The role of a target's orthographic neighborhood in visual word recognition was investigated in 2 lexical decision experiments. In both experiments, some stimuli had 1 letter delayed relative to the presentation of the rest of the stimulus. Experiment 1 showed that delaying a letter position, which yielded a potentially competitive neighbor, was more costly to target recognition than delaying a position that yielded no neighbors. This effect was strongest when one of these neighbors was of higher frequency than the target itself. Additionally, the effect was reduced for words with a high friendly-to-unfriendly-neighbor ratio (friendly neighbors being those words containing the delayed letter). In Experiment 2 the difficulty of the word-nonword discrimination was manipulated by varying the density of the nonwords' neighborhoods. Only when the nonwords had many neighbors at several positions did the word responses show neighborhood competition effects.

Interest is rapidly growing in the hypothesis that natural language emerged from a more primitive set of linguistic acts based primarily on manual activity and hand gestures. Increasingly, researchers are investigating how hemispheric asymmetries are related to attentional and manual asymmetries (i.e., handedness). Both speech perception and production have origins in the dynamical generative movements of the vocal tract known as articulatory gestures. Thus, the notion of a ''gesture'' can be extended to both hand movements and speech articulation. The generative actions of the hands and vocal tract can therefore provide a basis for the (direct) perception of linguistic acts. Such gestures are best described using the methods of dynamical systems analysis since both perception and production can be described using the same commensurate language. Experiments were conducted using a phase transition paradigm to examine the coordination of speech-hand gestures in both left-and right-handed individuals. Results address coordination (in-phase vs. anti-phase), hand (left vs. right), lateralization (left vs. right hemisphere), focus of attention (speech vs. tapping), and how dynamical constraints provide a foundation for human communicative acts. Predictions from the asymmetric HKB equation confirm the attentional basis of functional asymmetry. Of significance is a new understanding of the role of perceived synchrony (p-centres) during intentional cases of gestural coordination.

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a b s t r a c tThis exploratory study investigated the nature of teacher-infant social dialogue in a high-quality education and care centre in New Zealand. Employing dialogic methodology (Bakhtin, 1986), interactions between infants and teachers were analysed in terms of the language forms used in the social event. Polyphonic video footage of two infants' social experiences and subsequent teacher interviews were coded to identify forms of language that occurred in dialogues and their interpreted pedagogical significance to teachers. The results revealed four central features of teacher-infant social exchange: (i) infants were more likely to respond to teachers interaction initiations when teachers used verbal and non-verbal language form combinations; (ii) when initiations were verbal and non-verbal combinations, both teachers' and infants' responses were significantly more likely to be also combinations of verbal and non-verbal language forms; (iii) both infants and teachers altered their responses to the language forms used by the initiator regardless of whether that was an infant or a teacher; and (iv) when teachers did not respond, they had a pedagogical rationale. Results highlight the multi-voiced and synchronous nature of teacher-infant interactions, the complex nature of communication in a formal out-of-home setting, and the pedagogical nature of teacher dialogue with infants.

According to classical dual-route theory, effects of associative priming and frequency on the naming of printed words arise from lexical access and should be weak or absent when word names are assembled prelexically. Assembled naming would be more likely in a shallow orthography, especially in the presence of nonwords. This hypothesis was examined with the shallow Serbo-Croatian orthography. Interactions between association, frequency, and stimulus quality were also examined in both Serbo-Croatian and English. Contrary to classical dual-route theory, both lexical effects were found for naming words in Serbo-Croatian, with or without nonwords. Neither interaction was significant in Serbo-Croatian and only association X quality was significant in English. Discussion focused on (a) the claim that lexical effects on naming in a shallow orthography constitute prima facie evidence against either prelexical phonology or the orthographic depth hypothesis, and (b) the possible factorization of frequency and active associative knowledge in naming words.The rapid naming task places few explicit demands on the reader. It does not, in principle, require that the reader know the meaning of the letter string or what words it is related to or how common it is or even if it is, in fact, a word. Nonetheless, the latency to initiate the pronunciation of a letter string can be affected by all of these factors. When a target is preceded by an associative context, it is named faster than when it is preceded by an unrelated context (e.g., Meyer, Schvaneveldt, & Ruddy, 1975;Seidenberg, Waters, Sanders, & Langer, 1984). High-frequency words tend to be named faster than lowfrequency words (e.g., Forster & Chambers, 1973; MeCann, Besner, & Davelaar, 1988), and words tend to be named faster than nonwords (e.g., Forster & Chambers, 1973;Frederiksen & Kroll, 1976). Association, frequency, and lexicality are understood to exert their influences only after the lexicon has been accessed. Granting this understanding, what do such effects suggest about how rapid naming is accomplished?Discussions of naming often are framed in terms of accessed versus assembled phonology. In the former, visual characteristics of the letter string are mapped in whole word fashion onto lexical representations where information about phonology is accessed. In the latter, the visual form of the letter string is recoded into corresponding phonological constituents, and this assembled