A levels of processing approach to memory was directly tested in a welldefined processing context by varying the depth to which spoken prose material could be processed. The effects of successively removing the semantic and the syntactic levels of analysis produced decrements in immediate recall that were structured according to the clausal segmentation of the material. The results corresponded...

Psycholinguistic research faces a major challenge in describing the mental representations readers construct from a text. It is now widely accepted that readers end with a representation of the situation described in the text. However, it is unclear whether this representation allows the activation of elements in accordance with their situation proximity. To answer this question, two experiment...

This chapter provides an overview of experimental studies of rendaku. The general spirit behind these studies is to test whether rendaku—and other factors that affect the applicability of rendaku— are psychologically real. Experiments using nonce words, or those that ask the participants to create new compounds, address the question of whether patterns of rendaku are internalized in native spea...

We examined if iconic pictures belonging to one's native culture interfere with second language production in bilinguals in an object naming task. Bengali-English bilinguals named pictures in both L1 and L2 against iconic cultural images representing Bengali culture or neutral images. Participants named in both "Blocked" and "Mixed" language conditions. In both conditions, participants were sig...

Feldman’s project [1] has the ambitious goal of giving a compositional account of the “full range of meanings” in human language, one which meets the high standards of formalization found in formal semantics but is built on a theory of “embodied cognition”, takes into account the neurobiological substrate of language, and makes use of representations of world knowledge and discourse and situati...

Common ground is most often understood as the sum of mutually known beliefs, knowledge, and suppositions among the participants in a conversation. It explains why participants do not mention things that should be obvious to both. In some accounts of communication, reaching a mutual understanding, i.e., broadening the common ground, is posed as the ultimate goal of linguistic interactions. Yet, ...

The use of multilevel modeling is presented as an alternative to separate item and subject ANOVAs (F1 x F2) in psycholinguistic research. Multilevel modeling is commonly utilized to model variability arising from the nesting of lower level observations within higher level units (e.g., students within schools, repeated measures within individuals). However, multilevel models can also be used whe...

Linguistic processing, especially syntactic processing, is often considered a hallmark of human cognition; thus, the domain specificity or domain generality of syntactic processing has attracted considerable debate. The present experiments address this issue by simultaneously manipulating syntactic processing demands in language and music. Participants performed self-paced reading of garden pat...

This study examined the impact of teacher professional development aimed at improving the capacity of primary teachers in disadvantaged schools to strengthen children's expressive and receptive oral language skills and early literacy success in the first 2 years of school. Fourteen low-SES schools in Victoria, Australia were randomly allocated to a research (n = 8) or control arm (n = 6), resul...

The iconicity of a Chinese character, or the degree to which it looks like the concept that it represents, has been suggested as affecting the learning and processing of the character. However, previous studies have not provided good empirical information on the iconicity of specific characters. To fill this gap, 40 U.S. adults with no knowledge of Chinese were given an English word or short ph...