Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the subthalamic nucleus (STN) in individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) has often been associated with reduced verbal fluency performance. This study aimed to directly assess semantic switching as a function of STN stimulation in PD participants with the Homophone Meaning Generation Test (HMGT). Seventeen participants with PD who had received STN DBS completed...

The Homophone Meaning Generation Test (HMGT; Warrington, 2000) is a new measure of verbal fluency that has been demonstrated to be sensitive to the presence of anterior lesions. In the present study we used the HMGT healthy standardization sample (N = 170) and demonstrate that scores on the HMGT do not differ significantly from a normal distribution and that the test has adequate reliability (a...

To examine the neural signatures of language co-activation and control during bilingual spoken word comprehension, Korean-English bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to make overt or covert semantic relatedness judgments on auditorily-presented English word pairs. In two critical conditions, participants heard word pairs consisting of an English-Korean interlingual homophone (e.g., t...

In two experiments we investigated the extent to which interference from contextually inappropriate information was attenuated or suppressed over time in the two cerebral hemispheres during sentence comprehension. Subjects viewed centrally presented sentences ending in either a homophone or a homograph and made speeded judgments as to whether a laterally presented test word was related to the o...

In this study we investigated the availability of non-target language semantic features in bilingual speech processing. We recorded EEG from Dutch-English bilinguals who listened to spoken sentences in their L2 (English) or L1 (Dutch). In Experiments 1 and 3 the sentences contained an interlingual homophone. The sentence context was either biased towards the target language meaning of the homop...

The present study was designed to further examine the inhibitory processes of spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones during sentence processing. In this study, we employed the negative priming paradigm in a cross-modal naming experiment. In the experiment, all the native Cantonese listeners were asked to name aloud a visual probe as quick and accurate as they could after hearing a senten...

Two experiments investigated age differences in how semantic, syntactic, and orthographic factors influence the production of homophone spelling errors in sentence contexts. Younger and older adults typed auditorily presented sentences containing homophone targets (e.g., blew) that were categorized as having a regular spelling (EW) or an irregular spelling (UE). In Experiment 1, homophones were...

Two eye-tracking during listening experiments found frequency and context effects on fixation probability of pictures representing multiple meanings of homophones. Participants heard either an imperative sentence instructing them to look at a homophone referent (Experiment 1) or a declarative sentence that was either neutral or biased towards the homophone‘s subordinate meaning (Experiment 2). ...

Chinese is a language that is extensively ambiguous on a lexical-morphemic level. In this study, we examined the effects of prior context, frequency, and density of a homophone on spoken word recognition of Chinese homophones in a cross-modal experiment. Results indicate that prior context affects the access of the appropriate meaning from early on, and that context interacts with frequency of ...

Many approaches to early word learning posit that children assume a one-to-one mapping of form and meaning. However, children's early vocabularies contain homophones, words that violate that assumption. Children might learn such words by exploiting prosodic differences between homophone meanings that are associated with lemma frequency (Gahl, 2008). Such differences have not yet been documented...