This study focused on young children's incorrect answers to pragmatically demanding questions. Children with specific language impairment (SLI), including a subgroup with pragmatic language difficulties (PLD) and typically developing children answered questions targeting implicatures, based on a storybook and short verbal scenarios.…

This paper investigates how detailed a linguistic representation is formed for descriptions of visual events. In two experiments, participants watched captioned videos and decided whether the captions accurately described the videos. In both experiments, videos depicted geometric shapes moving around the screen. In the first experiment, all of the…

A digital pursuit rotor was used to monitor oral reading costs by time-locking tracking performance to the auditory wave form produced as young and older adults were reading out short paragraphs. Multilevel modeling was used to determine how paragraph-level predictors of length, grammatical complexity, and readability and person-level predictors…

The research investigated the roles of semantic and phonological processing in word production. Spanish-English bilingual individuals produced English target words when cued with definitions that were also written in English. When the correct word was not produced, a secondary task was performed in which participants rated the ease of…

Implicit learning is a process of acquiring knowledge that occurs without conscious awareness of learning, whereas explicit learning involves the use of overt strategies. To date, research related to implicit learning following stroke has been largely restricted to the motor domain and has rarely addressed implications for language. The present…

The importance of metacognitive language exposure to early educational achievement is widely recognized in the development literature. However, few studies have explored parents' metacognitive language, while accounting for family SES and stress within the parent-child relationship. This is a preliminary descriptive study to explore…

The relation between incidental word learning and two cognitive-linguistic variables--phonological memory and phonological awareness--is not fully understood. Thirty-five typically developing, 5-year-old, preschool children participated in a study examining the association between phonological memory, phonological awareness, and incidental word…

An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of…

In literates, reading is a fundamental channel for acquiring new vocabulary both in the mother tongue and in foreign languages. By using an artificial language learning task, we examined the acquisition of novel written words and their embedded regularities (an orthographic surface feature and a syllabic feature) in three groups of university…

This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb "yinggai" "should," like "Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le", whose meanings…

Through analyzing response latencies, errors, and self-repairs in Mandarin, this investigation explores how monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual adults process their speech production differently using cognitive control mechanisms. In this study we conducted two experiments involving speech production in Mandarin. In the two experiments, 81…

The current study examined the age of learning effect on second language (L2) acquisition. The research goals of the study were twofold: to test whether there is an independent age effect controlling for other potentially confounding variables, and to clarify the age effect across L2 grammar and speech production domains. The study included 118…

Dickinson and Szeligo ("Can J Exp Psychol" 62(4):211--222, 2008) found that processing time for simple visual stimuli was affected by the visual action participants had been instructed to perform on these stimuli (e.g., see, distinguish). It was concluded that these effects reflected the differences in the durations of these various…

The influence of sublexical and lexico-syntactic factors during the grammatical gender assignment process in Spanish was studied in two experiments using the gender decision task. In Experiment 1, the regularity of the ending of gender-marked nouns (masculine nouns ended in "-o" and feminine nouns ended in "-a" and of nouns…

There has been an increasing volume of evidence supporting the role of the syllable in word processing tasks. Recently it has also been shown that orthographic redundancy, related to the pattern of bigram frequencies, could not explain the syllable number effect on lexical decision times. This was demonstrated on a large sample of words taken from…