Are compound words represented as unitary lexical units, or as individual constituents that are processed combinatorially? We investigated the neuro-cognitive processing of compounds using EEG and a passive-listening oddball design in which lexical access and combinatorial processing elicit dissociating Mismatch Negativity (MMN) brain-response patterns. MMN amplitude varied with compound freque...

The effects of lexical context on phonological processing are pervasive and there have been indications that such effects may be modulated by attention. However, attentional modulation in speech processing is neither well-documented nor well-understood. Experiment 1 demonstrated attentional modulation of lexical facilitation of speech sound recognition when task and critical stimuli were identi...

The effects of lexical context on phonological processing are pervasive and there have been indications that such effects may be modulated by attention. However, attentional modulation in speech processing is neither well-documented nor well-understood. Experiment 1 demonstrated attentional modulation of lexical facilitation of speech sound recognition when task and critical stimuli were identi...

We present an MEG study of heteronym recognition, aiming to distinguish between two theories of lexical access: the 'early access' theory, which entails that lexical access occurs at early (pre 200 ms) stages of processing, and the 'late access' theory, which interprets this early activity as orthographic word-form identification rather than genuine lexical access. A correlational analysis meth...

The lexical identification shift is used as a measure of speech processing in the phoneme identification task (W. F. Ganong, 1980). Interactive (bottom-up and top-down) models of word recognition account for the shift by claiming that lexical knowledge feeds back to a prelexical level and aids speech processing. Autonomous models (bottom-up only) maintain that the shift arises by other means an...

In psycholinguistic studies of lexical processing, language users’ responses to real words are often compared to novel pseudoword forms. The goal of these comparisons is to learn something about the architecture of the lexical processing system, by examining or inferring the processing pathways evoked by words, which have full phonological, lexical, grammatical, and semantic representations. Th...

How does prior context influence lexical and discourse-level processing during real-time language comprehension? Experiment 1 examined whether the referential ambiguity introduced by a repeated, anaphoric expression had an immediate or delayed effect on lexical and discourse processing, using an eye-tracking-while-reading task. Eye movements indicated facilitated recognition of repeated express...