Picture-word interference studies typically show that semantically related distractor words embedded within a picture slow picture-naming responses, relative to unrelated ones. This semantic interference effect is commonly interpreted as arising from the competition of lexical-semantic (e.g., Schriefers, Meyer, & Levelt, 1990) or lexical-phonological (e.g., Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) codes. Th...

OBJECTIVE Subcortical electrical stimulation during brain surgery may allow localization of functionally crucial white matter fibers and thus tailoring of the tumor resection according to its functional limits. The arcuate fasciculus (AF) is a white matter bundle connecting frontal, temporal, and parietal cortical areas that is often disrupted by left brain lesions. It plays a critical role in ...

Three experiments used the masked priming paradigm to investigate the role of orthographic and phonological information in written picture naming. In all the experiments, participants had to write the names of pictures as quickly as possible under three different priming conditions. Nonword primes could be: (1) phonologically and orthographically related to the picture name; (2) orthographicall...

How are lexical representations retrieved during sign production? Similar to spoken languages, lexical representation in sign language must be accessed through semantics when naming pictures. However, it remains an open issue whether lexical representations in sign language can be accessed via routes that bypass semantics when retrieval is elicited by written words. Here we address this issue b...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Previous evidence suggests that anodal transcranial direct current stimulation (A-tDCS) applied to the left hemisphere can improve aphasic participants' ability to name common objects. The current study further examined this issue in a more tightly controlled experiment in participants with fluent aphasia. METHODS We examined the effect of A-tDCS on reaction time during...

The role of phonological neighborhood density in lexical access was examined during nativeand nonnative language production. German-English and English-German bilinguals named pictures of German words with highand low-density neighborhoods. Results revealed that accuracy of picture naming was influenced by phonological neighborhood, with high-density neighborhoods facilitating lexical access in...

Disagreement exists about how speakers monitor their internal speech. Production-based accounts assume that self-monitoring mechanisms exist within the production system, whereas comprehension-based accounts assume that monitoring is achieved through the speech comprehension system. Comprehension-based accounts predict perception-specific effects, like the perceptual uniqueness-point effect, in...

PURPOSE The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of enriching line drawings with color/texture and environmental context as a facilitator of naming speed and accuracy in older adults. METHOD Twenty young and 23 older adults named high-frequency picture stimuli from the Boston Naming Test (Kaplan, Goodglass, & Weintraub, 2001) under three conditions: (a) black-and-white items, (b...