Good-Enough production is the case where lexical selection between alternative words is subject to accessibility effects.Recent evidence suggests the name for a picture depends partly on the phonological form of the last word said. If Good-Enough production reflects variability in name activation and competition among alternative names, then non-adjacentmanipulations should also affect picture naming probability and latency. Participants read aloud printed words and namedpictures one at a time, including target pictures with two highly probable names (Dominant and Secondary). In theRepetition (vs Control) condition, Secondary names were read aloud in early trials, and target pictures were named at least50 trials later. Earlier reading resulted in a higher probability of Secondary names for target pictures, compared to Controlparticipants, suggesting that lexical selection is subject to non-adjacent influences. Dominant naming latency was greaterunder earlier Secondary name reading, supporting an interactive, competitive lexical selection mechanism.

The validity of verbal working memory depends on language experience-independent capacities. We tested how grammat-ical knowledge impacts memory in the absence of overt language production and while controlling for semantic meaningof word pair stimuli. Native English speakers (n=129) completed: (1) ratings of unattested noun-noun compounds (e.g.ice-wallet) on meaningfulness; the (2) Author Recognition Test, measuring language experience; and (3) an old/newrecognition task, where previously presented noun-noun compounds appeared in either old (ice-wallet) or new (wallet-ice)orders. Order of nouns in compounds either resembled order consistently found in English (i.e. typical noun modifier +typical head noun) or was reversed. If grammatical knowledge affects verbal working memory, consistency with natu-ral language should predict old ratings, controlling for meaningfulness ratings and old status. As predicted, participantswere more likely to rate consistent compounds as old compared to reversed. All analyses pre-registered on OSF prior toexperimenter access to data.

People’s memory for an event is known to be affected by their verbal descriptions prior to memory assessment. The present experiment investigated whether the computational difficulty of production itself, which is known to affect what people say, can shape descriptions and subsequent event memory. Participants viewed simple scenes and were asked to describe them using either speech or silent gesture, the latter being a much more difficult task. We hypothesized that gesturing participants would over-use action pantomimes, which would yield poorer Inaction (vs. Action) scene memory. Following scene descriptions, participants were given a forced-choice recognition task to discriminate previously presented scenes from foils. Patterns of gesturing showed that gesturers used action pantomimes for Inaction scenes, and they performed reliably worse on Inaction scene memory. Increased production of action pantomimes predicted increased guesses for Action scenes at test, independent of the correct response. Implications for memory and production are discussed

Many theories of verbal working memory have claimed that novel word lists are unlike natural language. As a result, recall of the novel word lists is not affected by sequential statistics in natural language and must be governed by short-term memory. We analyzed memory for novel, dative-like word lists (e.g., ADJ-NOUN-GAVE-ADJ-NOUN-NOUN) across three experiments. We used a powerful neural language model (Ng et al., 2019) to compute the surprisal associated with the critical words in each list, because surprisal indexes psycholinguistic processing difficulty (Levy, 2008). Surprisal at critical words strongly predicted the number of words recalled in each list. These results demonstrate lexico-syntactic factors can support syntactic structure even in novel word lists and that continuous measures of processing difficulty may be used to characterize similarity of novel lists to natural language. We discuss implications for theories of verbal working memory.

Different theories of human syntactic parsing make conflicting claims concerning the role of non-syntactic information (e.g. semantics, real world knowledge) on on-line parsing. W e address this debate by examining the effect of plausibility of thematic role assignments on the processing of syntactic ambiguities. In a selfpaced reading experiment, ambiguous condition reading times were longer than unambiguous condition times at the point of syntactic disambiguation only when plausibility cues had supported the incorrect interpretation. Off-line measures of plausibility also predicted reading time effects in regression analyses. These results indicate that plausibility information m ay influence thematic role assignment and the initial interpretation of a syntactic ambiguity, and they argue against parsing models in which the syntactic component is blind to plausibility information.

Though communicative goals clearly drive word choice in language production, online demands suggest that accessibility might play a role, too. If the benefits of accessibility are important enough to communication, more accessible words (high-frequency words) might be chosen over more accurate, less accessible ones. We used a novel artificial language learning paradigm to test whether high-frequency words are preferred over low-frequency words at a cost of meaning accuracy. Participants learned eight words which corresponded to precise angles on a compass. On test trials, participants viewed angles lying in-between two trained angles and were asked to produce a word for the angle. Across two experiments, we showed that participants extended their use of high- frequency words to more distal angles compared to low- frequency words. In cases of competition between high- and low-frequency words, the former tended to win out even when less accurate, suggesting that accessibility can compromise some accuracy.