Recent neuroimaging research has shown that perceptual and conceptual processing share a common, modality-specific neural substrate, while work on modality switching costs suggests that they share some of the same attentional mechanisms. In three experiments, we employed a modality detection task that displayed modality-specific object properties (e.g., unimodal shrill, warm, crimson, or bimodal jagged, fluffy) for extremely short display times and asked participants to judge whether each property corresponded to a particular target modality (e.g., auditory, gustatory, tactile, olfactory, visual). Results show that perceptual and conceptual processing share a tactile disadvantage: people are less accurate in detecting expected information regarding the sense of touch than any other modality. These findings support embodied assertions that the conceptual system uses the perceptual system for the purposes of representation. We suggest that the tactile disadvantage emerges for linguistic stimuli due to the evolutionary adaptation of endogenous attention to incoming sensory stimuli.

from Cognition

In two experiments using the action–sentence–compatibility paradigm we investigated the simulation processes that readers undertake when processing state descriptions with adjectives (e.g., Die Schublade ist offen/zu. [The drawer is open/shut]) or adjectival passives (e.g., Die Schublade ist geöffnet/geschlossen. [The drawer is opened/closed]). In Experiment 1 we did not find evidence for action simulation, not even in sentences with adjectival passives. The results were different in Experiment 2, where the temporal particle noch (still/yet) was inserted into the sentences (e.g., The drawer is still closed). Under these circumstances readers mentally simulated the action that brought about the current state for sentences with adjectival passives, but the action that would change the current state for sentences with adjectives. Thus, comprehenders are in principle sensitive to the subtle differences between adjectives and adjectival passives but highlighting the temporal dimension of the described states of affairs seems a necessary precondition for obtaining evidence for action simulation with sentences that describe a state. We discuss implications for future studies employing neuro-psychological methods.

from Brain and Language

In two experiments using the action–sentence–compatibility paradigm we investigated the simulation processes that readers undertake when processing state descriptions with adjectives (e.g., Die Schublade ist offen/zu. [The drawer is open/shut]) or adjectival passives (e.g., Die Schublade ist geöffnet/geschlossen. [The drawer is opened/closed]). In Experiment 1 we did not find evidence for action simulation, not even in sentences with adjectival passives. The results were different in Experiment 2, where the temporal particle noch (still/yet) was inserted into the sentences (e.g., The drawer is still closed). Under these circumstances readers mentally simulated the action that brought about the current state for sentences with adjectival passives, but the action that would change the current state for sentences with adjectives. Thus, comprehenders are in principle sensitive to the subtle differences between adjectives and adjectival passives but highlighting the temporal dimension of the described states of affairs seems a necessary precondition for obtaining evidence for action simulation with sentences that describe a state. We discuss implications for future studies employing neuro-psychological methods.

from Brain and Language

When processing sentences about perceptible scenes and performable actions, language understanders activate perceptual and motor systems to perform mental simulations of those events. But little is known about exactly what linguistic elements activate modality-specific systems during language processing. While it is known that content words, like nouns and verbs, influence the content of a mental simulation, the role of grammar is less well understood. We investigate the role of grammatical markers in mental simulation through two experiments in which we manipulate the meanings of sentences by modifying the grammatical aspect they use. Using the Action-sentence Compatibility Effect (ACE) methodology [Glenberg, A., Kaschak, M. (2002). Grounding language in action. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 558–565], we show that progressive sentences about hand motion facilitate manual action in the same direction, while perfect sentences that are identical in every way except their aspect do not. The broader implication of this finding for language processing is that while content words tell understanders what to mentally simulate and what brain regions to use in performing these simulations, grammatical constructions such as aspect modulate how those simulations are performed.

