Publications

This paper examined the role of lexical processing in phrase structure building in sentence production. We asked whether speakers exploit a lexical cue as a lexical guide (i.e., the cued word occurs earlier in the sentence) and as a retrieval cue (i.e., a cue facilitates the retrieval of a memorized structure). In two experiments, participants recalled Dutch genitive sentences. In some recall trials, they received a lexical cue that repeated one ...

Structural priming studies in production have demonstrated stronger priming effects for unexpected sentence structures (inverse preference effect). This is consistent with error-based implicit learning accounts that assume learning depends on prediction error. Such prediction error can be verb-specific, leading to strong priming when a verb that is for instance biased toward the prepositional object (PO) structure occurs with an unexpected ...

Cognates - words that share form and meaning between languages - are processed faster than control words. However, is this facilitation effect merely lexical in nature or does it cascade to phonological/orthographic (i.e., sub-lexical) processes? This study compared cognate effects in spoken and typewritten production, which share lexical, but not sub-lexical processes. Dutch-English bilinguals produced English names for pictures representing ...

This study assessed the usefulness of functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to study word production in the brain. As a test case, we focused on the semantic interference effect (SIE), which has been demonstrated in many behavioral studies and has also been studied using neuroimaging techniques. Experiment 1 examined whether fNIRS can identify neural correlates of the SIE in a cross-modal picture-word interference (PWI) paradigm. Native ...

We investigated L1 and L2 frequency effects in the sharing of syntax across languages (reflected in cross-linguistic structural priming) using an artificial language (AL) paradigm. Ninety-six Dutch speakers learned an AL with either a prepositional-object (PO) dative bias (PO datives appeared three times as often as double-object [DO] datives) or a DO dative bias (DOs appeared three times as often as POs). Priming was assessed from the AL to ...

Purpose: The current study examines how speech disfluencies manifest themselves in the two languages of bilingual persons who stutter, starting from the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with an attentional deficit at the level of speech production.Methods: Twenty-eight bilingual people who stutter performed a spontaneous and a controlled speech production task, once in their dominant and once in their non-dominant language. The ...

A doubly quantified sentence, such as All hikers climbed a hill, allows two interpretations: Did all hikers climb different hills, or did they climb the same hill? Previous work has shown that comprehenders construct disambiguated logical representations of these interpretations (Raffray & Pickering, 2010). We extended this line of research by investigating whether bilingual logical representations are shared between languages or separate ...

To reveal the underlying cause of disfluency, several authors related the pattern of disfluencies to difficulties at specific levels of production, using a Network Task. Given that disfluencies are multifactorial, we combined this paradigm with eye-tracking to disentangle disfluency related to word preparation difficulties from others (e.g. stalling strategies). We manipulated lexical and grammatical selection difficulty. In Experiment 1, lines ...