There are numerous studies demonstrating facilitated processing of cognates relative to noncognates for bilinguals, providing evidence that bilingual lexical access is language nonselective. We tested whether cross-language activation affects comprehension of larger units of meaning, focusing specifically on comprehension of anaphoric references.…

We present an artificial language experiment investigating (i) how speakers of languages such as English with two-way obligatory distinctions between singular and plural learn a system where singular and plural are only optionally marked, and (ii) how learners extend their knowledge of the plural morpheme when under the scope of negation without…

This research was aimed at investigating L1 Thai learners' English word stress production in two aspects of English words -- 1) English words with different suffixes: suffixes affecting stress shift, i.e. '-ic' (e.g. 'fantástic'), '-ity' (e.g. 'idéntity') and '-tion / -sion' (e.g. 'eléction') and suffixes demanding stress, i.e. '-oon' (e.g.…

When talking to infants, adults, especially mothers, espouse a particular type of speech known as Infant-directed Speech (IDS) or "babytalk" or "babytalking" , which contains a set of specialized speech with simplified grammatical construction; more repetitive; and more grammatical than adult-directed speech. Specifically, this…

Two experiments were conducted to investigate whether young children are able to take into account phrasal prosody when computing the syntactic structure of a sentence. Pairs of French noun/verb homophones were selected to create locally ambiguous sentences (["la petite 'ferme'"] ["est très jolie"] "the small farm is very…

The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

Contrastive focus, conveyed by prosodic cues, marks important information. Studies have shown that 6-year-olds learning English and Japanese can use contrastive focus during online sentence comprehension: focus used in a "contrastive context" facilitates the identification of a target referent (speeding up processing), whereas focus used…

This study investigates L2 learners' ability to use morphosyntactic gender as a predictive cue during the processing of Hindi agreement dependencies. Nine L2 learners of low-intermediate proficiency and nine highly proficient multilingual speakers who consider Hindi one of their dominant languages were tested using a speeded picture-selection…

Many influential models of sentence production (e.g., Bock & Levelt, 1994; Kempen & Hoenkamp, 1987; Levelt, 1989) emphasize the central role of verbs in structural encoding, and thus predict that verbs should be selected early in sentence formulation, possibly even before the phonological encoding of the first constituent (Ferreira, 2000).…

Purpose: This sentence processing experiment examined the abilities of children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical language development (TD) to establish relations between pronouns or reflexives and their antecedents in real time. Method: Twenty-two children with SLI and 24 age-matched children with TD (7;3-10;11…

Purpose: This follow-up study examined whether a parent intervention that increased the diversity of lexical noun phrase subjects in parent input and accelerated children's sentence diversity (Hadley et al., 2017) had indirect benefits on tense/agreement (T/A) morphemes in parent input and children's spontaneous speech. Method: Differences in…

Purpose: The first aim of this study was to investigate if Swedish-speaking school-age children with language impairment (LI) show specific morphosyntactic vulnerabilities in error detection. The second aim was to investigate the effects of lexical frequency on error detection, an overlooked aspect of previous error detection studies. Method:…

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

Two experiments explored how people create novel sentences referring to given entities presented either in line drawings or in nouns. The line drawings yielded more creative sentences than the words, both as rated by judges and objectively by a measure of the amount of information that the sentences conveyed. A hypothesis about the cognitive…

This paper reports on an experimental study addressing second language acquisition of English quantifiers by Arabic speakers. Due to several differences found between Arabic and English regarding types, meanings and functions of quantifiers, Arabic learners encounter challenges in mastering them properly. Unlike English, Arabic does not make lots…