Alexander S. LaTourrette , Charles Yang , John Trueswell
{"title":"Close enough isn’t good enough in word learning: successful cross-situational word mappings are semantically independent of previous mappings","authors":"Alexander S. LaTourrette , Charles Yang , John Trueswell","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104693","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104693","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Children often encounter new words in referentially and semantically ambiguous environments. Thus, they will generally make many incorrect guesses about a word’s meaning before arriving at its correct meaning. Here, we asked whether these initial incorrect guesses might nevertheless be useful to learners by providing information about a word’s semantic neighborhood (e.g., if most guesses were food items, perhaps the word has a food-related meaning). To test this, we analyzed datasets from previous tasks in which adults guessed the word which caregivers uttered in interactions with their children. We first tested whether adults’ incorrect guesses are, indeed, semantically similar to the correct meaning. In Study 1, we established that learners’ incorrect guesses were semantically similar to the target word. We then asked whether adults successfully used these semantically similar guesses as “stepping-stones” to arrive at the correct meaning across exposures. Study 2 showed that overall, learners’ guesses were semantically consistent across exposures. However, this effect was small, and correct guesses were not judged to be similar to learners’ prior, incorrect guesses. Moreover, Study 3 revealed that semantically close-to-target guesses did not improve learners’ subsequent accuracy. Thus, even adult word learners fail to use semantic similarity in cross-situational word learning. Study 4 confirmed this result in a new word learning experiment: even for maximally similar meaning pairs, adults failed to generate thematically or taxonomically similar meanings across exposures. While learners’ incorrect guesses tend to be similar to the correct meaning, learners do not successfully use this information to learn words across exposures.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104693"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145011009","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Phonological input processing is reduced during speech planning in turn taking","authors":"Mathias Barthel","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104717","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104717","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>In conversational turn taking, speech planning and language comprehension are known to frequently overlap in time, which has previously been found to lead to less efficient speech production due to parallel processing of linguistic input. Four experiments were conducted to investigate whether comprehension processes are also impaired by concurrent speech planning, or whether language comprehension is prioritised during process overlap in turn taking. In Experiment 1a, participants verbally responded to quiz questions while monitoring the auditorily presented question for a target phoneme. Phoneme detection performance was found to be reduced when the target phoneme was located at a position in the question where participants were already planning their response as compared to when they were not yet planning their response. A comparison with participants’ phoneme detection performance in Experiments 1b and 1c, featuring either no or a delayed speech planning task, shows that interlocutors prioritise speech planning in phases of limited processing capacity during turn taking situations. In Experiment 2, participants answered the same quiz questions used in Experiment 1a but had to detect tones instead of phonemes. A comparison with the phoneme detection performance in Experiment 1a suggests that speech planning interferes with phonological input processing in particular. Whether domain-general, non-linguistic auditory detection abilities are hindered by concurrent speech planning, as well as the social and processing-related causes and consequences of the common conversational strategy of planning during comprehension are discussed.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104717"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145620181","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The importance of attention for variation in learning to learn","authors":"Nash Unsworth , Ashley L. Miller","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104711","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104711","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Individual differences in learning to learn were examined in two studies. Participants performed a paired associates learning task across multiple trials. During learning task-evoked pupillary responses (as a measure of the intensity of attention) and fluctuations in baseline pupillary diameter (as a measure of arousal regulation) were measured. Participants were also presented with thought-probes to assess off-task thoughts and the consistency of attention during learning. Participants also completed measures of working memory and long-term memory, and self-reported their motivation, self-efficacy, and encoding strategies. Across both studies, the results suggested that participants who demonstrated more learning to learn tended to demonstrate increased pupillary responses across lists (indicating an increase in intensity/attentional effort), tended to sustain their attention and prevent off-task thoughts across lists, and tended to maintain arousal levels (less fluctuations in baseline pupil diameter) across lists better than participants who demonstrated less learning to learn. Learning to learn also demonstrated weaker relations with motivation and effective strategy use. Collectively, these results suggest that individual differences in learning to learn are associated with variation in the ability to manage different aspects of attention during learning as well as motivational and strategic factors.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104711"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145576159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sin Hang Lau , Janna W. Wennberg , Victor S. Ferreira
