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Recent evidence demonstrates that pictures corresponding to iconic signs are named faster than pictures corresponding to non-iconic signs. The present study investigates the locus of the iconicity advantage in hearing bimodal bilinguals. A naming experiment with iconic and non-iconic pictures in Italian Sign Language (LIS) was conducted. Bimodal bilinguals named the pictures either using a noun construction that involved the production of the sign corresponding to the picture or using a marked demonstrative pronoun construction replacing the picture sign. In this last condition, the pictures were colored and participants were instructed to name the pronoun together with the color. The iconicity advantage was reliable in the noun utterance but not in the marked demonstrative pronoun utterance. In a third condition, the colored pictures were presented as distractor stimuli and participants required to name the color. In this last condition, distractor pictures with iconic signs elicited faster naming latencies than non-iconic signs. The results suggest that the advantage of iconic signs in production arises at the level of semantic-to-phonological links. In addition, we conclude that bimodal bilinguals and native signers do not differ in terms of the activation flow within the sign production system.

Noun and verb acquisition was investigated in three- and five-year-old Italian children by means of picture naming of objects and actions, selected from Druks and Masterson (2000). The aim was to examine the previously reported advantage of nouns compared to verbs. Older children were faster than younger children, and naming latencies were faster for object pictures than for action pictures. For errors, the advantage of objects over actions was greater for younger children. A qualitative analysis of errors was carried out according to a classification derived by Masterson, Druks, and Gallienne (2008). Overall, 25% of the errors reflected a complete lack of knowledge of the names or of the meanings of the pictures. Most errors, however, were likely to be due to a not yet fully developed knowledge of the meaning of words labelling the pictures, or to an incomplete conceptual representation, and this pattern was more marked for action concepts.

Impairment of executive functions is a frequent and disabling consequence of brain injury. In 1991, Shallice and Burgess elaborated the Multiple Errand Test (MET) to assess everyday troubles associated with this impairment. Our first aim was to create a generic version of MET (MET-G) readily adaptable to different settings and for retesting. The second aim was to validate the revised version to detect executive impairment in individuals with severe ABI. An inter-professional team of experts in neurorehabilitation created a revised version of MET. Twenty-one patients with sABI (severe Acquired Brain Injury) and a control group of 20 neurologically healthy subjects, took part in the testing of MET-G. MET-G clearly distinguished people with sABI from healthy controls based on Total error score, task completion, and rule breaking. The test showed good inter-rater reliability and internal consistency. The new, generic version of MET was able to differentiate adults with sABI from controls and proved to be a good tool for evaluating executive functions in these patients in daily-life contexts. Indications on how to adapt the test to different contexts and different scoring modalities are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When speakers name multiple semantically related items, opposing effects can be found. Semantic facilitation is found when naming 2 semantically related items in a row. In contrast, semantic interference is found when speakers name semantically related items separated by 1 or more intervening unrelated items. This latter form of interference is cumulative, as it increases as a function of the number of related items that have been named beforehand. Semantic facilitation has therefore been envisaged as a product of transient and fast-decaying activation of related representations, whereas semantic interference has been linked to longer-lasting changes in the connections between semantic and lexical representations. In this work we attempted to explore and compare the 2 phenomena jointly, by means of contrasting naming sequences with noncontiguous semantically related items and sequences with contiguous semantically related items. Results provide evidence that mechanisms responsible for semantic facilitation and interference may jointly occur in parallel, producing opposing influences on behavior. Importantly, semantic facilitation may exhibit cumulative features too, though these are immediately disrupted when unrelated items intervene.

In this study, we investigated how activation unfolds in sign production by examining whether signs that are not produced have their representations activated by semantics (cascading of activation). Deaf signers were tested with a picture-picture interference task. Participants were presented with pairs of overlapping pictures and named the green picture (target) while ignoring the red picture (distractor). In Experiment 1 we varied whether target and distractor pictures had similar signs. Signs were produced faster with sign-related picture pairs compared to unrelated picture pairs. The facilitation observed with sign-related pairs replicates the 1 obtained in speaking with sound-related pairs (e.g., "bed-bell"), a finding cited in support of cascading of activation. In Experiments 2A and 2B we focused on sign iconicity, anticipating that cascading of activation would lead to a facilitatory effect of iconicity. Consistent with this prediction, picture distractors with iconic signs induced faster responses. Furthermore, in Experiment 3, facilitation was found for iconic signs in picture naming. Altogether, our results reveal that cascading of activation is a fundamental aspect of language processing that is at play not only in speaking, but also in signing. Our results also help to define which signs are activated in sign production.

