Theories of verbal rehearsal usually assume that whole words are being rehearsed. However, words consist of letter sequences, or syllables, or word onset-vowel-coda, amongst many other conceptualizations of word structure. A more general term is the 'grain size' of word units (Ziegler and Goswami, 2005). In the current study, a new method measured the quantitative percentage of correctly rememb...

A number of models of visual-word recognition assume that the repetition of an item in a lexical decision experiment increases that item's familiarity/wordness. This would produce not only a facilitative repetition effect for words, but also an inhibitory effect for nonwords (i.e., more familiarity/wordness makes the negative decision slower). We conducted a two-block lexical decision experimen...

Nonword repetition (NWR) tasks have become popular in recent years as measures of phonological short term memory (PSTM) in research settings, and as potential markers of language impairment in clinical settings. This has increased interest in the subskills that potentially NWR performance. The current study investigated the influence of PSTM, vocabulary skills, articulatory output skills, liter...

Word repetition has been a staple paradigm for both psycholinguistic and memory research; several possible loci for changes in behavioral performance have been proposed. These proposals are discussed in light of the event-related brain potential (ERP) data reported here. ERPs were recorded as subjects read nonfiction articles drawn from a popular magazine. The effects of word repetition were ex...

Five experiments examined whether overt repetition (i.e., saying a word aloud) during exposure is critical to the expressive learning of new words. When participants did not engage in overt repetition during exposure, they nevertheless exhibited clear expressive learning, both with and without an accompanying semantics, indicating that overt repetition is not critical to expressive word learnin...

Repetition of any number of cognitive processes can facilitate subsequent performance (i.e., repetition priming). In this study, we explored several candidate mechanisms that could account for repetition priming on a word generation task. In Experiment 1, we examined whether repetition of semantic processing is necessary for priming on this task. In Experiment 2, we examined whether repetition ...

BACKGROUND The non-word repetition task (NRT) has gained wide acceptance in describing language acquisition in both children with normal language development (NL) and children with specific language impairments (SLI). This task has gained wide acceptance because it so closely matches the phonological component of word learning, and correlates with measures of phonological working memory, a defi...

Changes in human brain activity associated with repetition priming during word generation were characterized across a series of neuroimaging and behavioural studies. Repetition priming was consistently observed behaviourally as a decrease in response latency for repeated items, and was found for both visually and aurally cued word-generation tasks. Brain imaging using whole-brain functional MRI...

Increasing working memory (WM) capacity is often cited as a major influence on children's development and yet WM capacity is difficult to examine independently of long-term knowledge. A computational model of children's nonword repetition (NWR) performance is presented that independently manipulates long-term knowledge and WM capacity to determine the relative contributions of each in explainin...

OBJECTIVE We hypothesized that an ERP word repetition paradigm, which reliably elicits and modulates the P600 and N400 components, would be particularly sensitive to the memory deficits and altered synaptic plasticity in mild Alzheimer's disease (AD). The P600 (a late positive component, or 'LPC'), and the N400, are sensitive indices of memory encoding and semantic processing, respectively. M...