Are oral sentences accompanied by pictures easier to understand than written sentences accompanied by the same pictures? This question--intensely discussed for more than two decades in educational, psychological, and psycholinguistic research in terms of "modality effect in multimedia learning," "split-attention effect," or…

Recent research has suggested that temporal sequencing of narrative events might be a domain-general ability that underlies oral narrative capacities. The current study investigated this issue in a group of children with known pragmatic and narrative difficulties, namely Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). We hypothesized (1) that children with ASD (n…

We propose a review of the literature of the studies investigating reading acquisition in intellectual deficiency (ID), with particular focus on the explanatory factors for reading difficulties. Indeed, we explore the role of intellectual efficiency, perceptual abilities, oral language development, phonological processing and memory. The study of…

Strategy use is a critical competence for academic achievement and problem solving in globalised and information-based knowledge economies. It involves skills such as synthesising information from task source materials and elaborating on interlocutors' viewpoints during integrated group discussions. However, evidence from empirical studies on this…

A large body of literature has characterized unimodal monolingual and bilingual lexicons and how neighborhood density affects lexical access; however there have been relatively fewer studies that generalize these findings to bimodal (M2) second language (L2) learners of sign languages. The goal of the current study was to investigate parallel…

This study examined the temporal dynamics of spoken word recognition in noise and background speech. In two visual-world experiments, English participants listened to target words while looking at four pictures on the screen: a target (e.g. "candle"), an onset competitor (e.g. "candy"), a rhyme competitor (e.g.…

The ability to detect non-adjacent dependencies (i.e. between "a" and "b" in "aXb") in spoken input may support the acquisition of morpho-syntactic dependencies (e.g. "The princess 'is' kiss'ing' the frog"). Functional morphemes in morpho-syntactic dependencies are often marked by perceptual cues that render…

A number of previous studies found that the consistency of sound-to-spelling mappings (feedback consistency) affects spoken word recognition. In auditory lexical decision experiments, words that can only be spelled one way are recognized faster than words with multiple potential spellings. Previous studies demonstrated this by manipulating…

The present study aims to reveal some facts concerning first language (L[subscript 1]) and second language (L[subscript 2]) spoken-word processing in unbalanced proficient bilinguals using behavioral measures. The intention here is to examine the effects of auditory repetition word priming and semantic priming in first and second languages of…

When bilinguals process written language, they show delays in accessing lexical items relative to monolinguals. The present study investigated whether this effect extended to spoken language comprehension, examining the processing of sentences with either low or high semantic constraint in both first and second languages. English-German…

Two cross-modal priming experiments tested whether lexical access is constrained by syllabic structure in Italian. Results extend the available Italian data on the processing of stressed syllables showing that syllabic information restricts the set of candidates to those structurally consistent with the intended word (Experiment 1). Lexical…

Speech priming tasks are frequently used to delineate stages in the speech process such as lexical retrieval and motor programming. These tasks, often measured in reaction time (RT), require fast and accurate responses, reflecting maximized participant performance, to result in robust priming effects. Encouraging speed and accuracy in responding…

The central question underlying this study revolves around how children process co-reference relationships--such as those evidenced by pronouns ("him") and reflexives ("himself")--and how a slowed rate of speech input may critically affect this process. Previous studies of child language processing have demonstrated that typical language…

Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like "John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today". Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called "nongapping" reading, where "John greeted Ben", and the highly unpreferred "gapping" reading, where "Ben greeted Paul". In the…

This article presents a selective overview of studies that have investigated auditory language processing in children and late second-language (L2) learners using online methods such as event-related potentials (ERPs), eye-movement monitoring, or the cross-modal priming paradigm. Two grammatical phenomena are examined in detail, children's and…