Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

Chinese learners of English often experience difficulty with English tense presumably because their native language is tenseless. We showed that this difficulty relates to their incomplete conceptual representations for tense rather than their poor grammatical rule knowledge. Participants made acceptability judgments on sentences describing…

This article sheds light on the linguistic and extralinguistic conditions that determine the likelihood of L1 grammatical attrition in late sequential bilinguals. We explore whether aspectual interpretations associated with the present tense may be a vulnerable area for the native grammar of 30 late Spanish-English bilinguals who have settled in…

Press representations of autism and autistic people both reflect and help shape public attitudes towards autism and neurodiversity and may establish critical barriers to social integration for autistic individuals. This study examined such representations in UK newspapers in the period 2011-2020 using a corpus-based approach. It also considered…

Purpose: Adults recognize words that are acquired during childhood more quickly than words acquired during adulthood. This is known as the Age of Acquisition (AoA) effect. The AoA effect, according to the integrated account, manifests in tasks necessitating greater semantic processing and in tasks with arbitrary input-output mapping. Compound…

Research suggests that individual differences in additional language learning may play a more important role in taxing situations when learners are confronted with unfamiliar or difficult tasks. However, studies to date have mostly focused on second language (L2) learners/bilinguals, while individual differences within multilingual populations…

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and…

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of the existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as "appropriacy" or…

This article brings together an experimental study involving L2 knowledge of negation in English and an analysis of how English language textbooks treat negation, in order to consider whether textbook explanations of negation could better exploit linguistic insights into negation. We focus on the English negative polarity item any, whose…

The results of a self-paced reading study with advanced German, Dutch and French second language (L2) learners of English showed that their online comprehension of early closure (EC) sentences which are initially misanalysed by native English speakers (e.g. "While John hunted the frightened rabbit escaped") was affected by whether or…

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by (N = 243) children aged 2-5 and their caregivers were…

Knowledge of English affixes plays a significant role in increasing knowledge of words. However, few attempts have been made to create a valid and reliable measure of affix knowledge. The Word Part Levels Test (WPLT) was developed to measure three aspects of affix knowledge: form (recognition of written affix forms), meaning (knowledge of affix…

Little is known about implicit morphological processing in typical and atypical readers. These studies investigate this using a probe detection task with lures sharing morphological, orthographic, or semantic overlap with the probe. Intermediate and advanced readers (reading ages = 9;1-12;9) perform more poorly when there is more linguistic…

This study investigates the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by 60 English learners of Spanish at three different proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced). Two oral production tasks and one interpretation task show that although the Imperfect is used from early on, the full array of interpretations associated with this form…

The issue of whether a regional accent and/or dialect impact(s) on the development of literacy skills remains current in the UK. For decades the issue has dogged debate concerning education outcomes, portable skills and employability. This article summarises research on the topic using systematic review methodology. A scoping review was undertaken…