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As we age, language reflects patterns of both stability and change. On the one hand, vocabulary and semantic abilities are largely stable across the adult lifespan, yet lexical retrieval is often slower and less successful (i.e., slower picture naming times, increased tip of the tongue incidents). Although the behavioral bases of these effects have been well established, less is known about the brain regions that support these age-related differences. We used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural basis of picture naming. Specifically, we were interested in whether older adults would be equally sensitive to semantic characteristics, specifically the number of semantic near neighbors. Near neighbors, defined here as items with a high degree of semantic feature overlap, were of interest as these are thought to elicit competition among potential candidates and increase naming difficulty. Consistent with prior reports, pictures with more semantic near neighbors were named more slowly and less accurately for all adults. Additionally, this interference for naming times was larger as age increased, starting around 30 years old. In contrast to the age-related behavioral slowing, the neural basis of these effects was stable across adulthood. Across all adults, a number of language-relevant regions including left posterior middle temporal gyrus and left inferior frontal gyrus, pars triangularis were sensitive to the number of near neighbors. Our results suggest that although middle-aged and older adults' picture naming is more slowed by increased semantic competition, the brain regions supporting semantic processes remain stable across the adult lifespan., (Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Evidence suggests that the language processing system is predictive. Although past research has established prediction as a general tendency, it is not yet clear whether comprehenders can modulate their anticipatory strategies in response to cues based on sentence constructions. In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, we investigated whether focus constructions (not the hammer but rather the …) and repair disfluencies (the hammer uh I mean the …) would lead listeners to generate different patterns of predictions. In three offline tasks, we observed that participants preferred semantically related continuations (hammer - nail) following focus constructions and phonologically related continuations (hammer - hammock) following disfluencies. However, these offline preferences were not evident in participants' predictive eye-movements during online language processing: Semantically related (nail) and phonologically related words (hammock) received additional predictive looks regardless of whether the target word appeared in a disfluency or in a focus construction. However, significantly less semantic and phonological activation was observed in two "control" linguistic contexts in which predictive processing was discouraged. These findings suggest that although the prediction system is sensitive to sentence construction, is it not flexible enough to alter the type of prediction generated based on preceding context., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

We examined whether the position of modifiers in English influences how words are encoded and subsequently retrieved from memory. Compared with premodifiers, postmodifiers might confer more perceptual significance to the associated head nouns, are more consistent with the "given-before-new" information structure, and might also be easier to integrate because the head noun is available before the modifications are encountered. In 4 experiments, we investigated whether premodified ("the cruel and merciless king"), and postmodified ("the king who was cruel and merciless") noun phrases (henceforth, NPs) could induce variations in ease of subsequent retrieval. In Experiments 1, 2, and 3, participants used more pronouns ("he"), as opposed to full descriptions ("the king") to refer to postmodified NPs than to unmodified competitors, but pronominal reference to premodified NPs and unmodified competitors did not differ, suggesting that postmodified NPs are more accessible in memory. When the data from all 3 experiments were combined, we also observed significantly more pronominal reference to post- than to premodified NPs, as well as a greater increase in pronominal reference rates between postmodified NPs and unmodified competitors than between premodified NPs and unmodified competitors. In Experiment 4, words following critical pronouns were read faster when the pronouns referred to modified than to unmodified NPs, and also when the pronouns referred to post- rather than premodified NPs. Taken together, our results show enhanced retrieval facilitation for postmodified NPs compared with premodified NPs. These results are the first to demonstrate that the linear position of modifications results in measurable processing cost at a subsequent point. The results have important implications for memory-based theories of language processing, and also for theories assigning a central role for discourse status and information structure during sentence processing.

Informed by theories of embodied cognition, in the present study, we designed a novel priming technique to investigate the impact of spatial diversity and script direction on searching through concepts in both English and Persian (i.e., two languages with opposite script directions). First, participants connected a target dot either to one other dot (linear condition) or to multiple other dots (diverse condition) and either from left to right (rightward condition) or from right to left (leftward condition) on a computer touchscreen using their dominant hand's forefinger. Following the spatial prime, they were asked to generate as many words as possible using two-letter cues (e.g., "lo" → "love," "lobster") in 20 s. We hypothesized that greater spatial diversity, and consistency with script direction, should facilitate conceptual search and result in a higher number of word productions. In both languages, word production performance was superior for the diverse prime relative to the linear prime, suggesting that searching through lexical memory is facilitated by spatial diversity. Although some effects were observed for the directionality of the spatial prime, they were not consistent across experiments and did not correlate with script direction. This pattern of results suggests that a spatial prime that promotes diverse paths can improve word retrieval from lexical memory and lends empirical support to the embodied cognition framework, in which spatial relations play a crucial role in the conceptual system.

Prior research has shown that during language comprehension, memory representations associated with premodified words (e.g., the injured and dangerous bear) are retrieved faster from memory than those associated with unmodified words (e.g., the bear). Current explanations attribute this effect to the semantic richness of modified words. However, it is not clear whether the presence of modifying words are in fact necessary for a retrieval benefit. Premodifiers necessarily delay the onset of the target word (i.e., bear), and temporal delays may heighten attention to upcoming stimuli, and/or strengthen encoding by producing free time during encoding, facilitating subsequent retrieval. We therefore examined whether a simple delay in the onset of the target can produce a retrieval benefit. Our results show that delayed onset facilitates the subsequent retrieval of target words in the absence of any modifying information. These results lend support to models of language comprehension according to which delays may enhance attention to upcoming words, and also to models of working memory based on which free time replenishes encoding resources, strengthening the memory trace of encoded information and facilitating its retrieval at a subsequent point. Our results also contribute to current memory-based theories of sentence comprehension by showing that retrieval from memory may be affected by nonlinguistic factors such as delay-induced attention enhancement, or free time during encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we show that the difficulty of re-activating and retrieving the representations of potential referents from memory (retrieval difficulty) influences referential processing, and that this effect is independent of the number of potential referents for a pronoun or the probability of possible referential interpretations (referential coherence). In two experiments, we varied retrieval difficulty by manipulating whether two referential candidates were modified by extra semantic information or not, creating representationally rich (modified) or bare (unmodified) referential candidates, respectively, and we measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) on following pronouns. We observed a sustained frontal negative shift (the Nref effect) on pronouns following bare, and therefore difficult-to-retrieve, referential candidates relative to those following representationally rich candidates, regardless of the ambiguity of pronouns and the probability of either referential interpretation. Since referential coherence was held constant across the conditions, the results suggest that retrieval difficulty affects referential processing independently of coherence. We discuss the implications for memory-based theories of language processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The length of a noun phrase has been shown to influence choices such as syntactic role assignment (e.g., whether the noun phrase is realized as the subject or the object). But does length also affect the choice between different forms of referring expressions? Three experiments investigated the effect of antecedent length on the choice between pronouns (e.g., he) and repeated nouns (e.g., the actor) using a sentence-continuation paradigm. Experiments 1 and 2 found an effect of antecedent length on written continuations: Participants used more pronouns (relative to repeated nouns) when the antecedent was longer than when it was shorter. Experiment 3 used a spoken continuation task and replicated the effect of antecedent length on the choice of referring expressions. Taken together, the results suggest that longer antecedents increase the likelihood of pronominal reference. The results support theories arguing that length enhances the accessibility of the associated entity through richer semantic encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]