Telling a lie requires several cognitive processes. We investigated three cognitive processes involved in verbal deception: the decision to deceive, the suppression of the true statement, and the construction of the false statement. In a standard picture-naming task, participants were instructed to commit true and false naming statements. Critically, participants could freely decide to name the picture (i.e., true naming events) or to commit a verbal deception and use a different name (i.e., false naming events). Different types of analysis were performed with the aim of exploring the influence of semantic, lexical, and phonological information of the target picture in the decision, suppression, and construction processes. The first type of analysis revealed that participants decided to lie more often when the target picture was less typical or less familiar. The second and third types of analysis focused on the false naming events. False naming latencies turned out to be faster when the name of the target picture was a highly frequent or an earlier-acquired name, suggesting an influence of lexical variables in the suppression of the true statement. The third analysis type explored the phonological relationship between the word that participants uttered in the false statements and the target picture name. No phonological influences emerged in this last analysis. These findings demonstrate that verbal deception is tied to semantic and lexical variables corresponding to true statements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

High-frequency words are usually understood and produced faster than low-frequency words. Although the effect of word frequency is a reliable phenomenon in many domains of language processing, it remains unclear whether and how frequency affects pronominal anaphoric resolution. We evaluated this issue by means of two self-paced reading experiments. Native speakers of Spanish read sentences containing the anaphoric noun or pronoun at the subject syntactic position (Experiment 1) or at the object syntactic position (Experiment 2) while the antecedent of the anaphor was either a high-frequency or a low-frequency word. Results showed that nominal anaphors were read faster when referring to high-frequency than to low-frequency antecedents, and faster when referring to subjects than to objects. Critically, pronoun reading times were unaffected by the frequency and by the syntactic position of the antecedent. These results are congruent with theories assuming that syntactic information of the words is not frequency sensitive.

How are lexical representations retrieved during sign production? Similar to spoken languages, lexical representation in sign language must be accessed through semantics when naming pictures. However, it remains an open issue whether lexical representations in sign language can be accessed via routes that bypass semantics when retrieval is elicited by written words. Here we address this issue by exploring under which circumstances sign retrieval is sensitive to semantic context. To this end we replicate in sign language production the cumulative semantic cost: The observation that naming latencies increase monotonically with each additional within-category item that is named in a sequence of pictures. In the experiment reported here, deaf participants signed sequences of pictures or signed sequences of Italian written words using Italian Sign Language. The results showed a cumulative semantic cost in picture naming but, strikingly, not in word naming. This suggests that only picture naming required access to semantics, whereas deaf signers accessed the sign language lexicon directly (i.e., bypassing semantics) when naming written words. The implications of these findings for the architecture of the sign production system are discussed in the context of current models of lexical access in spoken language production.

Several naming studies show that distractor pictures, even when intentionally ignored by the speaker, are still capable of activating their respective phonological representations. However results from word translation studies suggest that distractor pictures are only conceptually activated. Here we tested the reliability of the word translation results. In four experiments, bilingual participants translated words from one language to the other one while ignoring the presentation of pictures. In Experiment 1a phonological related pictures sped up translation latencies. However, the effect disappeared when the percentage of related trials was reduced (Experiment 1b). In Experiment 2a translation latencies were faster when the words were accompanied by semantically related pictures than by unrelated pictures. Importantly, the effect was still reliable when the proportion of related trials was reduced and the total number of semantic categories was increased (Experiment 2b). Theoretical implications of the influence of distractor pictures during speech production are discussed.

Previous research by Dupoux et al. [Dupoux, E., Pallier, C., Sebastian, N., & Mehler, J. (1997). A destressing "deafness" in French? "Journal of Memory Language" 36, 406-421; Dupoux, E., Peperkamp, S., & Sebastian-Galles (2001). A robust method to study stress' deafness. "Journal of the Acoustical Society of America" 110, 1608-1618.] found that French speakers, as opposed to Spanish ones, are impaired in discrimination tasks with stimuli that vary only in the position of stress. However, what was called stress "deafness" was only found in tasks that used high phonetic variability and memory load, not in cognitively less demanding tasks such as single token AX discrimination. This raised the possibility that instead of a perceptual problem, monolingual French speakers might simply lack a metalinguistic representation of contrastive stress, which would impair them in memory tasks. We examined a sample of 39 native speakers of French who underwent formal teaching of Spanish after age 10, and varied in degree of practice in this language. Using a sequence recall task, we observed in all our groups of late learners of Spanish the same impairment in short-term memory encoding of stress contrasts that was previously found in French monolinguals. Furthermore, using a speeded lexical decision task with word-nonword minimal pairs that differ only in the position of stress, we found that all late learners had much difficulty in the use of stress to access the lexicon. Our results show that stress "deafness" is better interpreted as a lasting processing problem resulting from the impossibility for French speakers to encode contrastive stress in their phonological representations. This affects their memory encoding as well as their lexical access in on-line tasks. The generality of such a persistent suprasegmental "deafness" is discussed in relation to current findings and models on the perception of non-native phonological contrasts.