On a distributed connectionist approach, morphology reects a learned sensitivity to the systematic relationships among the surface forms of words and their meanings. Performance on lexical tasks should thus exhibit graded effects of both semantic and formal similarity. Although there is evidence for such effects, there are also demonstrations of morphological effects in the absence of semantic...

Processing of spoken word form and meaning is separately evaluated from short-term repetition and semantic/associative priming experiments to investigate the role of speaker variability in spoken word recognition. The assumption that lexical representation and processing only involve abstract component devoid of stimulus variability is evaluated. The results from the repetition priming experime...

This priming study investigates the role of conceptual structure during language production, probing whether English speakers are sensitive to the structure of the event encoded by a prime sentence. In two experiments, participants read prime sentences aloud before describing motion events. Primes differed in 1) syntactic frame, 2) degree of lexical and conceptual overlap with target events, an...

Although syntactic priming is well studied and commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under debate. We tested whether implicit learning of adjacent and non-adjacent sequences occurs in a non-linguistic, finger sequence task (Serial Reaction Time task), and if so, whether these implicitly-learned dependencies can cause syntactic priming in ...

Structural priming reflects a tendency to generalize recently spoken or heard syntactic structures to different utterances. We propose that it is a form of implicit learning. To explore this hypothesis, we developed and tested a connectionist model of language production that incorporated mechanisms previously used to simulate implicit learning. In the model, the mechanism that learned to produ...

A substantial body of empirical work suggests people have a reliable tendency to match, amongst other things, their conversational partner’s body movements, speech style, and patterns of language use (Giles, Coupland and Coupland, 1991). Recently, a more specific ‘structural priming’ version of this claim has gained prominence (e.g. Pickering and Ferreira, 2008). Structural priming occurs when ...

Numerous studies have established that speakers tend to form utterances by reusing previously experienced sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). It was also frequently found the repetition of lexical items enhances priming boost). This facilitation effect occurs not only when there is a full overlap verbs, but one level representation (semantic or phonological representation) overlaps ...

OBJECTIVE To determine whether ERP components can differentiate between the semantic priming mechanisms of automatic spreading activation, expectancy, and semantic matching. METHODS The present study manipulated two factors known to differentiate semantic priming mechanisms: associations between words (forward, backward, and symmetrical) and prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA). Twent...

Disagreement exists about how bilingual speakers select words, in particular, whether words in another language compete, or competition is restricted to a target language, or no competition occurs. Evidence that competition occurs but is restricted to a target language comes from response time (RT) effects obtained when speakers name pictures in one language while trying to ignore distractor wo...