Two reading experiments were conducted to investigate the effect of phoneme repetition during silent reading (also referred to as the visual tongue-twister effect, see McCutchen & Perfetti, 1982; Perfetti & McCutchen, 1982) in conjunction with end-of-clause and end-of-sentence wrap-up effects (Just & Carpenter, 1982; Rayner, Sereno, Morris, Schmauder, & Clifton, 1989). In both experiments, read...

The N400 component of the event-related brain potential is widely used in research on language and semantic memory, but the cognitive functions underlying N400 amplitudes are still unclear and actively debated. Recent simulations with a neural network model of word meaning suggest that N400 amplitudes might reflect implicit semantic prediction error. Here, we extend these simulations to sentenc...

There is increasing evidence that infants can discriminate native and non-native speech from an early age. Prosody may be essential to this ability. In this paper, we assess the amount of linguistic information needed by two-month-old infants to recognize whether or not a sentence belongs to their native language. We conducted a cross-linguistic study of French and American 2-month old infants,...

This study examined the effects of a competing signal on sentence-word priming using an auditory lexical decision paradigm. Previous studies have suggested that the facilitatory component of the sentential priming effect is particularly sensitive to acoustic distortions that reduce the perceptibility of the sentence context, whereas the inhibitory component is more sensitive to increased attent...

Traditionally, parentheses have been described by phoneticians as speech segments with lower intensity, restrained pitch variation and speech rate faster than the rest of the sentence. This iconic coding may be found in some examples of read (prepared) speech, but spontaneous speech data tend to show that specific prosodic mechanisms do exist to either 1) integrate the syntactic parenthesis int...

Sentence repetition tasks (SRTs) have been widely used in language development research for decades. In recent years, there has increasing interest studying performance SRTs as a clinical marker impairment. What are the characteristics of SRTs? For what purposes used? To extent they with young children, different languages, and populations? order to answer these other questions, we conducted sc...

We report a failure to find a repetition deficit in recall following the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) of words within sentences, using adjectives rather than nouns as the critical items. In a series of experiments that ruled out participant and procedural differences as the source of the failure, both word class and list context were found to moderate the repetition deficit, but gram...