Abstract This study examined how six psycholinguistic variables, namely image agreement, concept familiarity, imageability, name agreement, word frequency, and age of acquisition, relate to picture naming accuracy and whether these associations vary as a function of age and bilingualism. Participants included younger and older adults who were either English monolinguals or English-French bilinguals. Older adults and monolinguals named more items correctly than younger adults and bilinguals, with no significant interaction between age and language. Principal components analysis reduced the six psycholinguistic variables to three components: lexical experience, stimulus agreement, and imageability. Generalized linear mixed model results showed that language group and stimulus agreement were associated with naming accuracy. The association between imageability and naming accuracy differed by both age and language group, while the association between lexical experience and naming accuracy differed by age. Overall, psycholinguistic influences on picture naming accuracy were selective rather than uniform across predictors and participant groups. The findings provide partial support for theoretical accounts suggesting that age and bilingualism influence the relationship between psycholinguistic variables and naming performance, highlighting the importance of considering broader clusters of psycholinguistic characteristics rather than isolated variables when examining picture naming across populations.
Abstract In research on the motor grounding of action language, the study of language users suffering from an impairment of the motor system may provide important insights. One such group are Parkinson’s Disease (PD) patients, who have been shown to exhibit effects of an impaired motor grounding. Evidence for this impairment has been obtained in a number of language-processing experiments. The present study extends this line of research by testing whether this impairment affects the semantic quality of the vocabulary of PD patients. We address this question by analyzing a corpus containing narratives of two fairy tales produced by German-speaking PD patients and a control group of healthy speakers. More specifically, we employ semantic vectors in two separate analyses to test the hypothesis of a reduced action-dominance in the verbal vocabulary of PD patients compared to healthy controls. The findings show a mixed pattern, with the results for one set of narratives aligning more robustly with the main hypothesis than the results for the other. We discuss the results against the background of previous findings and point out their implications for research on the motor grounding of action language and its representation in the mental lexicon.
Abstract Typing involves identifying and encoding the to-be-typed word, computing its meaning, and planning and executing the appropriate keystroke sequence. Measures of typing, such as keystroke latencies, are thus thought to reflect the processing of linguistic information. Using keystroke data from the TypeRacer online game, Chen et al. (2021) found that words that are more frequent, and more predictable (i.e., more likely to co-occur with other words in their context) were typed more quickly. Importantly, context shapes the meaning a word takes on, in addition to determining its likelihood of occurrence. Specifically, in figurative expressions, words take on meanings that are different from their literal and denotative meanings. We examined whether computing a figurative meaning for a word influences its typing by comparing the typing speeds of words that take on a figurative meaning and words that do not. Figurative words are generally not typed more slowly than literal words, but a potential conflict between a word’s literal and figurative meanings can slow down its production.
Abstract Chinese morphemes typically correspond to one character and one syllable. This one-to-one alignment makes Chinese a critical contrast to languages with more complex morpho-phonological structures for investigating the universality of morpheme activation in compound production. This study measures interkeystroke intervals (IKIs), the latencies between consecutive keystrokes, in Pinyin typing (Romanization input method), to clarify the timing of compound production. Gallant et al. (2026) found longer IKIs at character boundaries when participants typed Pinyin to transcribe visually presented two-character Chinese words. The present study used the same stimuli in the auditory modality, ensuring that characters were neither seen nor produced. We replicated the character-boundary IKI lengthening and the interaction between initial-character frequency and morphological type, demonstrating that the effects in Gallant et al. (2026) cannot be attributed solely to visual segmentation cues and providing converging evidence that characters function as cross-modal planning units in Pinyin typing. Crucially, we report a new pattern in which IKIs at character boundaries are shorter in compounds than in monomorphemic words, suggesting that morpheme activation can modulate motor execution even in a language where morphemes and syllables overlap closely. These findings further support Pinyin typing as a sensitive paradigm for investigating Chinese compound production.
Predictive language processing enables listeners to anticipate upcoming words using available linguistic cues. In Greek, adjectives provide both semantic information and grammatical-gender agreement, offering a unique window into how these cues jointly guide real-time comprehension. The present study examined how semantic and grammatical cues in adjectives influence prediction in adulthood. Thirty-three native speakers of Greek, divided into three age groups (19-30, 48-60, and 61-80 years), completed a webcam-based eye-tracking task using the Gorilla platform. Participants viewed a 2 & times;2 visual array while listening to spoken sentences containing adjectives that varied in predictive informativeness across four conditions: No Cue, Semantic Only, Gender Only, and Semantic + Gender. Results showed that all age groups engaged in predictive processing, with the highest anticipatory fixations occurring when semantic and gender cues co-occurred. Younger adults demonstrated the earliest and strongest cue-based predictions, whereas older adults were slower overall, and relied more heavily on semantic information. These findings show the added value of examining morphology in the study of prediction and provide new evidence of age-related changes in the integration of linguistic cues during comprehension.
