ROZE) differed f...

Congenital amusia is a lifelong musical disorder. It has been found that tonal-language speakers with amusia are impaired in lexical tone perception. But it has also been found that tonal-language experience compensates the deficit in certain scenario, reducing prevalence rate of amusia in speakers of a highly complex tonal-language – Cantonese. Thus it remains unclear whether lexical tone perc...