{"title":"Do people structure words and sentences using shared mechanisms?","authors":"Sin Hang Lau , Janna W. Wennberg , Victor S. Ferreira","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104708","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104708","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The same sequence of linguistic units can be structured differently: Relative clauses in sentences such as “I met the students of the teacher who played the violin” can either have a high attachment (HA; i.e., the students played the violin) or low attachment reading (LA; i.e., the teacher played the violin). Similarly, morphological attachment in noun phrases such as “social psychologist” can have either an HA (i.e., someone who studies social psychology; [[social psycholog(y)][ist]]) or LA reading (i.e., a psychologist who is social; [[social][[psycholog(y)][ist]]]). Thus, abstractly at least, sentences and words have analogous internal hierarchical structures. Using a structural priming paradigm, we investigated in three experiments whether shared mechanisms process the internal structures of both sentences and words, despite the difference in grain size. Overall, we only observed priming effects when the primes and targets were of the same grain size: Participants produced more HA sentences or rated the HA readings of ambiguous sentences as more probable following HA sentence primes (compared to following LA sentence primes), while the attachment structure of morphological primes did not affect subsequent sentence production and comprehension. Participants also rated the HA readings of ambiguous noun phrases as more probable following HA morphological primes (compared to following LA morphological primes), while the attachment of sentence primes did not affect subsequent morphological comprehension. We suggest that at least as reflected by structural priming, structural operations are not shared across morphological and syntactic levels.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104708"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145362933","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jianhua Li , Jinghan Zhao , Jiyue Yang , Sophia W. Deng
{"title":"Language and cognition revisited: Labels alter post-sensory processing in visual and auditory categorization","authors":"Jianhua Li , Jinghan Zhao , Jiyue Yang , Sophia W. Deng","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104710","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104710","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>How does language influence human categorization? Linguistic labels may affect categorization by either enhancing sensory encoding or modulating post-sensory processing. To dissociate these accounts, this study investigated whether label effects arise during sensory encoding or post-sensory processing, and whether they are modality-specific or modality-general. Using visual and auditory categorization tasks with a priming paradigm, we combined hierarchical drift–diffusion modeling (HDDM), electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding, and neurally-informed modeling to compare label effects against pseudoword baseline. Our results revealed consistent patterns across visual and auditory tasks. Behaviorally, congruent labels facilitated faster and more accurate responses in both visual and auditory tasks, while incongruent labels impaired accuracy in visual categorization. HDDM revealed that labels reduced response boundaries across tasks, with congruent labels shortening non-decision time and incongruent labels prolonging it. Critically, EEG analyses demonstrated that labels selectively amplified late neural components (post-sensory processing) without affecting early sensory encoding. Neurally informed modeling further confirmed that changes in response boundary arise from the enhanced efficiency of the post-sensory process. These findings support a modality-general, post-sensory account of label effects in categorization, aligning with the label-as-marker framework, where labels act as supervisory signals guiding categorical decisions rather than perceptual features. The study advances understanding of language-cognition interactions by delineating the temporal dynamics of label influences on categorization.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104710"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145465830","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Novel dynamics in semantic ambiguity processing: insights from a Semitic language","authors":"Sami Boudelaa , Noha Fathi , Sameh Al Ansary","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104709","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104709","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This study investigates the effects of semantic ambiguity in Arabic, a Semitic language with a unique root–pattern morphological structure, using lexical decision and semantic categorization tasks. Across five experiments, the study contrasted the processing of polysemous and homonymous words with that of unambiguous controls, examining how task demands modulate ambiguity effects. These findings reveal an early-stage processing advantage for both polysemes and homonyms during morphological decomposition, facilitated by shared root activation. In tasks emphasizing deeper semantic processing or the recombination of morphological components, polysemes demonstrate a robust advantage owing to cooperative dynamics among related senses, whereas homonyms show a processing disadvantage. Task specificity further shapes outcomes: smaller, well-defined categories minimize homonym competition, whereas broader categories amplify it. These results highlight the interplay between morphological decomposition and recombination in shaping lexical access and clarifies how cross-linguistic structure affects ambiguity processing.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104709"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145620180","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Merel Muylle , Robert J. Hartsuiker , Nazbanou Nozari
{"title":"On idle idols and ugly icons: Investigating lexical selection in typing through homophones","authors":"Merel Muylle , Robert J. Hartsuiker , Nazbanou Nozari","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104703","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104703","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Homophone errors (e.g., <em>there/their</em>) are not uncommon in typing, but it is debated whether they simply reveal poor spelling knowledge or signal competition in the production system. We tested the idea that competition underlies the greater difficulty associated with producing homophone, compared to non-homophone, targets. Using computational simulations, we showed that competition alone is sufficient to produce interference during homophone production, and that such interference is exacerbated by increasing lexical competition. These predictions were confirmed in two experiments, a typing-to-dictation task (Experiment 1) and a question-answering task (Experiment 2). We further showed the homophone effect was insensitive to the syntactic category: we found a robust homophone interference effect of a comparable magnitude for same-category (e.g., flower-flour) and different-category (e.g., idol-idle) homophones. Collectively, these results show that lexical selection in typing is similar to speaking in terms of the processes arising from representational overlap, but distinct from it in terms of the influence of syntax.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104703"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145267593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Sannyuya Liu, Yuxi Zhang, Sitian Zhou, Xiaoxuan Shen, Jianwen Sun
