Gary Oppenheim

Bangor University · School of Psychology

Naming a picture of a dog primes the subsequent naming of a picture of a dog (repetition priming) and interferes with the subsequent naming of a picture of a cat (semantic interference). Behavioral studies suggest that these effects derive from persistent changes in the way that words are activated and selected for production, and some have claimed...

Theories of how language works have shifted from rule-like competence accounts to more skill-like incremental learning accounts. Under these, people acquire language incrementally, through practice, and may even lose it incrementally as they acquire competing mappings. Incremental learning implies that (1) a bilingual's abilities in their languages...

Picture name agreement is commonly used as both a control variable and independent variable in studies of language production. It describes the proportion of participants who volunteer a picture's modal name in a norming study—a population-level descriptor—but researchers often assume that name agreement also indexes cognitive processes that occur...

Human neonates can discriminate phonemes, but the neural mechanism underlying this ability is poorly understood. Here we show that the neonatal brain can learn to discriminate natural vowels from backward vowels, a contrast unlikely to have been learnt in the womb. Using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, we examined the neuroplastic changes ca...

Researchers have long interpreted the presence or absence of semantic interference in picture naming latencies as confirming or refuting theoretical claims regarding competitive lexical selection. But inconsistent empirical results challenge any mechanistic interpretation. A behavioral experiment first verified an apparent boundary condition in a b...

Embodied cognition posits that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has shown that perceived power is spatially embodied along the vertical axis. However, it is unclear whether such mapping applies equally in the two languages of bilinguals. Using event‐related potentials, we compared spatial embodiment correlates...

Speakers of Mandarin Chinese are thought to conceptualise time along the vertical axis—as evidence for metaphor embodiment—but the extant behavioural evidence remains unclear. Here, we used electrophysiology to test space–time conceptual relationships implicitly in native speakers of Chinese. We employed a modified arrow flanker task, in which the...

Embodied cognition posits that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has shown that perceived power is spatially embodied along the vertical axis. However, it is unclear whether such mapping applies equally in the two languages of bilinguals. Here, using event-related potentials, we compared spatial embodiment corr...

Embodied theories of cognition suggest that processing concepts requires sensorimotor activation. Previous research has suggested that, like concrete concepts, abstract concepts such as time, morality, or power are embodied in relation to the vertical axis in space, albeit to a weaker extent. However, it is less clear whether such mapping applies i...

Learning to read involves efficient binding of visual to auditory information. Aberrant cross-modal binding skill has been observed in both children and adults with developmental dyslexia. Here, we examine the contribution of episodic memory to acquisition of novel cross-modal bindings in typical and dyslexic adult readers. Participants gradually l...

When learning to bind visual symbols to sounds, to what extent do beginning readers track seemingly irrelevant information such as a symbol’s position within a visual display? In this study, we used adulttypical readers’ own webcams to track their eye movementsduring a paired associate learning task that arbitrarily boundunfamiliarcharacters with m...

One of the major debates in the field of word production is whether lexical selection is competitive or not. For nearly half a century, semantic interference effects in picture naming latencies have been claimed as evidence for competitive (relative threshold) models of lexical selection, while semantic facilitation effects have been claimed as evi...

Purpose Using a blocked cyclic picture-naming task, we compared accuracy and error patterns across languages for Spanish–English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). Method Pictured stimuli were manipulated for semantic similarity across two (Same and Mixed) category contexts. Children's productions were score...

Languages differ in the consistency with which they map orthography to phonology, and a large body of work now shows that orthographic consistency determines the style of word decoding in monolinguals. Here, we characterise word decoding in bilinguals whose two languages differ in orthographic consistency, assessing whether they maintain two distin...

Free published full-text: http://communications.elsevier.com/r/?id=h5fa307fb,3e300f6d,3e30adbe&utm_campaign=STMJ_73515_AUTH_SERV_PPUB_V39&utm_channel=email&utm_source=73515_AUTH_SERV_PPUB_V39_STMJ&utm_acid=335077263&SIS_ID=-1&dgcid=STMJ_73515_AUTH_SERV_PPUB_V39&utm_in=1043337069&p1=authors.elsevier.com/a/1WqYX2Hx2bbCP With 40,000 words in the aver...