from Brain and Language

Abstract
The present study investigated the time-course of semantic integration in auditory compound word processing. Compounding is a productive mechanism of word formation that is used frequently in many languages. Specifically, we examined whether semantic integration is incremental or is delayed until the head, the last constituent in German, is available. Stimuli were compounds consisting of three nouns, and the semantic plausibility of the second and the third constituent was manipulated independently (high vs. low). Participants’ task was to listen to the compounds and evaluate them semantically. Event-related brain potentials in response to the head constituents showed an increased N400 for less plausible head constituents, reflecting the lexical-semantic integration of all three compound constituents. In response to the second (less plausible) constituents, an increased N400 with a central-left scalp distribution was observed followed by a parietal positivity. The occurrence of this N400 effect during the presentation of the second constituents suggests that the initial two non-head constituents are immediately integrated. The subsequent positivity might be an instance of a P600 and is suggested to reflect the structural change of the initially constructed compound structure. The results suggest that lexical-semantic integration of compound constituents is an incremental process and, thus, challenge a recent proposal on the time-course of semantic processing in auditory compound comprehension.

from Neuropsychology

Abstract
The present study investigated the time-course of semantic integration in auditory compound word processing. Compounding is a productive mechanism of word formation that is used frequently in many languages. Specifically, we examined whether semantic integration is incremental or is delayed until the head, the last constituent in German, is available. Stimuli were compounds consisting of three nouns, and the semantic plausibility of the second and the third constituent was manipulated independently (high vs. low). Participants’ task was to listen to the compounds and evaluate them semantically. Event-related brain potentials in response to the head constituents showed an increased N400 for less plausible head constituents, reflecting the lexical-semantic integration of all three compound constituents. In response to the second (less plausible) constituents, an increased N400 with a central-left scalp distribution was observed followed by a parietal positivity. The occurrence of this N400 effect during the presentation of the second constituents suggests that the initial two non-head constituents are immediately integrated. The subsequent positivity might be an instance of a P600 and is suggested to reflect the structural change of the initially constructed compound structure. The results suggest that lexical-semantic integration of compound constituents is an incremental process and, thus, challenge a recent proposal on the time-course of semantic processing in auditory compound comprehension.

from Neuropsychology

Children with SLI (Specific Language Impairment) display language deficits in the absence of frank neurological lesions, global cognitive deficits or significant clinical hearing loss. Although these children can display disruptions in both receptive and expressive grammar, the intervention literature has been largely focused on expressive deficits. Thus, there are numerous reports in the literature suggesting that expressive language skills can be improved using focused presentation of grammatical targets (cf. conversational recast; Camarata, Nelson & Camarata, 1994), but there have been few investigations addressing the remediation of receptive language skills in SLI for those children with receptive language deficits. The purpose of this study was to examine whether focused grammatical intervention on expressive grammar is associated with growth in receptive language in 21 children with SLI who have receptive language deficits. These children displayed significant growth in receptive language scores as an incidental or secondary association with expressive language intervention and significantly higher gains than seen in a comparison-control group with SLI and receptive language deficits (n = 6). The theoretical and clinical implications of these results are discussed.

from First Language

Results: The groups demonstrated comparable semantic analysis skills and understanding of transparent idioms. Children with poor comprehension were impaired in the use of supportive context to aid their understanding of the opaque idioms.

Conclusions: The study identifies poor inference from context as a source of the idiom understanding difficulties in children with poor reading comprehension; there was no evidence that poor semantic analysis skills contributed to their difficulties. Children with poor comprehension should be supported in the use of context to understand unfamiliar figurative language.

from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research
]]> http://callierlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/mirror-neurons-the-representation-of-word-meaning-and-the-foot-of-the-third-left-frontal-convolution/ Fri, 07 Nov 2008 16:12:43 +0000 Callier Library http://callierlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/11/07/mirror-neurons-the-representation-of-word-meaning-and-the-foot-of-the-third-left-frontal-convolution/

Previous neuroimaging research has attempted to demonstrate a preferential involvement of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in the comprehension of effector-related action word (verb) meanings. These studies have assumed that Broca’s area (or Brodmann’s area 44) is the homologue of a monkey premotor area (F5) containing mouth and hand mirror neurons, and that action word meanings are shared with the mirror system due to a proposed link between speech and gestural communication. In an fMRI experiment, we investigated whether Broca’s area shows mirror activity solely for effectors implicated in the MNS. Next, we examined the responses of empirically determined mirror areas during a language perception task comprising effector-specific action words, unrelated words and nonwords. We found overlapping activity for observation and execution of actions with all effectors studied, i.e., including the foot, despite there being no evidence of foot mirror neurons in the monkey or human brain. These “mirror” areas showed equivalent responses for action words, unrelated words and nonwords, with all of these stimuli showing increased responses relative to visual character strings. Our results support alternative explanations attributing mirror activity in Broca’s area to covert verbalisation or hierarchical linearisation, and provide no evidence that the MNS makes a preferential contribution to comprehending action word meanings.

