This paper introduces a special issue of Cognition on lexical access in speech production. Over the last quarter century, the psycholinguistic study of speaking, and in particular of accessing words in speech, received a major new impetus from the analysis of speech errors, dysfluencies and hesitations, from aphasiology, and from new paradigms in reaction time research. The emerging theoretical...

Despite a large amount of psycholinguistic research devoted to the issue of processing differences between a first and a second language, there is no consensus regarding the locus where these emerge or the mechanism behind them. The aim of this article is to briefly examine both the behavioral and neuroscientific evidence in order to critically assess three hypotheses that have been put forward...

The development of reading depends on phonological awareness across all languages so far studied. Languages vary in the consistency with which phonology is represented in orthography. This results in developmental differences in the grain size of lexical representations and accompanying differences in developmental reading strategies and the manifestation of dyslexia across orthographies. Diffe...

This paper presents a pool of Spanish sentences designed for use in cognitive research and speech processing in circumstances in which the effects of context are relevant. These lists of sentences are divided into six lists of 25 equivalent high-predictability sentences and six lists of 25 low-predictability sentences according to the extent to which the last word can be predicted by the preced...

This paper presents novel psycholinguistic evidence on the factors governing pronoun resolution in German. To determine the relative influence of linear order versus grammatical function of potential referents in the German Mittelfeld on pronoun interpretation, an interpretation-preference task was run on 23 German natives. Subjects chose the preferred referent for fully ambiguous personal pron...

In order to adjust observed frequencies of occurrence, previous studies have suggested a variety of measures of dispersion and adjusted frequencies. In a previous study, I reviewed many of these measures and suggested an alternative measure, DP (for ‘deviation of proportions’), which I argued to be conceptually simpler and more versatile than many competing measures. However, despite the releva...

Disagreement exists regarding the functional locus of semantic interference of distractor words in picture naming. This effect is a cornerstone of modern psycholinguistic models of word production, which assume that it arises in lexical response-selection. However, recent evidence from studies of dual-task performance suggests a locus in perceptual or conceptual processing, prior to lexical res...

Databases containing lexical properties on any given orthography are crucial for psycholinguistic research. In the last ten years, a number of lexical databases have been developed for Greek. However, these lack important part-of-speech information. Furthermore, the need for alternative procedures for calculating syllabic measurements and stress information, as well as combination of several me...

MacDonald (2013) proposes that comprehenders are sensitive to statistical patterns in their language input (Claim 1). These patterns are hypothesized to result from speakers’ preferences in production, aggregated over the population (Claim 2). Production preferences are taken to be primarily determined by biases that serve production ease, thereby improving fluency (Claim 3). These three claims...

While in (1a) and (1b) -ic and -ity, and -less and -ness happily combine, the combination -less-ity is impossible. Similar sets of examples can be found in abundance and pose the question what exactly is responsible for such patterns. Basically three types of answers have been given in the pertinent literature. One group of scholars argues for the existence of lexical strata (e.g. Siegel 1974, ...