Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to reflect mechanisms involved in word identificati...

One universal feature of human languages is the division between grammatical functors and content words. From a learnability point of view, functors might provide entry points or anchors into the syntactic structure of utterances due to their high frequency. Despite its potentially universal scope, this hypothesis has not yet been tested on typologically different languages and on populations o...

Cognitive models of word production correlate the word frequency effect (i.e., the fact that words which appear with less frequency take longer to produce) with an increased processing cost to activate the whole-word (lexical) phonological representation. We performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while subjects produced overt naming responses to photographs of animals and manipu...

A. Venkatadri, S. L. Rimrodt, A. Clements, K. R. Pugh, and L. E. Cutting F.M.Kirby Center, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, United States, Division of Developmental Medicine, Children's Hospital of Vanderbilt, Nashville, TN, United States, Department of Cognitive Neurology, Kennedy Krieger Institute, Baltimore, Maryland, United States, Brain Sciences Institute, Johns Hopkins Univ...