from Brain and Language
]]> http://callierlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/the-detection-and-monitoring-of-comprehension-errors-by-preschool-children-with-and-without-language-impairment/ Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:29:10 +0000 Callier Library http://callierlibrary.wordpress.com/2008/09/03/the-detection-and-monitoring-of-comprehension-errors-by-preschool-children-with-and-without-language-impairment/

from the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

Purpose: This study examined emerging comprehension monitoring, including error detection, evaluation and correction within the context of story understanding in preschool children with and without language impairment.

Method: Thirty-seven children between the ages of 30 and 61 months completed an online comprehension monitoring task. There were three groups: 10 children with language impairment, 13 typically developing children who were matched for age, and 14 typically developing children who were matched for receptive vocabulary.

Results: Analysis of variance tests revealed that children with language impairment attained significantly lower scores on the comprehension monitoring task than both age-matched and language-matched groups.

Conclusion: The skills underlying successful comprehension monitoring that may be affected in young children with language impairment are discussed.

from the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition

Plausibility violations resulting in impossible scenarios lead to earlier and longer lasting eye movement disruption than violations resulting in highly unlikely scenarios (K. Rayner, T. Warren, B. J. Juhasz, & S. P. Liversedge, 2004; T. Warren & K. McConnell, 2007). This could reflect either differences in the timing of availability of different kinds of information (e.g., selectional restrictions, world knowledge, and context) or differences in their relative power to guide semantic interpretation. The authors investigated eye movements to possible and impossible events in real-world and fantasy contexts to determine when contextual information influences detection of impossibility cued by a semantic mismatch between a verb and an argument. Gaze durations on a target word were longer to impossible events independent of context. However, a measure of the time elapsed from first fixating the target word to moving past it showed disruption only in the real-world context. These results suggest that contextual information did not eliminate initial disruption but moderated it quickly thereafter. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

from Topics in Language Disorders

This article discusses the potential value of working with school-aged children to increase their competence with narrative forms. With illustrations from current research, it argues that increased knowledge of, and experience with, narrative should have positive effects on comprehension of classroom language, selective listening, peer relations, and literacy. Narrative interventions can also be incorporated into dynamic assessment protocols and can help us identify children with limitations in language processing.

from Topics in Language Disorders

Many of the foundational abilities that are necessary for learning to read emerge in preschool children’s oral language in advance of formal literacy instruction. This is not only true of phonemic awareness skills but also true of oral language comprehension, particularly of stories. Thus, clinical evaluation of preschoolers’ story comprehension abilities is an important part of a preliteracy assessment. Ensuring that the outcomes of these evaluations accurately reflect children’s abilities and lead to optimal clinical decisions requires familiarity with the available tools, their task demands, and psychometric properties. To provide clinicians with information necessary for making evidence-based choices in their assessment of story comprehension, we review the development of story comprehension in young children with and without language impairment. We then describe the procedures, both traditional and novel, that have been used to measure early story comprehension, assessing strengths and limitations.

from Brain and Language

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21 adolescents with high-functioning autism (HFA), and 22 typically developing controls matched on age, IQ, receptive language, and gender. The HFA group was significantly less likely to use prosody to disambiguate syntax, but scored comparably to controls when syntax alone or both prosody and syntax indicated the correct response. These findings indicate that adolescents with HFA have difficulty using prosody to disambiguate syntax in comparison to typically developing controls, even when matched on chronological age, IQ, and receptive language. The implications of these findings for how individuals with autism process language are discussed.

