This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

Ten years ago, researchers using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a "Semantic Illusion": Semantically anomalous, but structurally well-formed sentences did not affect the N400 component--traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration--but instead produced a P600…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

With the ever-increasing number of available language technology products, there is also a need to evaluate them objectively. Unsubstantiated beliefs about what language technology can and cannot do inside or outside the language classroom often influence decisions about the choice of language technology to be used. The declarative/procedural…

This article proposes a model for teaching interpreting for tourism purposes. It shows the aims of the model, interpreting materials, training strategies, training environment and assessment techniques. The model aims to train students to interpret in English with or without prior preparation or knowledge of the topic and without taking or reading…

As is the case in traditional second language (L2) acquisition research, a major question in the field of L2 real-time sentence processing is the extent to which L2 learners process the input like native speakers. Where differences are observed, the underlying causes could be the influence of the learner's first language and/or differences…

Studies of the effect of word frequency in the serial recall task show that lists of high-frequency words are better recalled than lists of low-frequency words; however, when high- and low-frequency words are alternated within a list, there is no difference in the level of recall for the two types of words, and recall is intermediate between lists…

With the ever increasing number of studies on formulaic language, we are beginning to learn more about the processing of formulaic language (e.g. Ellis et al. 2008; Siyanova et al. 2011), its use in speech (e.g. Aijmer 1996; Wood 2012) and writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a, 2008b) and its application in natural language processing (e.g. Tschichold 2000).…

Verbal working memory (WM) tasks typically involve the language production architecture for recall; however, language production processes have had a minimal role in theorizing about WM. A framework for understanding verbal WM results is presented here. In this framework, domain-specific mechanisms for serial ordering in verbal WM are provided by…

There is a long-standing debate about the principles constraining the combinatorial properties of suffixes. Hay 2002 and Hay & Plag 2004 proposed a model in which suffixes can be ordered along a hierarchy of processing complexity. We show that this model generalizes to a larger set of suffixes, and we provide independent evidence supporting the…

Life themes, general events, and event-specific episodes, together with autobiographical knowledge, form autobiographical memory. Each of these memory structures is described, and research that has investigated the storage and retrieval of temporal information for life events, such as place in time, duration, and order, is examined. The general…

Listening comprehension input is necessary for language learning and acculturation. One approach to developing listening comprehension skills is through exposure to massive amounts of naturally occurring spoken language input. But exposure to this input is not enough; learners also need to make the comprehension corpus meaningful to their learning…

Theoretical accounts of both speech perception and of short term memory must consider the extent to which perceptual representations of speech sounds might survive in relatively unprocessed form. This paper describes a novel version of the serial recall task that can be used to explore this area of shared interest. In immediate recall of digit…

The syntagmatic paradigmatic model is a distributed, memory-based account of verbal processing. Built on a Bayesian interpretation of string edit theory, it characterizes the control of verbal cognition as the retrieval of sets of syntagmatic and paradigmatic constraints from sequential and relational long-term memory and the resolution of these…