This study examines the role of receptive vocabulary knowledge on outcomes of the TOEFL reading comprehension task. Participants included 18 native speakers of Spanish learning English as a foreign language and 17 native speakers of English ranging in age from 19-25 years. Lexical stimuli were presented auditorily and were divided into…

The current study investigated the role of visual short-term memory, working memory, and declarative memory as individual differences in the earliest stages of vocabulary and syntactic learning in "Duolingo"-based language instruction. Thirty-eight L1-Greek adults completed memory tasks and engaged in learning Navajo on…

This study explores the role of glosses and working memory capacity (WM) in second language (L2) learners' recall and comprehension in electronic reading. Glosses were investigated in terms of the type of information they provided (lexical versus topic-level) and their location on the screen (pop-up window versus separate window). One…

Organized under the auspices of the "Language Learning" Roundtable Conference Grant (2012), this seminar aimed to provide an interactive forum for a group of second language acquisition (SLA) researchers with particular interests in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics to discuss key theoretical and methodological issues in the…

The Mobile Assisted Language Learning concept has offered infinite language learning opportunities since its inception 20 years ago. Second Language Acquisition however embraces a considerably different body of knowledge from first language learning. While technological advances have optimized the psycholinguistic environment for language…

A study investigated the immediate recall protocol as a means of determining what second language learners retain of a spoken text. Three factors in comprehension were considered: topic familiarity, topic accessibility, and topic structure. A dialogue, a news broadcast, and a popular song were all presented to groups of beginning-level students of…

Lexical interference in the recall of adult Finnish/Swedish bilinguals with Finnish dominant is studied. The error patterns of short-term recall of words presented by category in either Swedish or Finnish were examined for translations, lexical substitutions, and intrusions or false recalls of non-occurring words. Individual differences in…

Three main issues relating to the question of silent speech in reading are considered: (1) How do Chinese speakers process Chinese ideographs in short-term memory? (2) How is Chinese students' learning of written English affected by the transition to an alphabetic language? (3) Are the strategies for encoding written words in short-term memory…