An 83-year-old right-handed woman presented with sudden right-sided hemiparesis, somnolence, and loss of normal speech. Speech was nonfluent with semantic paraphasias and word-finding difficulties. Word repetition and comprehension were normal. MRI brain showed an area of restricted diffusion in the left thalamus consistent with acute infarction (figure 1). Speech fluency returned to normal aft...

We combined for the first time electrophysiological measures and masked priming technique in sentential context, by setting up a cross-modal masked priming paradigm involving the auditory presentation of sentences. ERPs were time-locked to an auditorily presented word that was preceded by a repeated, related or unrelated pattern masked prime. We registered a two-way N400-difference between unre...

Response time (RT) distributions obtained from 3 word recognition experiments were analyzed by fitting an ex-Gaussian function to the empirical data to determine the main effects and interactive influences of word frequency, repetition, and lexicality on the nature of the underlying distributions. The ex-Gaussian analysis allows one to determine if a manipulation simply shifts the response time...

We used positron emission tomography to investigate word generation in subjects whose first language was English but who were also proficient in French. These subjects performed three types of lexical search: rhyme generation based on phonological cues, synonym generation requiring a semantic search, and translation involving access to a semantic representation in the other language. Two contro...

A short-term implicit memory effect is reported and interpreted as arising within the word recognition system. In Experiment 1, repetition priming in lexical decision was determined for low-frequency words and pseudowords at lags of 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, and 23 intervening items. For words, a large short-term priming component decayed rapidly but smoothly over the first 3 items (8 s) to a stable...

Serial attention models of eye-movement control during reading were evaluated in an eye-tracking experiment that examined how lexical activation combines with visual information in the parafovea to affect word skipping (where a word is not fixated during first-pass reading). Lexical activation was manipulated by repetition priming created through prime-target pairs embedded within a sentence. T...

What sources of statistical information do humans leverage to organize the mental lexicon? Recently, accounts emphasizing the importance of word frequency have been challenged by accounts emphasizing contextual diversity (CD). The latter suggest that words will be processed faster if they occur in a greater number of unique semantic contexts. Previous corpus studies have operationalized CD by c...

A longstanding question in bilingualism is whether syntactic information is shared between the two language processing systems. We used an fMRI repetition suppression paradigm to investigate syntactic priming in reading comprehension in German-English late-acquisition bilinguals. In comparison to conventional subtraction analyses in bilingual experiments, repetition suppression has the advantag...

This study examined patterns of neologistic and perseverative errors during word repetition in fluent Jargon aphasia. The principal hypotheses accounting for Jargon production indicate that poor activation of a target stimulus leads to weakly activated target phoneme segments, which are outcompeted at the phonological encoding level. Voxel-lesion symptom mapping studies of word repetition error...

With ideas from data compression and combinatorics on words, we introduce a complexity measure for words, called repetition complexity, which quantifies the amount of repetition in a word. The repetition complexity of w, r(w), is defined as the smallest amount of space needed to store w when reduced by repeatedly applying the following procedure: n consecutive occurrences uu . . . u of the same...