Research on alphabetic reading presents conflicting findings concerning the timing of orthographic and meaning processes in reading morphologically complex words. Chinese characters offer distinct visual cues for morphemes, enabling straightforward manipulations to examine orthographic and meaning processes. Guided by the Character-Word Dual…

Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

This article reports on an empirical study of L3 Mandarin, aiming to shed light on transfer effects and their interaction with other factors throughout the L3 acquisition trajectory. A fill-in-the-blank task was employed to examine L2 and L3 acquisition of three types of Mandarin sentence-final particle clusters. Participants in the study were…

The purpose of this dissertation is to answer the following question that falls in the intersection of philosophy of language and epistemology: is there any distinctive kind of knowledge that one might possess, merely in virtue of being a native, competent speaker of a certain natural language? When this is expressed as a question specifically…

The purpose of this study was to consider the core of the mental lexicon of the Kazakh language based on the analysis of associative dictionaries, to determine the basic lexico-semantic groups of words and to compare the basic lexical layer with value categories. This study uses the following methods of linguocultural, comparative,…

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social…

The present study aims to explore how second language (L2) speakers process four types of presupposition triggers in an online self-paced reading task and an offline acceptability judgment task. The four types of triggers are definite expressions with "the," the factive verb "know," the change-of-state verb "stop" and…

Speakers vary in their pronunciations of the sounds in their native language. Listeners use lexical knowledge to adjust their phonetic categories to speakers' idiosyncratic pronunciations. Lexical information can, however, be inconclusive or become available too late to guide this phonetic retuning. Sentence context is known to affect lexical…

This study examined number marking comprehension among Japanese learners of second language (L2) English, whose first language (L1) does not have an obligatory number marking system. The study conducted an online sentence comprehension experiment with 96 L1-Japanese learners and 32 native speakers of English, wherein participants engaged in a…

This study investigates the acquisition of genericity in L2 French and L3 English. While some exponents become generic by assembling morphological, syntactic and discursive cues, definite singular nominals additionally require the well-established kind restriction. It is a pragmatic and language-specific constraint. The participants are L1 Arabic…

Background: Previous work suggests that children can teach themselves new written words via reading aloud texts independently (i.e., orthographic learning via self-teaching). In self-teaching in Chinese, regular phonetic radicals and transparent semantic radicals facilitate orthographic learning. The present study examined the roles of phonetic…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

This study examined individual-level variability in N400 and P600 ERP correlates of native and nonnative language sentence processing of semantic and grammar information. Twenty-six native English-speaking learners of Spanish as a second language were tested. Participants completed sentence reading tasks in English and Spanish during EEG…

This study aims to examine nominal tautology functioned as human nature based on the assumptions by Wierzbicka (1987). It compares English and Arabic tautology on construction like "Boys are boys." This study integrates Miki's evocation function with two other core concepts namely a "macro-frame" and a "micro-frame."…

The lexical representation of compound words in speech production is still under debate. While most studies with healthy adult speakers suggest that a single lemma representation is active during compound production, data from neuropsychological studies point toward multiple representations, with activation of the compound's constituent lemmas in…