from the Psychological Bulletin

Repetition is a central phenomenon of behavior, and researchers have made extensive use of it to illuminate psychological functioning. In the language sciences, a ubiquitous form of such repetition is structural priming, a tendency to repeat or better process a current sentence because of its structural similarity to a previously experienced (“prime”) sentence (J. K. Bock, 1986). The recent explosion of research in structural priming has made it the dominant means of investigating the processes involved in the production (and increasingly, comprehension) of complex expressions such as sentences. This review considers its implications for the representation of syntax and the mechanisms of production and comprehension and their relationship. It then addresses the potential functions of structural priming, before turning to its implications for first language acquisition, bilingualism, and aphasia. The authors close with theoretical and empirical recommendations for future investigations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved)

from Brain and Language

Allen [Allen, M. D. (2005). The preservation of verb subcategory knowledge in a spoken language comprehension deficit. Brain and Language, 95, 255–264] presents evidence from a single patient, WBN, to motivate a theory of lexical processing and representation in which syntactic information may be encoded and retrieved independently of semantic information. In his critique, Kemmerer argues that because Allen depended entirely on preposition-based verb subcategory violations to test WBN’s knowledge of correct argument structure, his results, at best, address a “strawman” theory. This argument rests on the assumption that preposition subcategory options are superficial syntactic phenomena which are not represented by argument structure proper. We demonstrate that preposition subcategory is in fact treated as semantically determined argument structure in the theories that Allen evaluated, and thus far from irrelevant. In further discussion of grammatically relevant versus irrelevant semantic features, Kemmerer offers a review of his own studies. However, due to an important design shortcoming in these experiments, we remain unconvinced. Reemphasizing the fact the Allen (2005) never claimed to rule out all semantic contributions to syntax, we propose an improvement in Kemmerer’s approach that might provide more satisfactory evidence on the distinction between the kinds of relevant versus irrelevant features his studies have addressed.

Despite the fact that I’ve seen some really impactful primate related research lately, I’ve completely neglected updating Primatology.net with it. I can’t believe it has been almost three months since I’ve posted there! I should really resume posting there. Actually, I was considering putting up this following blog post over there, since it has to do with differences in neuroanatomy of the primate brain… but because these comparative studies are in the context of identifying specific architectural differences in the human brain related to language, I think posting it here is more fitting.

If you’re a reader of Neurophilosophy, you may have an idea of what research I’m referring too, the new Nature Neuroscience paper from James Rilling and team. Before I jump into this paper, “The evolution of the arcuate fasciculus revealed with comparative DTI,” please let me share another recent paper that gives some introduction about what I’m gonna talk about.

See earlier this month, Current Biology published a paper, “Communicative Signaling Activates ‘Broca’s’ Homolog in Chimpanzees,” where researchers not only confirmed that the Broca’s area as an important area of the human brain for language comprehension, but also chimpanzees have similar activity in the homologous area of their brains when communicative signals are produced or heard. The Broca’s area has long been thought to be one of the specialized functional areas of the brain for language comprehension. In fact was discovered almost 150 years ago by a physician named Pierre Paul Broca, who conducted an autopsy of patient with a speech deficit. Broca was able to determine the patient had a syphilitic lesion in the left cerebral hemisphere and identified this area as his namesake.

If you’ve heard anything about Broca’s area, it larger in the left hemisphere of the brain. Comparing activity levels between the two hemisphere, during language-related tasks, have shown the left hemisphere Broca’s area is more active. That’s due to the lateralization of the brain, which I’m sure you’ve heard of.

Anyways, the results of this study have important implications in figuring out the functional and structural differences of the human and chimpanzee brain. Why? Well, for starters, the linguistic abilities of humans have been thought to be unique to us for a while. This is a really big misconception because research on signing apes and other communicating animals, have begun to show us that we’re not alone in our abilities to symbolize information and exchange it by way of complex sound and gesture.

In order to investigate the differences of the activity between Broca’s areas in humans and related structure in chimpanzees, Taglialatela et al., put three chimpanzee subjects in PET and fMRI machines and stimulated to vocalize by putting treats just out of their reach. They then recorded the activity of the subjects would vocalize in frustration. They were able to see the very same the neuroanatomical structures associated with the production of communicative behaviors in humans, fire in chimpanzees.

Now, of course that doesn’t mean chimpanzees are gonna be reciting Shakespeare anytime soon. This leads me to the first paper I mentioned today, the one from Rilling and crew. Rilling et al., did a comparative anatomical study on the structure of arcuate fasciculus, a large white matter tract, in humans, chimpanzees and macaques. The arcuate fasciculus functions as a linker between Broca’s area and another language associated area of the brain, Wernicke’s area. The researchers used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), a type of noninvasive medical imaging that’s a lot like MRI but it compares and contrasts the local characteristics of water diffusion within tissues.

