The Mental Lexicon - Online First

This study investigated the degree to which cognitive mechanisms support word recognition and word inflection in aging and how this changes in Alzheimer’s disease (AD). We tested competing hypotheses regarding the functional organization of language within the broader cognitive system. One set of hypotheses, derived from dual-system theories like the Declarative/Procedural (DP) model, predicts a functional architecture segregated by linguistic function. An alternative set of hypotheses posits a more integrated architecture, organized by task demands and resource availability.

We analyzed participants’ performance on a lexical decision task and a word inflection task, alongside neuropsychological tests, using both behavioral and network analyses. In healthy controls (HC), the network analysis revealed a highly integrated architecture where language tasks were clustered by functional demands (e.g., speed vs. accuracy) rather than segregated along a strict lexicon/grammar divide. In the AD group, behavioral results showed a classic dissociation, with disproportionate impairment on irregular word inflection — a pattern traditionally seen as evidence for a modular memory failure. However, our network analysis revealed a different underlying mechanism. We observed a dramatic network reorganization where a core declarative memory module became functionally isolated, causing language tasks to form new, compensatory alliances with remaining frontal-executive resources. This provides clear evidence of a shift where executive functions are recruited to support language abilities when dedicated memory systems decline.

These findings suggest that the cognitive substrate for language is not static but adapts dynamically in neurodegeneration, shifting its reliance from failing declarative memory systems to domain-general executive control pathways.

This study explores gender assignment strategies in Russian-Hebrew code-mixed adjective-noun phrases. Russian features a three-gender system (masculine, feminine, neuter), while Hebrew uses a two-gender system (masculine, feminine). Despite these differences, both languages share transparent gender assignment cues: nouns ending in -a are typically feminine, while those ending in consonants are generally masculine. Both languages also feature opaque nouns. Eighty Russian-Hebrew speakers participated, divided into heritage language (HL) speakers (age of bilingualism onset [AoB]: 0–6 years, dominant in Hebrew) and immigrant (IMM) speakers (AoB: 9+ years, dominant in Russian). Participants rated the acceptability of code-mixed sentences featuring Russian nouns within Hebrew matrix sentences. Results showed a preference for strategies combining shape-based and insertion approaches with transparent nouns, reflecting overlapping linguistic cues in both languages. The same strategies were preferred for opaque congruent nouns, where no gender conflict existed. For opaque gender-incongruent nouns, strategy use was shaped by the degree of overlap between the languages’ gender systems. Although differences between HL and IMM speakers were expected, no group variation in strategy use was found. These findings advance our understanding of gender assignment in code-switching contexts and shed light on how bilinguals represent and process gender when two linguistic gender systems are involved.

Morphological effects are consistently reported in written word recognition but their theoretical explanation is still debated. The paper aims to disentangle the specific role of morphological information from orthography during written word recognition. We exploit the “morphemic ambiguity” of stem-homographs, words that share formally identical but morphologically and semantically unrelated stems (e.g., mor-a, “blackberry” and mor-ire, “to die”). Two unmasked visual priming lexical decision experiments are described. The results replicate the inhibitory priming effects elicited by stem-homographs, extend it to their allomorphic variants in Italian (e.g., mor-a, and muor-e, “he/she dies”, verb form deriving from an allomorph ( muor -) of the homographic stem mor - of morire) and differentiate the stem-homographs and the stem-allomorphs inhibition from the positional effects of orthographic overlap in prime-target pairs. The pattern of data confirms the presence of mechanisms of morphological segmentation in word recognition. On the other hand, the effects fit with hypotheses of graded morphology where word stems are supposed to affect the processing of words on the basis of multiple connections between regular and irregular forms included in their inflectional paradigms and derivational families.

This study investigates whether the recognition advantage of proper names (PN) over common nouns (CN) — reported in several languages — is also observed in Spanish, and whether different types of PN (e.g., personal vs. geographical) are affected to the same extent. Drawing on semantic theories that assign different presuppositional meanings to subcategories of PN, we designed four experiments to examine PN processing patterns: a lexical decision task, two categorization tasks, and a semantic priming task. To explore which semantic factors account for variability within each subcategory, we also conducted a series of regression analyses. The results confirm a cross-linguistic recognition advantage for PN in categorization tasks; however, this effect is limited to personal PN — even after controlling for affective factors and familiarity — while the advantage for geographical PN appears to be language-specific. Participants’ behavioral responses to geographical PN resembled those elicited by CN. These findings suggest that PN is a semantically heterogeneous category, and that their recognition lies on a continuum with that of CN.