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.…

This study aimed to determine the variables affecting the eye-movements of second-language (L2) learners of Turkish in Türkiye while solving a test consisting of questions that included graphics. A total of 115 L2 learners participated in the research (21 in the pilot study and 94 in the main study). We presented a test consisting of five…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to examine inhibition of irrelevant information in younger and older English monolingual and Spanish--English bilingual adults. Method: Sixty-one participants divided into four groups: 15 younger English monolinguals, 16 younger Spanish-English bilinguals, 15 older English monolinguals, and 15 older…

The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n =…

Infants as young as 2 months can integrate audio and visual aspects of speech articulation. A shift of attention from the eyes towards the mouth of talking faces occurs around 6 months of age in monolingual infants. However, it is unknown whether this pattern of attention during audiovisual speech processing is influenced by speech and language…

The cognate advantage in bilingual children varies in strength across groups and individuals, in particular on receptive measures (e.g. picture-identification). This variation may be due to children's developing ability to benefit from cognates in such tasks, yet longitudinal studies of this phenomenon, especially with older children, are rare.…

Late exposure to the first language, as in the case of deaf children with hearing parents, hinders the production of linguistic expressions, even in adulthood. Less is known about the development of language soon after language exposure and if late exposure hinders all domains of language in children and adults. We compared late signing adults and…

Storms, Ameel, and Malt [2015. "Development of Cross-language Lexical Influence." "International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism" 18: 529-547] compared the development of naming patterns in monolingual and bilingual children. They concluded that bilinguals' naming patterns in their two languages become…

Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood…

This dissertation explores Spanish copular verbs, "ser" and "estar" (both 'to be' in English), in pre-adjectival contexts within two Spanish varieties: first-language (L1) Chilean speakers from Santiago (N = 29) and second-language (L2) English-speaking learners studying in Chile (N = 31). Bridging sociolinguistics and second…

The present article is aimed to investigate whether there are any differences between youngsters and adults in their working and long-term memory functioning. The theory of Depth of Processing (Craik and Lockhart in "J Verbal Learning Verbal Behav" 11:671-684, 1972) discusses the varying degrees of strengths of memory traces as the…

We investigated the potential influence of implicit learning mechanisms on L2 morphosyntactic attainment by examining the relationship between age of onset (AoO), two cognitive abilities hypothesized to underlie implicit learning (phonological short-term memory and implicit statistical learning), and performance on an auditory grammaticality…

Purpose: This study examined bilinguals' performance on functional executive function map tasks such as the Zoo Map from the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome and the extent to which working memory, set-shifting, and inhibition measures predicted bilinguals' performance on these tasks. Additionally, we explored the utility of…

Research has shown that both adults and children will imitate acoustic properties of the speech around them. In fact, studies on adults have shown that this convergence occurs even when the subject simply sees, but does not hear, the interlocutor. Not only does visual speech elicit imitation on its own, but also imitation is greater for…

This study examined lexical organization in English language learners (ELLs) who acquired their second language (L2) either during or after the period of maximal sensitivity related to the critical period hypothesis. Twenty-three native-Spanish-speaking ELLs completed psycholinguistic tasks to examine age effects in bilingual lexical organization.…