Ten years ago, a group of researchers investigating the processing of morphological information met in the south of France to discuss how morphology affects word recognition, perception and production from a cross-linguistic perspective. This special issue is the fourth volume to expose the results of this on-going research effort.

The volume begins with a comprehensive review of the nature of morphological priming, followed by a series of experimental papers that examine morphological processing in a variety of languages such as English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, and Spanish. The parallel monitoring of morphological processing in reading, speech perception and production, using a wide array of experimental methods such as masked priming, long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, and the recording of electrophysiological activity, provides converging evidence regarding the nature of morphemic representations in the various languages.

The cross-linguistic perspective that characterizes the research effort of the present volume, as well as the previous ones, is used to investigate whether there are qualitative differences in the principles of lexical organization and lexical processing in different alphabetic orthographies that arise from qualitative differences in morphological structure.

This special issue samples the state of the art in research that attempts to describe the functional units that intervene between low-level perceptual processes and access to whole-word representations in long-term memory during visual word recognition. The different articles in this special issue cover various candidates for such processing units, defined in terms of orthographic, phonological, or morphological information. The most obvious candidate in terms of orthographic information is the individual letter. One article examines the way in which a word's component letters are combined in the correct order during early orthographic processing. At a slightly higher level of representation, several articles provide a focus on the role of syllabic representations in the processing of polysyllabic words, and examine the extent to which such syllabic representations are orthographic or phonological in nature. One article provides evidence concerning the role of interfixes in the processing of compound words, thus addressing the issue of how morphological representations exert their influence on the word recognition process. Altogether, the papers included in this special issue report a series of challenging findings that cannot be ignored by current computational models of visual word. Evidence is provided in favour of more flexible orthographic coding schemes that are typically used in models of visual word recognition. The syllabic effects that are reported call for a syllabic level of representation that is absent in the vast majority of computational models, and the effects of paradigmatic analogy in processing morphologically complex words should help limit the possible ways of representing morphological information in the visual word recognition system.

This book presents a set of contributions to the current flow of psycholinguistic research, with new and challenging data gathered from Spanish that may illuminate issues about the generality of language processing models. Although it is possible to find a considerable amount of papers on psycholinguistic research with the Spanish language published in English-speaking journals, unfortunately, the scientific community does not have access to an overview of psycholinguistics in Spain. This book overcomes these limitations because it brings together state-of-the-art descriptions of the research and theory of the different subareas of psycholinguistics currently being studied in Spain. Spanish, the third most widely-used language in the world, differs from English in a number of important respects. Since English has been predominant in psycholinguistic research, contrasting properties of Spanish may help to test the generality of language processing mechanisms and to refine their description. The set of contrasting features considered in this book includes acoustical and syllabic transparency, shallow orthography, a much richer morphology, flexibility in word order, less variability in intonational contours, and the existence of null pronominal subjects for inflected verbs. There are also interesting contrasts in the frequency of different linguistic units, whose impact on language processing is also evaluated. One of the main lines of argument throughout this book deals with the tension between universality and variation as a way of characterizing the functioning of language capacities and processes. The variety of topics covered by this book ranges from one end of the spectrum of language related behavior to the other: speech perception, lexical access in word recognition, relations between phonological and orthographic representations, sentence processing, discourse comprehension, and language production. All chapters focus on questions of general interest within each topic, and in most cases they appeal to one particular feature of the Spanish language that is relevant for a given question. Most chapters show the indisputable importance of crosslinguistic research in psycholinguistics to improve understanding on whether universal cognitive mechanisms and language specific routines underlie the ability of understanding and producing language.

This book contains eighteen chapters addressing important findings, assumptions, problems, hopes and future guidelines on the use of advanced research techniques to study the moment-by-moment mental processes that occur while a reader or listener is understanding language. The core techniques are Eyetracking and ERP, with some extensions to others such as fMRI. Eyetracking and ERPs are techniques widely used in the last two decades in the field of psycholinguistics. A vast amount of data has been collected with these two techniques that allow us to advance in our knowledge of the cognitive mechanisms and processes involved in comprehending and producing language. They also allow us to ask new questions for advancing in our theoretical knowledge. The book has been written by leading researchers in the field of psycholinguistics that are also leading experts in the use of these techniques. The book combines comprehensive overviews of the state of the art on theoretical progress and assumptions behind the use of eye movements (reading and visual world) and ERP methods with papers that address specific research questions through the use of these techniques. It addresses not only methodological issues but also discuss the theoretical progress that has been made on understanding language processing using temporally fine-grained methods.

This book addresses important findings, assumptions, problems, hopes, and future guidelines on the use of advanced research techniques to study the moment-by-moment mental processes that occur while a reader or listener is understanding language. The core techniques are eye tracking and ERPs, with some extensions to others such as fMRI. The On-line Study ofSentence Comprehension has been written by top researchers in the field of psycholinguistics, who are also leading experts in the use of eye tracking and ERPs. This book combines comprehensive overviews of the state of the art on theoretical progress, the latest on assumptions behind the use of eye movements (reading and visual world) and ERPs methods with papers that address specific research questions. This work covers not only methodological issues but also discusses the theoretical progress in understanding language processing using temporally fine-grained methods.

This book presents a set of contributions to the current flow of psycholinguistic research, with new and challenging data gathered from Spanish that may illuminate issues about the generality of language processing models. Although it is possible to find a considerable amount of papers on psycholinguistic research with the Spanish language published in English-speaking journals, unfortunately, the scientific community does not have access to an overview of psycholinguistics in Spain. This book overcomes these limitations because it brings together state-of-the-art descriptions of the research and theory of the different subareas of psycholinguistics currently being studied in Spain. Spanish, the third most widely-used language in the world, differs from English in a number of important respects. Since English has been predominant in psycholinguistic research, contrasting properties of Spanish may help to test the generality of language processing mechanisms and to refine their description. The set of contrasting features considered in this book includes acoustical and syllabic transparency, shallow orthography, a much richer morphology, flexibility in word order, less variability in intonational contours, and the existence of null pronominal subjects for inflected verbs. There are also interesting contrasts in the frequency of different linguistic units, whose impact on language processing is also evaluated. One of the main lines of argument throughout this book deals with the tension between universality and variation as a way of characterizing the functioning of language capacities and processes. The variety of topics covered by this book ranges from one end of the spectrum of language related behavior to the other: speech perception, lexical access in word recognition, relations between phonological and orthographic representations, sentence processing, discourse comprehension, and language production. All chapters focus on questions of general interest within each topic, and in most cases they appeal to one particular feature of the Spanish language that is relevant for a given question. Most chapters show the indisputable importance of crosslinguistic research in psycholinguistics to improve understanding on whether universal cognitive mechanisms and language specific routines underlie the ability of understanding and producing language.

Ten years ago, a group of researchers investigating the processing of morphological information met in the south of France to discuss how morphology affects word recognition, perception and production from a cross-linguistic perspective. This special issue is the fourth volume to expose the results of this on-going research effort. The volume begins with a comprehensive review of the nature of morphological priming, followed by a series of experimental papers that examine morphological processing in a variety of languages such as English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, and Spanish. The parallel monitoring of morphological processing in reading, speech perception and production, using a wide array of experimental methods such as masked priming, long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, and the recording of electrophysiological activity, provides converging evidence regarding the nature of morphemic representations in the various languages. The cross-linguistic perspective that characterizes the research effort of the present volume, as well as the previous ones, is used to investigate whether there are qualitative differences in the principles of lexical organization and lexical processing in different alphabetic orthographies that arise from qualitative differences in morphological structure.