The purpose of this study was to investigate the mental representation of cognate and noncognate translation pairs in languages with different scripts to test the prediction of dual lexicon model (Gollan, Forster, & Frost, 1997). Two groups of Persian-speaking English language learners were tested on cognate and noncognate translation pairs in Persian-English and English-Persian directions with...

Language comprehension proceeds at a very fast pace. It is argued that context influences the speed of language by providing informative cues. How syntactic contextual information processing incoming words is, however, less known. Here we employed masked priming paradigm in four behavioural experiments German to test whether primes automatically influence categorisation nouns and verbs. We foun...

Numerous connectionist models of language production have been proposed in the literature. Most of these models exclusively refer to the process of phonological encoding. One exception is the so called “Illinois Model” which simulates grammatical encoding, especially experimental findings of structural priming. In this paper, we propose an alternative account within the localist connectionist p...

Many studies have shown evidence for syntactic priming during language production (e.g., Bock, 1986). It is often assumed that comprehension and production share similar mechanisms and that priming also occurs during comprehension (e.g., Pickering & Garrod, 2004). Research investigating priming during comprehension (e.g., Branigan, Pickering, & McLean, 2005; Scheepers & Crocker, 2004) has mainl...

This paper reports results from masked priming experiments investigating regular past-tense forms and deadjectival nominalizations with -ness and -ity in adult native (L1) speakers of English and in different groups of advanced adult second language (L2) learners of English. While the L1 group showed efficient priming for both inflected and derived word forms, the L2 learners demonstrated repet...

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE To determine if structural priming can be demonstrated in young children with and without specific language impairment (SLI). RESEARCH DESIGN A mixed-model design was used to compare children with SLI to two groups of typically developing (TD) children, and to compare priming conditions. METHODS AND PROCEDURES Eighteen children with SLI and 36 TD children (18 matched on ag...

Does the language processing system make use of abstract grammatical categories and representations that are not directly visible from the surface form of a linguistic expression? This study examines stem-formation processes and conjugation classes, a case of ‘pure’ morphology that provides insight into the role of grammatical structure in language processing. We report results from a cross-mod...

Event-related potentials (ERPs) and masked translation priming served to examine the time-course of form and meaning activation during word recognition in second language learners. Targets were repetitions of, translations of, or were unrelated to the immediately preceding prime. In Experiment 1 all targets were in the participants' L2. In Experiment 2 all targets were in the participants' L1. ...

Introduction Language acquisition is a complex task, encompassing (at least) perception and categorization of phonemes, segmentation of speech, learning word meanings, and extracting morphological and syntactic regularities. The daunting nature of this task might suggest that a specialized module is required for language acquisition. Yet there is increasing evidence that general learning proces...

Domain-general statistical learning (SL) is thought to support language phenomena like verb bias and structural priming. We explored this idea by inducing these phenomena within a non-linguistic serial reaction time (SRT) task where participants learned an English-like artificial language using SL. In a series of two experiments we found error rates to be sensitive to verbs’ structural preferen...