To address questions about information processing at the message level, pronoun errors of second language (L2) speakers of English were studied. Some L2 pronoun errors--"he/she" confusions by Spanish speakers of L2 English--could be due to differences in the informational requirements of the speakers' two languages, providing a window into the…

Growth curve analyses showed that (a) word-level phonological and orthographic awareness show greatest growth during the primary grades but some additional growth thereafter, and (b) three kinds of morphological awareness show greatest growth in the first three or four grades but one--derivation--continues to show substantial growth after fourth…

The purpose of this experiment is to explore possible relationships between the intensity of emotions and the lexical modalities for expressing those emotions. In this experiment, 60 Hebrew-speaking subjects were asked to watch four short films that aroused emotion. Two of the films gave rise to different degrees of happiness, and two produced…

This study investigated the processes underlying parallelism by evaluating the activation of a parallel element (i.e., a verb) throughout "and"-coordinated sentences. Four points were tested: (1) approximately 1,600ms after the verb in the first conjunct (PP1), (2) immediately following the conjunction (PP2), (3) approximately 1,100ms after the…

Recent research suggests that the quality of a metaphorical topic-vehicle pairing should be the determinant to the choice of a proper grammatical form, nominal metaphor versus simile. Two studies examined the relationship between the quality of the content of a metaphorical statement and its grammatical form. Study 1 showed that the two…

This study investigated how Japanese-speaking learners of English pronounce the three point vowels /i/, /u/, and /a/ appearing in the first and second monosyllabic words of English noun phrases, and the schwa /[image omitted]/ appearing in English disyllabic words. First and second formant (F1 and F2) values were measured for four Japanese…

Children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) have been observed to have production and perception difficulties with sentences containing long-distance dependencies, but it is unclear whether this is due to impairment in grammatical knowledge or in processing mechanisms. The current study addressed this issue by examining automatic on-line…

Ellipsis refers to an element that is absent from the input but whose meaning can nonetheless be recovered from context. In this cross-modal priming study, we examined the online processing of Sluicing, an ellipsis whose antecedent is an entire clause: "The handyman threw a book to the programmer but I don't know which book" the handyman threw to…

Our purpose in the following was to investigate the start-up rhetoric employed by U.S. President Barack Obama in his speeches. The initial 5 min from eight of his speeches from May to September of 2009 were selected for their variety of setting, audience, theme, and purpose. It was generally hypothesized that Barack Obama, widely recognized for…

A subsyllabic phonological unit, the antibody, has received little attention as a potential fundamental processing unit in word recognition. The psychological reality of the antibody in Korean recognition was investigated by looking at the performance of subjects presented with nonwords and words in the lexical decision task. In Experiment 1, the…

The notion of the phoneme counts as a break-through of modern theoretical linguistics in the early twentieth century. It paved the way for descriptions of distinctive features at different levels in linguistics. Although it has since then had a turbulent existence across altering theoretical positions, it remains a powerful concept of a…

Initial lexical activation in typical populations is a direct reflection of the goodness of fit between the presented stimulus and the intended target. In this study, lexical activation was investigated upon presentation of polysyllabic pseudowords (such as "procodile for crocodile") for the atypical population of dyslexic adults to see to what…

This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group).…

There is now a growing body of evidence in various languages supporting the claim that syllables are functional units of visual word processing. In the perspective of modeling the processing of polysyllabic words and the activation of syllables, current studies investigate syllabic effects with subtle manipulations. We present here a syllabary of…

This study investigated the relationship between speech perception, phonological processing and reading skills among school-aged children classified as "skilled" and "less skilled" readers based on their ability to read words, decode non-words, and comprehend short passages. Three speech perception tasks involving categorization of speech continua…