Although receptive priming has long been used as a way to examine lexical access in adults, few studies have applied this method to children and rarely in an auditory modality. We compared auditory associative priming in children and adults. A testing battery and a Lexical Decision (LD) task was administered to 42 adults and 27 children (8;1-10; 11 years-old) from Spain. They listened to Spanis...

The distinction between memory for events and memory for facts rests on a range of findings indicating that different memory systems respectively subserve episodic and semantic memory functions. Whereas general knowledge clearly affects memory for events, the respective roles of encoding and retrieval processes in this interaction remain unclear. Using intracranial electroencephalography and mu...

Recent evidence suggests that lexical-semantic activation spread during language production can be dynamically shaped by contextual factors. In this study we investigated whether semantic processing modes can also affect lexical-semantic activation during word production. Specifically, we tested whether the processing of linguistic ambiguities, presented in the form of puns, has an influence on...

Understanding the neural representation of semantic concepts is at the core of understanding human knowledge and experience. Competing cognitive theories suggest that these neural representations are based on either a unitary semantic code or on multiple semantic codes. We contrasted these theories using event-related fMRI in a semantic priming study. Pairs of words were presented that were eit...

Subjects made speeded object decisions about target line drawings which were preceded by semantically related or unrelated prime line drawings. One hundred of the targets depicted real objects and 50 others were unrecognizable non-objects. Similar to a recent picture-matching study, the ERPs from this study generated a larger negativity for unrelated than for related target pictures, between 32...

Why do we lose, or have trouble accessing, an idea that was in the focus of attention only a moment ago, especially in the absence of any apparent distraction? We tested the hypothesis that accessing a single item that is already active is affected by implicit interference (interference of which we have little or no awareness). We presented masked words that were semantically related or unrelat...

With a picture-picture experiment, we contrasted competitive and non-competitive models of lexical selection during language production. Participants produced novel noun-noun compounds in response to two adjacently displayed objects that were categorically related or unrelated (e.g., depicted objects: apple and cherry; naming response: "apple-cherry"). We observed semantic interference, with sl...

Analogical reasoning is an acknowledged process behind many episodes of creativity. Typically, the creator chances upon information unrelated to the given problem – and solves the problem by analogy with this accidental source of inspiration. Current models of analogical retrieval do not explain how semantically unrelated source domains are retrieved. We present the RADAR algorithm that maps do...