The results of four experiments are reported, in which we examined how the effects of part-list cuing--the presentation of a random selection of studied items as retrieval cues at test--on recall of the remaining target items depend on encoding and access to study context at test. Encoding was varied by inducing high and low degrees of interitem…

This study explores the developmental change of mother-child interactions in order to investigate which aspects of maternal behavior affect children's speech production. To this end, the interactions between 79 German-speaking mothers and their two- or five-year-old children were observed at two time points (12 months apart) and in two interactive…

The grammatical gender of German nouns continues to pose a challenge to second language learners. Following from a connectionist framework, this study explores the effect of two input enhancement techniques, color-coding and gendered actors, on the learning of grammatical gender by beginning learners of German during a vocabulary acquisition…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

Open-ended probing questions in cross-cultural surveys help uncover equivalence problems in cross-cultural survey research. For languages that a project team does not understand, probe answers need to be translated into a common project language. This article presents a case study on translating open-ended, that is, narrative answers. It describes…

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between explicit and implicit forms of Theory of Mind reasoning and to test the influence of experience on implicit Theory of Mind reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and in neurotypical adults. Results from two standard explicit Theory of Mind tasks are mixed: Individuals with…

Learning from texts requires reflection on how far one has mastered the material. Learners use such metacognitive processes to decide whether to engage in deeper learning activities or not. This article examines how the lexical surface of specialist concepts influences their mental representation. Lexical encodings that are the concise wordings of…

This study examined lexical-phonological interactions in the first 50 words of a group of monolingual German- and Spanish-speaking children and bilingual German--Spanish children. The phonological characteristics of the earliest target word forms and output patterns of these children were analyzed to determine whether bilingual children select…

Knowledge of lexical items is arguably the most essential aspect of being able to communicate in a foreign language (Richards, 2000). Many studies have examined effective strategies for retaining the meaning of foreign words, but studies investigating the effectiveness of different methods for the retention of essential grammatical features of…

The tracking of entities in discourse is known to be a bimodal phenomenon. Speakers achieve cohesion in speech by alternating between full lexical forms, pronouns, and zero anaphora as they track referents. They also track referents in co-speech gestures. In this study, we explored how viewpoint is deployed in reference tracking, focusing on…

This study investigates prosodic (noun length) and lexical-semantic (animacy) influences on determiner use in the spontaneous speech of three children acquiring French, Austrian German and Dutch. In support of typological and language-specific hypotheses from the Germanic-Romance contrast, an advantage of monosyllabic nouns and of inanimate nouns…

Experimental studies demonstrate that contrast helps toddlers to extend the meanings of novel adjectives. This study explores whether antonym co-occurrence in spontaneous speech also has an effect on adjective use by the child. The authors studied adjective production in longitudinal speech samples from 16 children (16-36 months) acquiring eight…

In two studies we investigated 2-year-old children's answers to predicate-focus questions depending on the preceding context. Children were presented with a successive series of short video clips showing transitive actions (e.g., frog washing duck) in which either the action (action-new) or the patient (patient-new) was the changing, and therefore…

The research on text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), while generally acknowledging the potential benefits afforded by the medium's capacity for extensive self-repair, has done little in the way of exploration of the nature of such text. Indeed, until quite recently, output logs have been favored almost exclusively at the…

This study explores the relationship between scrolling, negotiated interaction, and self-initiated self-repair (SISR) in a task-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) foreign language learning environment. Pairs of adult learners of German engaged in four jigsaw tasks over the course of one university semester. Video screen…