Using the blocked-translation paradigm with healthy participants, we examined Crutch and Warrington's hypothesis that concrete and abstract concepts are organized by distinct principles: concrete concepts by semantic similarities and abstract ones by associations. In three experiments we constructed two types of experimental blocking (similar…

The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a…

In the current study we explored lexical, syntactic, and semantic processes during text comprehension in English monolinguals and Spanish/English (first language/second language) bilinguals with different experience in interpreting (nontrained bilinguals, interpreting students and professional interpreters). The participants performed an…

This study investigated compound processing and cross-language activation in a group of Chinese-English bilingual children, and they were divided into four groups based on the language proficiency levels in their two languages. A lexical decision task was designed using compound words in both languages. The compound words in one language contained…

This study aimed to investigate cognate/noncognate processing distinctions in young adult bilinguals and examined whether the previously reported cognate facilitation effect would also be demonstrated in older adult bilinguals. Two groups of Italian-English bilingual participants performed lexical decisions in repetition priming experiments.…

The purpose of this study was to examine within- and across-language relationships between lexical and grammatical domains by focusing on measures of lexical diversity and grammatical complexity in Spanish and English. One hundred ninety-six preschool and school-aged Latino children with different levels of English and Spanish proficiencies and…

The objectives of this study are (a) to determine if native speakers of Canadian French at different English proficiencies can use primary stress for recognizing English words and (b) to specify how the second language (L2) learners' (surface-level) knowledge of L2 stress placement influences their use of primary stress in L2 word recognition. Two…

Although the organization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) lexicosemantic information has been extensively studied in the bilingual literature, little evidence exists concerning how syntactic information associated with words is represented across languages. The present study examines the shared or independent nature of the…

Understanding how words are created is potentially a key component to being able to learn and understand new vocabulary words. However, research on morphological awareness is relatively rare. In this study, over 660 preschool-aged children from three language groups (Cantonese, Mandarin, and Korean speakers) in which compounding morphology is…

A review is offered of various bilingual memory studies that have been carried out during the past quarter century. Most of the studies have employed lexical items as the investigative tool, tested outside of a grammatical or semantic context. (Contains 58 references.) (JL)

An auditory technique for studying semantic priming and lexical access, single-word shadowing, was applied in three separate experiments: priming in word pairs; priming in sentence context; and comparison of priming in children aged 7-11 and elderly adults. Results indicate that, because shadowing works across ages and does not require reading, it…

Phonological working memory and auditory processing skills were investigated in six children with central auditory processing (CAP) difficulties. Compared to children without the disorder, CAP children showed poorer abilities in nonword repetition and word recall and were sensitive to the phonological similarity and word length of the recall…

Two experiments were conducted to explore processing of relative clause structures by normal elderly adults. Four groups of subjects (aged 20-29 years, 60-69 years, 70-79 years, and 80-89 years) participated in a lexical decision task and a sentence repetition task. (19 references) (VWL)

Investigates the case of a 7-year-old boy with severe word-finding difficulties. The study used a series of theoretically motivated questions as a framework for psycholinguistic investigation to determine the cause of his difficulties. Findings indicated pervasive deficits in phonological processing, deficits interpreted as a developmental…

Phonetic skills and vocabulary size were investigated in 37 toddlers identified with specific expressive language impairment and 20 comparison toddlers. Results indicate significant differences in numbers of consonant types and tokens, although the most frequently present consonants were consistent across groups. No predictive relationship emerged…