Graded interference effects were tested in a naming task, in parallel for objects and actions. Participants named either object or action pictures presented in the context of other pictures (blocks) that were either semantically very similar, or somewhat semantically similar or semantically dissimilar. We found that naming latencies for both object and action words were modulated by the semantic similarity between the exemplars in each block, providing evidence in both domains of graded semantic effects. Graded Semantic Effects in Object and Action Naming Miller and Fellbaum (1991) wrote: "When psychologists think about the organization of lexical memory it is nearly always the organization of nouns that they have in mind" (p.214). Even more specifically, we may add, often it is nouns referring to objects that we have in mind. Although the object-noun domain is certainly relevant to studies of lexical memory, it only represents part of adults' lexical knowledge; theories and tools deve...

A series of three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of Adjective+Noun phrases in Dutch. Bilinguals (Dutch native speakers) were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an Adjective+Noun phrase in Dutch which included the translation of the noun. In two experiments, we blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender.We found that participants performed the task slower when the target nouns were of the same semantic category than when they were from different categories; and faster when they were of the same grammatical gender than when they were of different gender. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed in order to both replicate the previous experiments and to test for interactions between the two effects. The results of the first two experiments were replicated, and crucially no interaction was found. These findings are compatible with models of lexical retrieval in production in which, first lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information are separable; second the flow of activation between the two is feedforward.

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Cognates are words in different languages that have similar spelling and meaning. They can help second-language learners with vocabulary expansion and reading comprehension tasks. Special attention needs to be paid to pairs of words that appear similar but are in fact false friends: they have different meanings in all contexts. Partial cognates are pairs of words in two languages that have the same meaning in some, but not all, contexts. Detecting the actual meaning of a partial cognate in context can be useful for Machine Translation and Computer-Assisted Language Learning tools. Our research on cognate and false-friend words between two pair of languages (French and English in our case) consists in automatically classifying a pair of words from two languages as cognates or false friends. We use Machine Learning techniques with several measures of orthographic similarity as features for classification. We study the impact of selecting different features, averaging them, and combining them through Machine Learning techniques. The methods work on different pair of languages as long as a small amount of annotated pairs of words is provided as training data. In addition to the work done on cognate and false-friend identification we propose a

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The study investigated the neuronal basis of the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon. The semantic category interference effect was used to locate lexical retrieval processes in time and space. This effect reflects the finding that, for overt naming, volunteers are slower when naming pictures out of a sequence of items from the same semantic category than from different categories. Participants named pictures blockwise either in the context of same- or mixedcategory items while the brain response was registered using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Fifteen out of 20 participants showed longer response latencies in the same-category compared to the mixed-category condition. Event-related MEG signals for the participants demonstrating the interference effect were submitted to a current source density (CSD) analysis. As a new approach, a principal component analysis was applied to decompose the grand average CSD distribution into spatial subcomponents (factors). The spatial factor indicating left temporal activity revealed significantly different activation for the same-category compared to the mixedcategory condition in the time window between 150 and 225 msec post picture onset. These findings indicate a major involvement of the left temporal cortex in the semantic interference effect. As this effect has been shown to take place at the level of lexical selection, the data suggest that the left temporal cortex supports processes of lexical retrieval during production. &

It has been claimed that bilingualism enhances inhibitory control, but the available evidence is equivocal. The authors evaluated several possible versions of the inhibition hypothesis by comparing monolinguals and bilinguals with regard to stop signal performance, inhibition of return, and the attentional blink. These three phenomena, it can be argued, tap into different aspects of inhibition. Monolinguals and bilinguals did not differ in stop signal reaction time and thus were comparable in terms of active-inhibitory efficiency. However, bilinguals showed no facilitation from spatial cues, showed a strong inhibition of return effect, and exhibited a more pronounced attentional blink. These results suggest that bilinguals do not differ from monolinguals in terms of active inhibition but have acquired a better ability to maintain action goals and to use them to bias goal-related information. Under some circumstances, this ability may indirectly lead to more pronounced reactive inhibition of irrelevant information.

Three different speech production paradigms are used to assess the hypothesis introduced by Kello, Plant, and MacWhinney (2000) according to...

The degree to which native and non-native readers interpret English sentences incrementally was investigated by examining plausibility effects on reanalysis processes. Experiment 1 required participants to read sentences word by word and to make on-line plausibility judgements. The results showed that natives and non-natives immediately computed the plausibility of the preferred structural analysis, which then affected ease of reanalysis. Experiment 2 required participants to read the same sentences word by word in order to perform a memory task. The natives showed a similar pattern of results to Experiment 1, whereas for the non-natives plausibility effects were delayed. However, the non-natives still appeared to be performing immediate syntactic reanalysis. It is concluded that syntactic processing was person- and task-independent, whereas the incrementality of interpretation was more dependent on task demands for the non-natives than for the natives. Incremental interpretation 3

presentations; language dominance; speed--accuracy tradeoff; semantic retrieval. How are lexical and conceptual information represented in memory for speakers of more than one language? Early approaches to this issue focused on the logical extremes, seeking to determine whether the languages of multilingual speakers are represented in a common store or in separate stores (see, McCormack, 1977). More recently, a consensus has emerged that languages have functionally separate stores for form-based, lexical (phonological and orthographic) representations but share a common set of conceptual representations (e.g., Durgunoglu & Roediger, 1987; Potter et al., 1984; Snodgrass, 1984; but see Van Heuven, Dijkstra, & Grainger, 1998). This hierarchical model of bilingual memory can be partly motivated by monolingual research indicating that linguistic information is represented in separable levels (Smith, 1997). However, its primary strength derives from its ability to provide a systematic acco