While the arcuate fasiculus of the rhesus macaque, the chimpanzee, and the human linked up to the frontal cortex — including with Broca’s area, it was observed that the human arcuate fasiculus is much larger. It more spreads deep into the middle temporal lobe, leaving the classical Wernicke’s area. In chimps, the arcuate fasciculus made very superficial connections to the temporal cortex regions homologous to Wernicke’s area. Macaques showed a much lower extend of this integration. Rilling commented,

“We know from previous functional imaging studies that the middle temporal lobe is involved with analyzing the meanings of words. In humans, it seems the brain not only evolved larger language regions but also a network of fibers to connect those regions, which supports humans’ superior language capabilities.”

This following diagram was published in Rilling et al.’s paper and illustrates their results:

So from these two papers, the evolution of specialized language areas maybe active in both chimpanzee and human brains but as the human brain diverged from other primate counterparts, major re-wiring at the arcuate fasciculus accompanied the massive expansion of brain size. Ultimately the area that is associated with understanding word meaning, Wernicke’s area, has been strongly connected with Broca’s area.

Rilling, J.K., Glasser, M.F., Preuss, T.M., Ma, X., Zhao, T., Hu, X., Behrens, T.E. (2008). The evolution of the arcuate fasciculus revealed with comparative DTI. Nature Neuroscience DOI: 10.1038/nn2072

TAGLIALATELA, J., RUSSELL, J., SCHAEFFER, J., HOPKINS, W. (2008). Communicative Signaling Activates ‘Broca’s’ Homolog in Chimpanzees. Current Biology, 18(5), 343-348. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.01.049

from the Journal of the American Academy of Audiology

Although comprehension of spoken language is ordinarily conducted without apparent effort, it is among the most complex of human activities. We illustrate this complexity by outlining the operations involved at the perceptual, attentional, and linguistic levels necessary for successful comprehension of speech in sentences and discourse. We describe how challenges to speech comprehension imposed by hearing loss and cognitive limitations in the capacity of attentional and working memory resources can be counterbalanced to a significant degree by utilization of linguistic knowledge and contextual support, including the use of naturally-occurring speech prosody. We conclude by considering factors that may affect one’s willingness to expend the attentional effort that may be necessary for successful listening behavior and comprehension performance.

from Language Learning

This study examined two issues: (a) whether there are gains in accurate and speedy comprehension of second language (L2) pragmatic meaning over time and (b) whether the gains are associated with cognitive processing ability and the amount of language contact in an L2 environment. Forty-four college students in a US institution completed three measures three times over a 4-month period: (a) the pragmatic listening test that measured the ability to comprehend implied speaker intentions, (b) the lexical access test that measured ability to make speedy semantic judgment, and (c) the language contact survey that examined the amount of time learners spent in L2 outside the class. The learners’ pragmatic comprehension was analyzed for accuracy (the scores on the pragmatic listening test) and comprehension speed (the average time taken to answer items correctly). Results showed that the learners made significant improvement on comprehension speed but not on accuracy of comprehension. Lexical access speed was significantly correlated with comprehension speed but not with accuracy. The amount of speaking and reading outside class that the students reported on the language contact survey significantly correlated with the gains in comprehension speed but not with accuracy of comprehension.

from NIH News

For children who struggle to learn language, the choice between various interventions may matter less than the intensity and format of the intervention, a new study sponsored by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) suggests. The study, led by Ronald B. Gillam, Ph.D., of Utah State University is online in the February 2008 Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. NIDCD is one of the National Institutes of Health.

