Organisational signals and sources can be considered metatextual cues that guide the processing of the discourse. Organisational signals encourage readers to use the structure strategy, while source information reveals the epistemic and formal properties of texts. This study addressed three gaps in prior research about these topics: (1) whether…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

Facial masks have become and may remain ubiquitous. Though important for preventing infection, they may also serve as a reminder of the risks of disease. Thus, they may either act as cues for threat, priming avoidance-related behavior, or as cues for a safe interaction, priming social approach. To distinguish between these possibilities, we…

Language comprehension is remarkable in that we adapt easily to different forms of language use, from adapting to speakers' dialects, meanings of new slang words, and fictional worlds described in novels. While there is growing evidence comprehenders adapt their expectations for text during reading, the nature of these adaptation mechanisms…

A large body of research suggests that spoken language processing is heavily influenced by social characteristics of the speaker, and conversely, that socio-cognitive processing is influenced by the language spoken by our interlocutors. However, little is known about the extent to which this interaction that is observed in adulthood has its roots…

The purpose of this meta-analytic review is to investigate the relation between statistical learning (SL) and language-related outcomes, and between SL and reading-related outcomes. A comprehensive search of peer-reviewed published research resulted in 42 articles with 53 independent samples and 201 reported effect sizes (Pearson's r). Results of…

Individual variability in infant's language processing is partly explained by environmental factors, like the quantity of parental speech input, as well as by infant-specific factors, like speech production. Here, we explore how these factors affect infant word segmentation. We used an artificial language to ensure that only statistical…

Purpose: This study tested the hypothesis that audiovisual training benefits children more than it does adults and that it improves Japanese-speaking children's English /r/-/l/ perception to a native-like level. Method: Ten sessions of audiovisual English /r/-/l/ identification training were conducted for Japanese-speaking adults and children.…

Research has investigated how lexical-semantic and participant factors impact word learning in young children and adults. However, limited information pertaining to expressive vocabulary development exists for school-aged bilinguals--particularly those with developmental language disorder (DLD). Cross-linguistic differences in the semantic…

Children's lexical processing speed at 18 to 25 months of age has been linked to concurrent and later language abilities. In the current study, we extend this finding to children aged 36 months. Children (N = 126) participated in a lexical processing task in which they viewed two static images on noun trials (e.g., an ear of corn and a hat), or…

Remembering to carry out intended actions in the future, known as prospective memory (PM), is an important cognitive ability. In daily life, individuals remember to perform future tasks that might rely on effortful processes (monitoring) but also habitual tasks that might rely on more automatic processes. The development of PM across childhood in…

Purpose: Short-term and working memory vary across individuals and life span. Studies of how cochlear implant (CI) users remember spoken words often do not fully disentangle perceptual influences from memory assessment because stimulus identification is rarely checked; instead, correct perception is assumed by using simple or practiced stimuli.…

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner ("a"/"an"/"the"), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in…

Humans possess a tendency to rapidly and consistently make character evaluations from mere facial appearance. Recent work shows that this tendency emerges surprisingly early: children as young as 3-years-old provide adult-like assessments of others on character attributes such as "nice," "strong," and "smart" based…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…