Breaking down complex words into smaller meaningful units (e.g., "unhappy = un- + happy"), known as morphemes, is vital for skilled reading as it allows readers to rapidly compute word meanings. There is agreement that children rely on reading experience to acquire morphological knowledge in English; however, the nature of this…

For Spanish nouns, masculine gender is unmarked and feminine is marked. Effects of markedness on gender agreement processing are inconsistent, possibly owing to differences between online methods. This study presents a reanalysis of eye-tracking data from Keating's (2022) study on the processing of noun-adjective gender agreement in speakers of…

Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently-encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word…

An important issue in second-language acquisition concerns the role of explicit information (EI) and how it is affected by individual differences. The present study explored this question through a partial replication and extension of Fernández (2008: Experiment 2), which investigated the effects of EI in processing instruction (PI) for the…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

In acquiring a native language, the input children receive, to an unneglectable extent, shapes the rate of acquisition and the ultimate achievement. This in turn has cascading effects on many aspects of later development, including but not limited to language. Providing optimal input for early language development, therefore, is of major interest…

We used a novel linguistic training paradigm to investigate the experience-dependent acquisition, representation, and processing of novel emotional and neutral abstract concepts. Participants engaged in mental imagery (n = 32) or lexico-semantic rephrasing (n = 34) of linguistic material during five training sessions and successfully learned the…

Background: Speech development requires intact and adequately functioning oral anatomy and cognitive 'speech processing' skills. There is evidence that speech input processing skills are associated with speech output problems in children not born with a cleft. Children born with cleft palate ± lip (CP±L) are at high risk of developing disordered…

"Wh"-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave…

Ambridge calls for exemplar-based accounts of language acquisition. Do modern neural networks such as transformers or word2vec -- which have been extremely successful in modern natural language processing (NLP) applications -- count? Although these models often have ample parametric complexity to store exemplars from their training data, they also…

Lexical frequency benchmarks have been extensively used to investigate second language (L2) lexical sophistication, especially in language assessment studies. However, indices based on semantic co-occurrence, which may be a better representation of the experience language users have with lexical items, have not been sufficiently tested as…

Recent years have seen a flourishing of Natural Language Processing models that can mimic many aspects of human language fluency. These models harness a simple, decades-old idea: It is possible to learn a lot about word meanings just from exposure to language, because words similar in meaning are used in language in similar ways. The successes of…

Background: Vocabulary scores increase until approximately age 65 years and then remain stable or decrease slightly, unlike scores on tests of other cognitive abilities that decline significantly with age. Aims: To review the findings on ageing-related changes in vocabulary, and to discuss four methodological issues: research design; test type;…

Research on input processing and processing instruction has often employed a scoring method known as trials to criterion to observe the effects of instruction that emerge during training. Despite its common use in this research (see Fernández, 2021) this metric has never been evaluated critically. The present study first discusses several…

In Krashen's theory of second-language acquisition he claims that there is distinction between language acquisition and language learning, a distinction which other second-language acquisition researchers have called "perhaps the most important conceptualization" in the field and which has made possible the most productive models of SLA.…