In natural conversation, speakers often mention the same referents multiple times. While referents that have been previously mentioned are produced with less prominence than those that have not been mentioned, it is unclear whether prominence reduction is due to repetition of concepts, words, or a combination of the two. In the current study, we dissociate these sources of repetition by examini...

A longstanding question in bilingualism is whether syntactic information is shared between the two language processing systems. We used an fMRI repetition suppression paradigm to investigate syntactic priming in reading comprehension in German-English late-acquisition bilinguals. In comparison to conventional subtraction analyses in bilingual experiments, repetition suppression has the advantag...

The processes contributing to the durability of repetition priming in picture naming and its decline across a week were assessed in two experiments with Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, both picture identification and word retrieval processes of picture naming exhibited facilitation after a week. Word retrieval priming declined substantially relative to a 10-min retention interval, ...

Two experiments examined whether the association between word-learning, nonword repetition, and immediate serial recall observed in children also exists in normal adults. The experiments also introduce a novel paradigm for studying word-learning. Experiment 1 studied the performance of 52 adults in nonword repetition, immediate serial recall, and word-learning tasks, examining the correlation b...

This study investigates the relationship between word repetition, predictability from neighbouring words, and articulatory reduction in Dutch. For the seven most frequent words ending in the adjectival suffix -lijk, 40 occurrences were randomly selected from a large database of face-to-face conversations. Analysis of the selected tokens showed that the degree of articulatory reduction (as measu...

Nonword repetition (NWR) has been used extensively in the study of child language. Although lexical and sub-lexical knowledge is known to influence NWR performance, there has been little examination of the NWR processes (e.g., encoding, storage, articulation) that may be affected by lexical and sub-lexical knowledge. We administered 2and 3-syllable spoken nonword recognition and nonword repetit...

Single word production requires that phoneme activation is maintained while articulatory conversion is taking place. Word serial recall, connected speech and non-word production (repetition and spelling) are all assumed to involve a phonological output buffer. A crucial question is whether the same memory resources are also involved in single word production. We investigate this question by ass...

Two studies were carried out to investigate the effects of presentation of primes showing partial (word-initial) or full overlap on processing of spoken target words. The first study investigated whether time compression would interfere with lexical processing so as to elicit aphasic-like performance in non-brain-damaged subjects. The second study was designed to compare effects of item overlap...

Word selection allows us to choose words during language production. This is often viewed as a competitive process wherein a lexical representation is retrieved among semantically-related alternatives. The left prefrontal cortex (LPFC) is thought to help overcome competition for word selection through top-down control. However, whether the LPFC is always necessary for word selection remains unc...