This study examined the effectiveness of bilingual subtitles relative to captions, subtitles, and no subtitles for incidental vocabulary learning. Learners' processing of novel words in the subtitles and its relationship to learning gains were also explored. While their eye movements were recorded, 112 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of…

Multilingual research could offer a unique perspective on how the languages already acquired by a person affect the online processing of a new language. But it is currently difficult to assess this issue because theoretical accounts of multilingualism have focused on acquisition rather than processing and most empirical research to date has…

The constructionist approach holds that an argument structure construction, a conventionalized form-meaning correspondence of a sentence, allows language users to efficiently access sentential information. This study investigated whether increased sensitivity to constructional information would enable second language learners to efficiently fuse…

This study examined first language (L1) influence on second language (L2) ambiguous pronoun resolution by investigating (a) whether L1 influence takes place at the level of the pronominal form (form-dependent influence) and/or at the level of the construction in which the form appears (construction-dependent influence) and (b) whether effects…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

The results of two self-paced reading experiments are reported, which investigated the online processing of subject-object ambiguities in Dutch relative clause constructions like "Dat is de vrouw die de meisjes heeft/hebben gezien" by German advanced second language (L2) learners of Dutch. Native speakers of both Dutch and German have been shown…

This article presents a reading-time study of scope resolution in the interpretation of ambiguous cardinality interrogatives in English-French and in English and French native sentence processing. Participants were presented with a context, a self-paced segment-by-segment presentation of a cardinality interrogative, and a numerical answer that…

Examines the nature and development of fluent second language English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) word integration skills involved in lower-level text processing. Four theoretical approaches to word integration and sentence processing in the first language and second language ESL literature are discussed in conjunction with a review of the relevant…

This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated…

Presents some of the general goals in story grammar research and examines its major issues. Then describes a study in which the effects of text content and order on narrative recall were investigated in intermediate and advanced readers of English as a foreign language. (SED)

Recent advances in cross-language psycholinguistics provide reading researchers with both the models and the tools needed to investigate the syntactic processing of second-language (L2) readers. In this study, 48 first-language and 48 highly fluent L2 French readers read sentences containing constructions that do not exist in English, pre-verbal…

Twenty-two Cantonese-speaking Chinese students and 16 Spanish-speaking students were tested for short-term memory encoding strategies on word-recognition tests. Chinese speakers were found to encode Chinese ideographs phonologically, but both Chinese and Spanish learners of English were found to encode English words visually. (Author/CFM)