High and low achievers' strategy use profiles in the speaking skill appear to be rare, with the few studies examining their strategy use profiles only in skills such as reading and writing. Another gap can be observed in the scrutiny of effective and ineffective strategy use in speaking tests. The study was carried out with thirty male and female…

Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between "apple," "juicy," and "pear." These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become…

Purpose: Robust improvements in intelligibility following familiarization, a listener-targeted perceptual training paradigm, have been revealed for talkers diagnosed with spastic, ataxic, and hypokinetic dysarthria but not for talkers with hyperkinetic dysarthria. While the theoretical explanation for the lack of intelligibility improvement…

The abstract concept of time is conceptualized as moving linearly across space, known as the mental timeline (MTL). The direction of our MTL is consistent with reading direction. English speakers, who read left to right, think of past on the left and future on the right; the reverse is true of Hebrew speakers, who read right to left. However, it…

The hypothesis that known words can serve as anchors for discovering new words in connected speech has computational and empirical support. However, evidence for how the bootstrapping effect of known words interacts with other mechanisms of lexical acquisition, such as statistical learning, is incomplete. In 3 experiments, we investigated the…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Many studies have demonstrated that we can identify a familiar face on an image much better than an unfamiliar one, especially when various degradations or changes (e.g., image distortions or blurring, new illuminations) have been applied, but few have asked how different types of facial information from familiar faces are stored in memory. Here…

An important issue in theories of word learning is how abstract or context-specific representations of novel words are. One aspect of this broad issue is how well learners maintain information about the source of novel words. We investigated whether listeners' source memory was better for words learned from members of their in-group (students of…

This study examined the role of relevance determinations within the context of undergraduates' multiple text reading and writing. In this study, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to one of two experimental conditions (i.e., to compose a research report about either the causes of or the solutions to the urban housing crisis), using a…

English-speaking children use plural morphology from around the age of 2, yet often omit the syllabic plural allomorph /-[schwa]z/ until age 5 (e.g., "bus(es)"). It is not clear if this protracted acquisition is due to articulatory difficulties, low input frequency, or fricative-final words (e.g., "bus," "nose") being…

Purpose: This study examined whether 2-year-olds are better able to acquire novel verb meanings when they appear in varying linguistic contexts, including both content nouns and pronouns, as compared to when the contexts are consistent, including only content nouns. Additionally, differences between typically developing toddlers and late talkers…

While generating multiple-choice questions has been shown to promote deep learning, students often fail to realize this benefit and do not willingly participate in this activity. Additionally, the quality of the student-generated questions may be influenced by both their level of engagement and familiarity with the learning materials. Towards…

This paper adopts an ethnomethodological, conversation analytic approach to analyze the social organization of the instruction-giving sequences that were accomplished by a teacher of Italian as a foreign language during the last phase of a writing task conducted in pairs. Specifically, the paper explores the linguistic, prosodic and embodied…

This study examines second language (L2) learners' perspectives regarding the affordances and challenges of using the Data-Driven Learning (DDL) to identify the properties of near-synonymous words. Employing a convergent mixed-method design, this study deciphers the perceptions of 40 undergraduate L2 learners majoring in English language teaching.…

Two experiments are reported to investigate whether Chinese readers skip a high-frequency preview word without taking the syntax of the sentence context into account. In Experiment 1, we manipulated target word syntactic category, frequency, and preview using the boundary paradigm (Rayner, 1975). For high-frequency verb targets, there were…