The study compared four intervention strategies in children who have unusual difficulty understanding and using language, and found that all four methods resulted in significant, long-term improvements in the children’s language abilities. The aim of the study was to assess whether children who used commercially available language software program Fast ForWord-Language had greater improvement in language skills than children using other methods. This program was specifically designed to improve auditory processing deficits which may underlie some language impairments. Children who have auditory processing deficits can jumble the order of sounds that are heard in close sequence. Researchers believe that this deficit can interfere with vocabulary and grammar development.

from the Journal of Child Language

Early language comprehension may be one of the most important predictors of developmental risk. The need for performance-based assessment is predicated on limitations identified in the exclusive use of parent report and on the need for a performance measure with which to assess the convergent validity of parent report of comprehension. Child performance data require the development of procedures to facilitate infant attention and compliance. Forty infants (20 at 1 ; 4 and 20 at 1 ; acquiring English completed a standard picture book task and the same task was administered on a touch-sensitive screen. The computerized task significantly improved task attention, compliance and performance. Reliability was high, indicating that infants were not responding randomly. Convergent validity with parent report and 4-month stability was substantial. Preliminary data extending this approach to Mexican-Spanish are presented. Results are discussed in terms of the promise of this technique for clinical and research settings and the potential influences of cultural factors on performance.

from the Journal of Neuroscience

One of the most remarkable abilities of bilinguals is to produce and/or to perceive a switch from one language to the other without any apparent difficulty. However, several psycholinguistic studies indicate that producing, recognizing, and integrating a linguistic code different from the one in current use may entail a processing cost for the speaker/listener. Up to now, the underlying neural substrates of perceiving language switches are unknown. In the present study, we investigated the neural mechanisms of language switching during auditory perception in bilinguals. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was performed in 12 early, highly proficient Italian/French bilinguals, who were more exposed to their second language. Subjects had to listen to narratives containing “switched passages” that could either respect (i.e., regular switches) or violate (i.e., irregular switches) the constituents of sentence structure. The results indicate that switching engages an extensive neural network, including bilateral prefrontal and temporal associative regions. Moreover, a clear dissociation is observed for the types of switches. Regular switches entail a pattern of brain activity closely related to lexical processing, whereas irregular switches engage brain structures involved in syntactic and phonological aspects of language processing. Noteworthy, when switching into the less-exposed language, we observed the selective engagement of subcortical structures and of the anterior cingulate cortex, putatively involved in cognitive and executive control. This suggests that switching into a less-exposed language requires controlled processing resources. This pattern of brain activity may constitute an important neural signature of language dominance in bilinguals.

from the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education

This study aims to answer the question, how much of Spanish Sign Language interpreting deaf individuals really understand. Study sampling included 36 deaf people (deafness ranging from severe to profound; variety depending on the age at which they learned sign language) and 36 hearing people who had good knowledge of sign language (most were interpreters). Sign language comprehension was assessed using passages of secondary level. After being exposed to the passages, the participants had to tell what they had understood about them, answer a set of related questions, and offer a title for the passage. Sign language comprehension by deaf participants was quite acceptable but not as good as that by hearing signers who, unlike deaf participants, were not only late learners of sign language as a second language but had also learned it through formal training.

In a very readable piece in eSkeptic, Clive Wynne writes about experiments in teaching apes to speak, how they all have failed, and how language is still uniquely human, since it is the intention that makes the language not stringing words together. There are some nice stories along the way, like this one about Nim Chimpsky:

The most significant of Washoe’s imitators was probably a chimpanzee cheekily named Nim Chimpsky by Herbert Terrace of Columbia University. The joke was that linguist Noam Chomsky was the most vocal defender of Descartes’ belief that language was uniquely human. Terrace held a quite different view. He told an interviewer in early 1975, “I’m not the only one trying to teach a chimp a sign language. There are others … but I hope to be the one who is going to do it right.” He would, “nail to the wall proof that a subhuman primate can acquire a syntactical competence that at least overlaps with that of man …the age-old distinctions concerning man’s uniqueness would no longer hold.”

Take a look!

(Link via  A&L Daily)

from Language and Cognitive Processes

Two experiments employed a lexical decision task and a delayed cued recall task to investigate whether and how syntactic focusing affects the online processing and long-term encoding of repeated and non-repeated definite NP anaphors in spoken language comprehension. For discourses with repeated anaphors (Experiment 1), focus facilitated lexical decisions but resulted in poorer recall performance. Discourses with non-repeated anaphors (Experiment 2) showed focus facilitation in lexical decision but no effects in recall. These results show that, similar to reading, spoken language comprehension is impeded by repeated reference to a focused discourse referent. The finding that repetition initially facilitates processing but then interferes with the resulting memory representation is consistent with theories that view referential processing as consisting of multiple stages that can be differentially impacted by repetition.