Learning visual-phonological associations is a key skill underlying successful reading acquisition. However, we are yet to understand the cognitive mechanisms that enable efficient learning in good readers, and those which are aberrant in individuals with developmental dyslexia. Here, we use a repeated cued-recall task to examine how typical and re...

In their paper “Do Bilinguals Automatically Activate Their Native Language When They Are Not Using it?”, Costa, Pannunzi, Deco, and Pickering (Cognitive Science, 2017) proposed a reinterpretation of Thierry and Wu's (2004, 2007) finding of native language‐based (Chinese, L1) ERP effects when they tested Chinese–English late bilinguals exclusively i...

Learning visual-phonological associations is a key skill underlying successful reading acquisition. However, we are yet to understand the cognitive mechanisms that enable efficient learning in good readers, and those which are aberrant in individuals with developmental dyslexia. Here, we use a repeated cued-recall task to examine how typical and re...

In their paper "Do bilinguals automatically activate their native language when they are not using it?", Costa, Pannunzi, Deco, and Pickering (Cognitive Science, 2016) proposed a reinterpretation of Thierry and Wu's (2004, 2007) finding of native language-based (Chinese, L1) ERP effects when they tested Chinese-English late bilinguals exclusively i...

With 40,000 words in the average vocabulary, how can speakers find the specific words that they want so quickly and easily? Cumulative semantic interference in language production provides a clue: when naming a large series of pictures, with a few mammals sprinkled about, naming each subsequent mammal becomes slower and more error-prone. Such inter...

This study investigates the interaction of lexical access and articulation in spoken word production, examining two dimensions along which theories vary. First, does articulatory variation reflect a fixed plan, or do lexical access-articulatory interactions continue after response initiation? Second, to what extent are interactive mechanisms hard-w...

Speech errors and naming latencies provide two complementary sets of behavioural data for understanding language production processes. A recent analytical trend—applied to intact and impaired production alike—highlights a link between specific features of correct picture naming latency distributions and the retrieval processes thought to underlie t...

Preserved cumulative semantic interference despite amnesia Introduction Recent theory is converging on a role for implicit incremental learning in continually adapting and maintaining the language production system (e.g. Chang, Dell, & Bock, 2006; Dell, Reed, Adams, & Meyer, 2000; Oppenheim, Dell, & Schwartz, 2007, 2010). But because language use...

Pickering & Garrod (P&G) consider the possibility that inner speech might be a product of forward production models. Here I consider the idea of inner speech as a forward model in light of empirical work from the past few decades, concluding that, while forward models could contribute to it, inner speech nonetheless requires activity from the imple...

Corley, Brocklehurst, and Moat (2011) recently demonstrated a phonemic similarity effect for phonological errors in inner speech, claiming that it contradicted Oppenheim and Dell's (2008) characterization of inner speech as lacking subphonemic detail (e.g., features). However, finding an effect in both inner and overt speech is not the same as find...

Naming a picture of a dog primes the subsequent naming of a picture of a dog (repetition priming) and interferes with the subsequent naming of a picture of a cat (semantic interference). Behavioral studies suggest that these effects derive from persistent changes in the way that words are activated and selected for production, and some have claimed...

Inner speech is typically characterized as either the activation of abstract linguistic representations or a detailed articulatory simulation that lacks only the production of sound. We present a study of the speech errors that occur during the inner recitation of tongue-twister-like phrases. Two forms of inner speech were tested: inner speech with...

Retrieving a word in a sentence requires speakers to overcome syntagmatic, as well as paradigmatic interference. When accessing cat in "The cat chased the string," not only are similar competitors such as dog and cap activated, but also other words in the planned sentence, such as chase and string. We hypothesize that both types of interference imp...

Inner speech, that little voice that people often hear inside their heads while thinking, is a form of mental imagery. The properties of inner speech errors can be used to investigate the nature of inner speech, just as overt slips are informative about overt speech production. Overt slips tend to create words (lexical bias) and involve similar exc...

When aphasic individuals name pictures in a blocked-cyclic naming paradigm, they produce more semantic and omission errors when the repeatedly named items come from a single semantic category, relative to when the items are from different categories, an effect known as cumu- lative semantic interference. This effect is magnified in Broca’s aphasics...