Search for: All records

Adult speakers rarely produce a verb that does not agree with its subject in number, unless the sentence contains nouns with clashing pluralities. For example, a sentence such as “The key next to the cabinets…”, sometimes elicits a plural verb, and such attraction errors are more common with singular than plural heads (the attraction asymmetry). Both attraction and attraction asymmetry have been instrumental in understanding the computations underlying agreement production. Interestingly, developmental studies of agreement have often found very different patterns of agreement errors in children, leading to the conclusion of different mechanisms for agreement production in children and adults. Using a referential communication game, we demonstrate that Englishspeaking children as young as 5 years of age show robust agreement attraction. Children 6 years and older also demonstrate the attraction asymmetry. These findings support similar mechanisms underlying agreement production in children and adults. 

Adult speakers rarely produce a verb that does not agree with its subject in number, unless the sentence contains nouns with clashing pluralities. For example, a sentence such as “The key next to the cabinets…”, sometimes elicits a plural verb, and such attraction errors are more common with singular than plural heads (the attraction asymmetry). Both attraction and attraction asymmetry have been instrumental in understanding the computations underlying agreement production. Interestingly, developmental studies of agreement have often found very different patterns of agreement errors in children, leading to the conclusion of different mechanisms for agreement production in children and adults. Using a referential communication game, we demonstrate that Englishspeaking children as young as 5 years of age show robust agreement attraction. Children 6 years and older also demonstrate the attraction asymmetry. These findings support similar mechanisms underlying agreement production in children and adults. 

Abstract Most research showing that cognates are named faster than non-cognates has focused on isolated word production which might not realistically reflect cognitive demands in sentence production. Here, we explored whether cognates elicit interference by examining error rates during sentence production, and how this interference is resolved by language control mechanisms. Twenty highly proficient Spanish–English bilinguals described visual scenes with sentence structures ‘NP1-verb-NP2’ (NP = noun-phrase). Half the nouns and half the verbs were cognates and two manipulations created high control demands. Both situations that demanded higher inhibitory control pushed the cognate effect from facilitation towards interference. These findings suggest that cognates, similar to phonologically similar words within a language, can induce not only facilitation but robust interference. 

One of the major debates in the field of word production is whether lexical selection is competitive or not. For nearly half a century, semantic interference effectsin picture naming latencieshave beenclaimed as evidence for competitive (relative threshold) models of lexical selection,while semantic facilitation effects have beenclaimed as evidence for non-competitive (simple threshold) models instead.In this paper, we use a computational modelingapproach to comparethe consequences of competitive and noncompetitive selection algorithms for blocked cyclic picture naming latencies, combined with two approaches to representing taxonomic and thematic semantic features.We show thatalthough our simplemodel can capture both semantic interference and facilitation,the presence or absence of competition in the selection mechanism is unrelated to the polarity of these semantic effects.These results question the validity of prior assumptions and offer new perspectives on the origins of interference and facilitation in languageproduction. 

Naming a picture is more difficult in the context of a taxonomically-related picture. Disagreement exists on whether non-taxonomic relations, e.g., associations, have similar or different effects on picture naming. Past work has reported facilitation, interference and null results but with inconsistent methodologies. We paired the same target word (e.g., cow) with unrelated (pen), taxonomically-related (bear), and associatively-related (milk) items in different blocks, as participants repeatedly named one of the two pictures in randomized order. Significant interference was uncovered for the same target item in the taxonomic vs. unrelated and associative blocks. There was no robust evidence of interference in the associative blocks. If anything, evidence suggested that associatively-related items marginally facilitated production. This finding suggests that taxonomic and associative relations have different effects on picture naming and has implications for theoretical models of lexical selection and, more generally, for the computations involved in mapping semantic features to lexical items.