Processing efficiency theory can explain the relationship between anxiety and academic success; however, its application to adults with Specific Learning Disabilities (SLD) remains unclear, especially in a nonalphabetic language, such as Chinese. This study investigated the effects of working memory and processing speed on the relationships…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine whether older adults exhibit reduced abilities in coordinating lexical retrieval and syntactic formulation during sentence production and whether an individual's working memory capacity predicts age-related changes in sentence production. Method: A total of 124 Korean-speaking individuals (79 young…

Background: Accurate nonword repetition (NWR) is contingent on many underlying skills, including encoding, memory and motor planning and programming. Though vowel errors are frequently associated with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), several recent studies have found that children with developmental language disorder (DLD) produce high rates of…

Investigations of working memory advantages in bilinguals yield inconsistent findings. Even less is known about how the addition of languages beyond two (multilingualism) may affect working memory. Due to their experience with managing multiple languages, it is possible that multilinguals may be more practised in the use of their working memories.…

Purpose: This study aimed to investigate how hearing loss affects (a) spoken language processing and (b) processing of faster speech in school-age children who are deaf and hard of hearing (DHH). Method: Spoken language processing was compared in thirty-six 7- to 12-year-olds who are DHH and 31 peers with normal hearing using a word detection…

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…

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., "chunk sensitivity") may significantly modulate online…

This study used a correlational design and a path analytic approach to investigate direct and indirect relationships between strategic backtracking and integrated text understanding when undergraduates read a digital informational text on a tablet or a smartphone. In digital reading contexts, strategic backtracking involves that readers…

Deficits in working memory have not been fully explored in toddlers and preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). We investigated the relationship between language (verbal ability, verbal self-talk) and visuospatial working memory in 2- and 4-year-olds with ASD (n = 65) and typical development (TD) (n = 54). Children with ASD displayed…

This study examines the referential context effect on second-language relative clause ambiguity resolution by proficient L1 Chinese learners who learn English as a foreign language (EFL) and investigates whether the ambiguity resolution process is constrained by individuals' working memory capacity (WMC). It presents a self-paced reading study and…

The relationship between working memory (WM) and language processing has been extensively investigated in cognitive research. Previous studies mostly obtain evidence from measuring the involvement of WM in complex syntactic structures reported with well-established processing asymmetry, e.g., relative clauses (RCs) in English. Rarely considered is…

The aim of the study is to examine the effect of sentential context on lexical ambiguity resolution in Greek adults and typically developing children. Context and word frequency are factors that can affect lexical processing, however, the role of them has not been thoroughly examined in Greek. To this aim, we assessed sentence context effects in…

Multi-modal discourse comprehension requires speakers to combine information from speech and gestures. To date, little research has addressed the cognitive resources that underlie these processes. Here we used a dual-task paradigm to test the relative importance of verbal and visuospatial working memory in speech-gesture comprehension. Healthy,…

This study replicates Felser and Roberts (2007), which used a cross-modal picture priming task to examine indirect-object dependency processing in classroom L2 learners. The replication focuses on early L2 learners with extensive naturalistic L2 exposure (n = 22)--an understudied group in the literature--and investigates whether these learners, in…

Purpose: Emotional processing allows us to predict our own and others' behavior, communicate our wants and needs, and understand those of others. Thus, deficits in emotional processing can negatively impact one's quality of life. While changes in emotional processing across several domains (e.g., prosody, faces) in Parkinson's disease (PD) are…