What is the underlying representation of lexical knowledge? How do we know whether a given string of letters is a word, whereas another string of letters is not? There are two competing models of lexical processing in the literature. The first proposes that we rely on mental lexicons. The second claims there are no mental lexicons; we identify certain items as words based on semantic knowledge....

In two studies, we find that native and non-native acquisition show different effects on sign language processing. Subjects were all born deaf and used sign language for interpersonal communication, but first acquired it at ages ranging from birth to 18. In the first study, deaf signers shadowed (simultaneously watched and reproduced) sign language narratives given in two dialects, American Sig...

An exception to a non-categorical generalization consists of a lexical item that exhibits the general pattern at a rate radically different – either far higher or far lower – from the norm. Lexical differences in noun phrases containing non-subject relative clauses (NSRCs) correlate with large differences in the likelihood that the NSRC will begin with that. In particular, the choices of determ...

A method for processing sentences which contain unknown words, i. e. words for which no lexical entry exists, is presented. There are three different stages of processing: 1. The sentence with the unknown word is parsed. There are no special requirements for the parsing algorithm, but the lexical lookup procedure needs to be modified. 2. Based on the syntactic structure of the parse, informatio...