The "hard problem" in bilingual lexical access arises when translation-equivalent lexical representations are activated to roughly equal levels and, thus, compete equally for lexical selection. The language suppression hypothesis (D. W. Green, 1998) solves this hard problem through the suppression of lexical representations in the nontarget language. Following from this proposal is the predicti...

This study examines the effects of lexical stress on vowel quality in Iberian Spanish and Central Catalan and the relationship between phonetic variation caused by stress and speech rate. For Catalan, both absence of stress and fast speech rate result in a shrunken vowel space. For Spanish, the effects of speech rate are in line with those found for Catalan. Yet, unstressed vowels are character...

creativeness / a pleasing field / of bloom Word associations are an important element of linguistic creativity. Traditional lexical knowledge bases such as WordNet formalize a limited set of systematic relations among words, such as synonymy, polysemy and hypernymy. Such relations maintain their systematicity when composed into lexical chains. We claim that such relations cannot explain the typ...

Both notional and grammatical number affect agreement during language production. To explore their workings, we investigated how semantic integration, a type of conceptual relatedness, produces variations in agreement (Solomon & Pearlmutter, 2004). These agreement variations are open to competing notional and lexical-grammatical number accounts. The notional hypothesis is that changes in number...

Since Perlmutter (1968, 1970) argued that English aspectual verbs are ambiguous between control and raising, the phenomenon has been argued or assumed to exist in a number of other languages, such as French (Lamiroy 1987, Ruwet 1991), German (Wurmbrand 2001), Greek (Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1999), Hebrew (Landau 2003), Italian (Rizzi 1982, Burzio 1986), Japanese (Shibatani 1973, 1978, Kuno 1...

recently tasks, as the basic units of syllabi, and the cognitive complexity, as the criterion for sequencing them, have caught many second language researchers’ attention. this study sought to explore the effect of utilizing the cognitively simple and complex tasks on high- and low-proficient efl iranian writers’ linguistic performance, i.e., fluency, accuracy, lexical complexity, and structura...