Three experiments and a simulation study investigate competing featural and phonemic views of the representation of the speech input in access to the mental lexicon. Auditory lexical decision and gating tasks show that the processing consequences of subcategorical mismatches (conflicts between phonetic cues to speech segment identity) depend on the lexical status of the conflicting cues, such that conflicts that only involve nonwords do not disrupt performance. A further study, using a phonetic-decision task with the same stimuli, found the same pattern. A simulation study shows that the interactive activation model TRACE, with top-down feedback to a prelexical phonemic level, does not model these effects successfully. The authors argue instead for a direct access featural model, based on a distributed computational substrate, where featural information is mapped directly onto lexical representations.

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This study investigates acquisition of second language (L2) vocabulary from reading a connected authentic text. Advanced and upper‐intermediate L2 (English) participants read a long expository text for general understanding, with embedded critical vocabulary items (pseudowords). Explicit knowledge of the critical items was examined using a meaning generation task, while their tacit knowledge was probed using form and semantic priming in lexical decision tasks. Results revealed a complex landscape of contextual L2 word learning in which individual differences (age, L2 lexical proficiency, first language, gender, learning strategies, levels of enjoyment) and lexical and text characteristics (concreteness, frequency, distribution, and saliency of use) individually and together affect L2 lexical development from reading. Implications of these results for contextual L2 word learning are discussed.

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This experiment explores the role of prosodic cues in resolving temporary morphosyntactic ambiguities in spoken language comprehension. Using a cross-modal naming task, we find that prosodic cues are as effective as overt lexical cues in controlling how the listener resolves attachment ambiguities. This suggests that prosodic factors can affect the early stages of parsing and interpretation.

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