Highly controllable environment Synchronised presentation of audible and visual stimuli Interactive studies are possible Automatic recording of relevant data, such as reaction-time, interactive responses or even speech A thoroughly designed experiment can directly produce the data needed for a statistical evaluation relieving the empiricist of the tedious task of annotating audioor video-record...

The language production system of literate adults comprises an orthographic system (used during written language production) and a phonological system (used during spoken language production). Recent psycholinguistic research has investigated possible influences of the orthographic system on the phonological system. This research has produced contrastive results, with some studies showing effec...

This article argues that Vygotsky’s choice of word meaning as the basic unit of analysis for cultural psychology connects him to a German psycholinguistic tradition—exemplified in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and J. G. Herder—distinct from the Marxist tradition. While later commentators criticize Vygotsky’s reliance on word meaning, arguing that it cannot explain the formation of consciousness, t...

1 Embodied Cognition Lab, Decision and Cognitive Sciences Research Centre, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK 2 Embodied Cognition Lab, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK 3 Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, Nijmegen, Netherlands 4 School of Psychological Sciences, Uni...

Previous studies of alignment have focused on two-party conversations. We study multi-party conversation in online health communities, which have shown benefits for their members from forum conversations. So far, our understanding of the relationship between alignment in such multi-party conversations and its possible connection to member benefits has been limited. This paper quantifies linguis...

Whether a word has an irregular inflection does not depend on its sound alone: compare lie-lay (recline) and lie-lied (prevaricate). Theories of morphology, particularly connectionist and symbolic models, disagree on which nonphonological factors are responsible. We test four possibilities: (1) Lexical effects, in which two lemmas differ in whether they specify an irregular form; (2) Semantic e...

Visual lexical decision is a classical paradigm in psycholinguistics, and numerous studies have assessed the so-called "lexicality effect" (i.e., better performance with lexical than non-lexical stimuli). Far less is known about the dynamics of choice, because many studies measured overall reaction times, which are not informative about underlying processes. To unfold visual lexical decision in...

Phonological alternations often serve to modify forms so that they respect a phonotactic restriction that applies across the words of language. Although it has long been assumed that an adequate theory of phonology should capture the connection between phonotactics and alternations, there is however, no psycholinguistic evidence that speakers actually do use a single mechanism for them both. In...

Many recent studies have demonstrated the influence of sublexical frequency measures on language processing, or called for controlling sublexical measures when selecting stimulus material for psycholinguistic studies (Aichert & Ziegler, 2005). The present study discusses which measures should be controlled for in what kind of study, and presents orthographic and phonological syllable, dual unit...

From some psycholinguistic perspectives, this study examines language transfer by exploring the nature of the multilingual mental lexicon in relation to sources of language transfer. It assumes that the multilingual mental lexicon contains not only lexemes but also language-specific lemmas; language-specific lemmas may activate language-specific morphosyntactic procedures in speech production, ...