In the current study, idiom understanding was analyzed in relation to the ability to process the linguistic context in which the idiom is embedded with the hypothesis that there is a strong relationship between text and idiom comprehension. This hypothesis was derived from the global elaboration model. Nonfamiliar idioms, both transparent and…

Case marking is the major cue to sentence interpretation in Japanese, whereas animacy and word order are much weaker. However, when subjects and their cases markers are omitted, Japanese honorific and humble verbs can provide information that compensates for the missing case role markers. This study examined the usage of honorific and humble verbs…

We join other responders in thanking Clahsen and Felser (CF) for pulling together these observations about the development of language processing. We are especially impressed by the generality and inclusiveness of CF's treatment of development in L1 and L2. Because most of their specifics concerned comprehension processes, our contribution will…

Investigated how adult monolinguals and bilinguals incorporate the context cue in assigning the agent role vis-a-vis intrasentential cues (animacy and word order). Subjects were first and second language speakers of Chinese and English. Results show that both Chinese and English controls paid less attention to context than to intrasentential cues…

Traditional models of human memory have postulated the need for a brief phonological or verbatim representation of verbal input as a necessary gateway to a higher level conceptual representation of the input. Potter has argued that meaningful sentences may be encoded directly in a conceptual short-term memory (CSTM) running parallel in time to…

Describes the "Competition Model" (Bates and MacWhinney, 1982) dealing with second-language sentence processing by bilinguals and research that has further developed theories dealing with the model. (CB)