Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that motor simulation contributes to the processing of idioms. A semantic interference paradigm was applied. Critically, imageability of idioms was manipulated. Results of the experiments suggested that processing of highly imageable idioms involved motor simulation in both meaning and familiarity verification tasks. However, low-imageable i...

Experimental tasks designed to involve procedural memory are often rigid and unchanging, despite many reasons to expect that implicit learning processes can be flexible and support considerable variability. A version of the serial response time (SRT) task was developed, in which the locations of targets were probabilistically determined. Targets appeared in locations according to both a structu...

Repeated words are often reduced in prosodic prominence, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. The present study contrasted two theories: does prosodic reduction reflect the choice of a particular linguistic form, or does ease of retrieval within the language production system lead to facilitated, less prominent productions? One test of facilitation-based theories is suggested by findin...

Two masked priming experiments were conducted to examine phonological priming of bisyllabic words in French, and in particular, whether it operates sequentially or in parallel. Bisyllabic target words were primed by pseudowords that shared either the first or the second phonological syllable of the target. Overlap of the first syllable only-not the second-produced facilitation in both the lexic...

Activation decay functions were examined in two different tasks: lexical decision and word recognition. Activation (amount of facilitation) was measured both for item repetition and for priming between newly learned associates. Results indicate that there are at least three different components of activation: a short-term component that decays with one or two intervening items and that appears ...

The experiment reported here uses a conditional self-discrimination task to examine the influence of social interaction on the facilitation of selfdiscrimination in rats. The study is based on a previous report (PenagosCorzo et al., 2011) showing positive evidence of such facilitation, but extending the exposition to social interaction conditions prior to training. Specifically, rats were assig...

Previous studies show Stroop effect is stronger in the right visual field. However, (1) whether the lateralization patterns of two aspects of Stroop effects, facilitation and inhibition, for native Chinese speakers are similar to each other, and (2) whether secondary interference tasks modulate Stroop effect as in the studies about the lateralized Whorf effect, are remaining open questions. We ...

Successfully adopting Web2.0 in companies for purposes such as continuing learning on the job has to take into account that the number of potential users and contributors is much smaller than in the World Wide Web. There the transfer into enterprises requires establishing a socio-technical system that includes organizational change: New roles and tasks have to established, such as facilitation ...

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether premovement facilitation of corticospinal excitability before sequential movement was different from that before simple movement. Each of 7 participants who performed choice reaction tasks with the right hand pressed a force transducer with the index finger in response to a start cue or pressed the transducers sequentially with the index fing...