In this study, we investigated the accuracy of first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' intuitive judgments of phrasal frequency and collocation strength, and examined the linguistic influences that give rise to these judgments. L1 and L2 speakers of English judged 180 adjective-noun collocations as (a) high frequency, medium…

Research has shown that learning a known-and-unknown word combination leads to greater learning than learning an unknown word alone (Kasahara, 2010, 2011). These studies found that attaching a known adjective to an unknown noun can help learners remember the unknown noun. Kasahara (2015) found that a known verb can serve as an effective cue to…

This study investigated the effects of individual word frequency, collocational frequency, and association on L1 and L2 collocational processing. An acceptability judgment task was administered to L1 and L2 speakers of English. Response times were analyzed using mixed-effects modeling for 3 types of adjective-noun pairs: (a) high-frequency, (b)…

Prior research has shown that people can learn many nouns (i.e., word--object mappings) from a short series of ambiguous situations containing multiple words and objects. For successful cross-situational learning, people must approximately track which words and referents co-occur most frequently. This study investigates the effects of allowing…

The purpose of this work is to determine how widely and in which semantic and morphologic categories, word associations are used by children. There is no study about word associations children use in the acquisition of Turkish as their mother tongue. Participants of the current research consisted of a total of 90 kids between 4.0 and 6.0 years of…

Three source-memory experiments were conducted with Spanish-English bilinguals and monolingual English speakers matched on age, education, nonverbal cognitive ability and socioeconomic status. Bilingual language proficiency and dominance were assessed using standardized objective measures. In Experiment 1, source was manipulated visuo-spatially,…

Significant variation exists in how native speakers respond to word association tasks and challenges the usage of nativelikeness as a benchmark to gauge second language (L2) performance. However, the influence of word class and trials of elicitation is not sufficiently addressed in previous work. With controlled stimuli from multiple word classes,…

Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we…

Researchers in the field of second language acquisition continue to establish links between cognition and emotion (Dewaele, 2013; MacIntyre, 2002; MacIntyre & Gardner, 1989, 1991b, 1994; Segalowitz & Trofimovich, 2011). The purpose of the present study is to investigate to what extent physiological and self-report measures predict…

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). Study 1 investigated how parents use gestures in association with generic versus particular reference during naturalistic interactions with their 2- and 3-year-old children. Parents provided…

CHALLENGE is generally perceived as a negative word synonymous with "dispute," "defy," "confrontation," and "contest." However, when resorting to dictionary definitions, CHALLENGE has unexpectedly been found to possess positive senses such as "stimulating" and "arousing competitive…

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…

We analyzed the differential processing of nouns and verbs in a lexical decision task. Moderate and high-frequency nouns and verbs were compared. The characteristics of our material were specified at the formal level (number of letters and syllables, number of homographs, orthographic neighbors, frequency and age of acquisition), and at the…

Although there is good evidence for implicit learning of associations between forms, little work has investigated implicit learning of form-meaning connections, and the findings are somewhat contradictory. Two experiments were carried out using a novel reaction time methodology to investigate implicit learning of grammatical form-meaning…

Research has demonstrated that children use different strategies to infer a referent. One of these strategies is to use inflectional morphology. We present evidence that toddlers learning Spanish are capable of using gender word inflections to infer word reference. Thirty-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Participants…