Word-order rules impose major constraints on linguistic behavior. For example, adjectives appear before nouns in English, and after nouns in French. This means that constraints on word order must be language-specific properties upheld on-line by the language system. Despite the importance of these rules, little is known about how they operate. We report an influence of word order on the activat...

We test the hypothesis that naming an object depicted in a picture and reading aloud an object's name are affected by the object's speed. We contend that the mental representations of everyday objects and situations include their speed, and that the latter influences behavior in instantaneous and systematic ways. An important corollary is that high-speed objects are named faster than low-speed ...

An interactive 2-step theory of lexical retrieval was applied to the picture-naming error patterns of aphasic and nonaphasic speakers. The theory uses spreading activation in a lexical network to accomplish the mapping between the conceptual representation of an object and the phonological form of the word naming the object. A model developed from the theory was parameterized to fit normal erro...

Ignoring an object slows subsequent naming responses to it, a phenomenon known as negative priming (NP). A central issue in NP research concerns the level of representation at which the effect occurs. As object naming is typically considered to involve access to abstract semantic representations, Tipper 1985 proposed that the NP effect occurred at this level of processing, and other researchers...

Although older adults exhibit normal accuracy in performing word retrieval and generation (lexical production; e.g., object naming), they are generally slower in responding than younger adults. To maintain accuracy, older adults recruit compensatory mechanisms and strategies. We focused on two such possible compensatory mechanisms, one semantic and one executive. These mechanisms are reflected ...

visual memory (1) Non-verbal 0.45 (.26) 1.73 Animal test (1) Verbal 0.43 (.23) 1.87 Arithmetic task (2) Verbal 0.65 (.16) 4.05*** Auditory digit sequence (6) Verbal 0.55 (.16) 3.46** Auditory serial addition task (1) Verbal 1.41 (.40) 3.53*** Backward digit span (14) Verbal 0.63 (.12) 5.34*** Backward letter span (1) Verbal 0.83 (.26) 3.19** California Verbal Learning Test (1) Verbal 0.18 (.16)...

We address how the structure of a social communication system affects language coordination. The naming game is an abstraction of lexical acquisition dynamics, in which N agents try to find an agreement on the names to give to objects. Most results on naming games are specific to certain communication network topologies. We present two important results that are general to any graph topology: t...

The aim of this study was to address the effect of objective age of acquisition (AoA) on picture-naming latencies when different measures of frequency (cumulative and adult word frequency) and frequency trajectory are taken into account. A total of 80 Spanish participants named a set of 178 pictures. Several multiple regression analyses assessed the influence of AoA, word frequency, frequency t...

PURPOSE This study examined the relationship between semantic enrichment and naming in children asked to extend taught words to untrained exemplars. METHOD Sixteen typically developing children ( M = 32.63 months, SD = 4.02) participated in 3 word learning conditions that varied semantic enrichment via iconic (shape, function) or point gesture. At test, children named taught referents and 2 e...

The results of three different experiments suggested that the relation between an object in the fovea on fixation n and an object subsequently brought into the fovea on fixation n + 1 affects the time to identify the second object. In Experiment 1 we extended previous work by demonstrating that a previously seen related priming object speeded the time to name a target object even when a saccade...