This study, employing unmasked priming lexical decision tasks, examines the possible effects of the phonogram properties on the representation of Chinese phonograms and their radicals. In Experiment 1, the representation of radicals (semantic radical and phonetic radical) and their host phonograms is compared under various phonograms types.…

Knowledge of collocations facilitates second language (L2) learning by enhancing accuracy and fluency. However, acquiring L2 collocations is often challenging for learners. One factor contributing to this difficulty is incongruency between first and second languages (e.g., "draw distinctions" in English corresponds to do…

Introduction: It is well documented that preschoolers with DLD produce first instances of sentential complement clause sentences later than same-age peers with typical language. However, it remains unknown whether children with DLD are limited in their production of a variety of sentential complement clause sentences. Aims: Using a sentence…

When communicating, people adapt their linguistic representations to those of their interlocutors. Previous studies have shown that this also occurs at the semantic level for vague and context-dependent terms such as quantifiers and uncertainty expressions. However, work to date has mostly focused on passive exposure to a given speaker's…

The phenomenon of scalar diversity refers to the well-replicated finding that different scalar expressions give rise to scalar implicatures (SIs) at different rates. Previous work has shown that part of the scalar diversity effect can be explained by theoretically motivated factors. Although the effect has been established only in controlled…

This research explored the mental representation of media and digital literacy (MDL) in 242 Mexican high school students through a definitional task based on the natural semantic networks technique. The participants defined ten target concepts related to MDL, using verbs, nouns, and adjectives as definers, and then they rated each definer with a…

Filler-gap dependency resolution is often characterized as an active process. We probed the mechanisms that determine where and why comprehenders posit gaps during incremental processing using Norwegian as our test language. First, we investigated why active filler-gap dependency resolution is suspended inside "island" domains like…

Pronoun interpretation is often described as relying on a comprehender's mental model of discourse. For example, in some psycholinguistic accounts, interpreting pronouns involves a process of "retrieval," whereby a pronoun is resolved by accessing information from its linguistic antecedent. However, linguistic antecedents are neither…

Purpose: This study investigates the acquisition of aspect markers by Mandarin-speaking children with developmental language disorder (DLD) in comparison to typically developing aged-matched (TDA) children and typically developing younger (TDY) children through the aspect hypothesis (AH). Method: A sentence-picture matching task and a priming…

According to logical theories of meaning, a meaning of an expression can be formalized and encoded in truth conditions. Vagueness of the language and individual differences between people are a challenge to incorporate into the meaning representations. In this paper, we propose a new approach to study truth-conditional representations of vague…

German-speaking children between ages 2 and 3 mostly use the preposition ohne ('without') in an adult-like way, to express the absence of something. In this article we present surprising results from a corpus study suggesting that in this age group, absence can also be expressed using the sequence mit ohne 'with without'. We argue that this…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

Purpose: Pronouns are referentially ambiguous: For example, "she" could refer to any female. Nonetheless, errors in pronoun interpretation rarely occur for adults with typical development (TD) due to several strategies implicitly shared between the talker and listener. The purpose of this study was to test the impacts of syntactic,…

There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential…

Visual manifestations of an object that moves from one place to another are common in sign languages. Here, we offer an overview of techniques for conveying motion of an entity based on an examination of storytelling and poetry in seven sign languages. The signer can use embodiment and/or classifiers to show translocating movement of an object, or…