{"title":"Mitigating orthographic interference: Exploring the combined effects of L2 interlexical similarities on vocabulary memory with big data","authors":"Sannyuya Liu, Yuxi Zhang, Sitian Zhou, Xiaoxuan Shen, Jianwen Sun","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104707","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104707","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>The retention of newly learned second language (L2) words is influenced by pre-existing word representations through interactions driven by similarity. When learners encounter new L2 words, similar previously learned words influence retention through cross-lexical activation. This study integrates established memory models with advanced machine learning techniques, providing a comprehensive approach. It analyzes a large-scale Duolingo dataset and quantifies the impact of previously learned words on current word memory. By improving the Half-Life Regression model with interlexical features, we constructed an L2 interlexical influence matrix and examined how similarity dimensions affect vocabulary retention through complementary analytical approaches. The results indicate that semantic similarity is the primary facilitator with significant nonlinear impacts, whereas orthographic similarity causes interference when considered in isolation. Notably, high semantic similarity mitigates orthographic interference, enabling successful vocabulary retention even when visual form similarities would otherwise impede learning. Two-dimensional and three-dimensional interactions significantly enhanced model fit, while four-dimensional interactions showed no significant improvement, suggesting an optimal complexity threshold for similarity-based memory facilitation. These findings reveal the complex mechanisms through which multiple similarity dimensions work synergistically in L2 vocabulary learning and offer practical implications for optimizing vocabulary learning sequences in language education.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104707"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145416616","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Thomas Hikaru Clark , Greta Tuckute , Bryan Medina , Evelina Fedorenko
{"title":"A distinctive meaning makes a sentence memorable","authors":"Thomas Hikaru Clark , Greta Tuckute , Bryan Medina , Evelina Fedorenko","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104700","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104700","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prior work on visual memory has suggested that humans have a high-capacity but imperfect memory: image representations accumulate noise over time, which makes similar images confusable. This account – the <em>noisy representation hypothesis</em> – was recently extended to the verbal domain: in line with past evidence that words are encoded in memory by their meanings, it was shown that words with distinctive meanings are most memorable. Here, we leverage recent advances in natural language processing to ask whether the same holds true for compositional linguistic stimuli — sentences. In a recognition memory experiment with responses from 443 participants to 2500 six-word-long target sentences, we found that a sentence’s semantic distinctiveness – as estimated through contextual representations from a large language model – predicts the accuracy and speed of its recognition. These effects were observed for both intrinsic sentence memorability (distinctiveness of a sentence relative to a large corpus of sentences) and contextual memorability (distinctiveness relative to recently encountered sentences in the experiment), and cannot be reduced to properties of the sentence’s constituent words. Our findings suggest that sentence memorability, similar to image and word memorability, is related to meaning distinctiveness, thus extending the noisy representation hypothesis to compositional linguistic stimuli.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"146 ","pages":"Article 104700"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145155792","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Segmental contributions to prosodic weight in processing English auxiliary contractions","authors":"Holger Mitterer , Sahyang Kim , Taehong Cho","doi":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104725","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jml.2025.104725","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Prosodic weight of prominence is traditionally attributed to <em>suprasegmental</em> features associated with pitch accent. This study examines <em>segmental</em> contribution to prosodic weight in processing English auxiliary <em>have</em> contractions. Through four web-based mouse-tracking experiments, we tested whether and how segmental variations in the auxiliary <em>have</em> (contracted vs. uncontracted) could signal prominence in relation to information structure and guide sentence processing in a mini two-sentence dialogue. It was hypothesized that the uncontracted, segmentally full form would carry prosodic weight on the auxiliary, independently of suprasegmental cues with pitch accent. The first two experiments showed that when <em>have</em> (in <em>they have</em>) was hyperarticulated with pitch accent, participants could use its prosodic weight, perceiving an enhanced affirmativeness in contrast with a preceding negative question with <em>haven’t</em>. However, an uncontracted <em>have</em> when produced with no pitch accent, was not perceived as carrying such prosodic weight. The intended uncontracted form produced with no pitch accent differed from the accented one, not only in suprasegmental features but also in segmental detail, with the ‘h’ being weakened. Experiment 3 used an uncontracted <em>have</em> with a clear ‘h’, which did create prosodic weight for enhancing affirmativeness contrast even without pitch accent. Experiment 4 confirmed that this effect was not merely due to the longer duration of this form as a whole, contributed by a full ‘h’, highlighting genuine segmental contribution to the interpretation of <em>they have</em> with its prosodic weight of prominence in relation to the information structure of the mini dialogue. Our findings underscore the importance of segmental detail in real-time sentence processing and provide new insights into the syntax-prosody interface, with implications for speech production and perception.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":16493,"journal":{"name":"Journal of memory and language","volume":"147 ","pages":"Article 104725"},"PeriodicalIF":3.0,"publicationDate":"2026-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145736279","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}