This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an…

In this study we explore listeners' sensitivity to vowel to vowel (VV) coarticulation, using both event-related potential (ERP) and behavioral methodologies. The stimuli used were vowels "colored" by the coarticulatory influence of other vowels across one, three or five intervening segments. The paradigm used in the ERP portion of the study was…

This study assessed the prediction that individuals are able to use the knowledge from their first language (L1) in processing the comparable sound contrasts in an unknown language. Two languages, Arabic and Japanese, which utilize vowel duration contrastively, were examined. Native Arabic (NA) and native Japanese (NJ) listeners' discrimination…

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…

Research at the interface of bilingual development and child language disorders has increased greatly in the past decade. The purpose of this article is to highlight the theoretical and clinical implications of this research. Studies examining the similarities in linguistic characteristics between typically developing sequential bilingual children…