Prosody is the fundamental organizing principle of spoken language, carrying lexical, morphosyntactic, and pragmatic information. It, therefore, provides highly relevant input for language development. Are infants sensitive to this important aspect of spoken language early on? In this study, we asked whether infants are able to discriminate…

This study used event-related potential (ERP) and retrieval practice effect paradigm to investigate the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying the retrieval practice effect in a third language (L3) vocabulary learning. Thirty-five Chinese (First Language, L1)-English (Second Language, L2) bilinguals without prior knowledge of French (L3) studied 120…

In 2 ERP experiments participants read 4-word sequences presented for 200 ms (RPVP paradigm) and were required to decide whether the word sequences were grammatical or not. In Experiment 1, the word sequence consisted of either a grammatically correct sentence (e.g., "she can sing now") or an ungrammatical scrambled sequence (e.g.,…

Previous research has suggested that Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) can index form-, meaning-, and use-related aspects of the second language (L2) vocabulary knowledge, through, respectively, a lexical decision task (LDT, targeting N400), a semantic relatedness task (SEMREL, targeting N400), and a grammatical judgment task (GJT, targeting…

The value of a dictionary is traditionally considered to be proportional to its physical volume, measured in the number of entries. However, the amount of useful data varies depending on existing hypertextual links across a dictionary. Therefore, its utility might also be calculated as proportional to the number of useful links among its…

This study is about artificial neural network modeling of the linguistic challenges encountered by students learning Turkish as a foreign language in universities in France. The study was conducted in four universities where Turkish is taught as an optional foreign language. Sixty-six students whose mother tongues were either Arabic or French…

The present study investigated the neural correlates of infant discrimination of very similar linguistic varieties (Quebecois and Parisian French) using functional Near InfraRed Spectroscopy. In line with previous behavioral and electrophysiological data, there was no evidence that 3-month-olds discriminated the two regional accents, whereas…

Immediate and lasting effects of music or second-language training were examined in early childhood using event-related potentials. Event-related potentials were recorded for French vowels and musical notes in a passive oddball paradigm in thirty-six 4- to 6-year-old children who received either French or music training. Following training, both…

Although the word-frequency effect is one of the most established findings in spoken-word recognition, the precise processing locus of this effect is still a topic of debate. In this study, we used event-related potentials (ERPs) to track the time course of the word-frequency effect. In addition, the neighborhood density effect, which is known to…

This combined ERP and behavioral experiment explores the dynamics of processing during the discrimination of vowels in a non-native regional variety. Southern listeners were presented with three word forms, two of which are encountered in both Standard and Southern French ([kot] and [kut]), whereas the third one exists in Standard but not Southern…

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late…

Functional connectivity changes in the language network (Price, 2010), and in a control network involved in second language (L2) processing (Abutalebi & Green, 2007) were examined in a group of Persian (L1) speakers learning French (L2) words. Measures of network integration that characterize the global integrative state of a network (Marrelec,…

Our aim was to investigate whether developing language system, as measured by a priming task for spoken words, is organized by semantic categories. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during a priming task for spoken words in 18- and 24-month-old monolingual French learning children. Spoken word pairs were either semantically related…

To investigate potential causes of L2 performance deficits that correlate with age of onset, we use a computational model to explore the individual contributions of L1 entrenchment and aspects of memory development. Since development and L1 entrenchment almost invariably coincide, studying them independently is seldom possible in humans. To avoid…

We report a series of ERP and eye-tracking experiments investigating, (a) whether English-French learners can process grammatical gender online, (b) whether cross-linguistic similarities influence this ability, and (c) whether the syntactic distance between elements affects agreement processing. To address these questions we visually presented…