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...

It has been demonstrated that listener-generated predictions of upcoming material can be specified to a phonological level, such that a specific word onset is anticipated (e.g., DeLong, Urbach, & Kutas, Nature Neuroscience, 8, 1117-1121, 2005). In the present study, we investigated whether such word-form-specific predictions impact picture-naming latencies in a manner similar to that observed w...

The present study investigated whether lexical frequency, a variable that is known to affect the time taken to utter a verbal response, may also influence articulation. Pairs of words that differed in terms of their relative frequency, but were matched on their onset, vowel, and number of phonemes (e.g., map vs. mat, where the former is more frequent than the latter) were used in a picture nami...

Functional imaging studies have proposed a role for left BA37 in phonological retrieval, semantic processing, face processing and object recognition. The present study targeted the posterior aspect of BA37 to see whether a deficit, specific to one of the above types of processing could be induced. Four conditions were investigated: word and nonword reading, colour naming and picture naming. Rep...

A recent debate in the language production literature concerns the influence of a word's orthographic information on spoken word production and the extent to which this influence is modulated by task context. In the present study, Mandarin Chinese participants produced sets of words that shared orthography (O+P-), phonology (O-P+), or orthography and phonology (O+P+), or were unrelated (O-P-), ...

Previous studies have revealed that greater neural pattern similarity across repetitions is associated with better subsequent memory. In this study, we used an artificial language training paradigm and representational similarity analysis to examine whether neural pattern similarity across repetitions before training was associated with post-training behavioral performance. Twenty-four native C...

BACKGROUND Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have problems not only with language performance but also with sustained attention, which is the ability to maintain alertness over an extended period of time. Although there is consensus that this ability is impaired with respect to processing stimuli in the auditory perceptual modality, conflicting evidence exists concerning the visu...