In this study of more than 1,000 typical and at-risk elementary Arabic-speaking students in Oman, we explore relationships between pragmatic (and other) language skills, literacy, cognition, and behavior and the degree to which demography impacts performance on associated tasks. We found, in most cases, that females performed better than males,…

Extending new verbs is important in becoming a productive speaker of a language. Prior results show children have difficulty extending verbs when they have seen events with varied agents. This study further examines the impact of variability on verb learning and asks whether variability interacts with event complexity or differs by language.…

This study focuses on evaluating students' topic mastery and flow of thought in their Psycholinguistics project paper. Assessing these two aspects means a lot since it will be helpful as a planning tool to approach future better instruction. It was conducted with Indonesian students taking Psycholinguistics course at Humanities Faculty of UIN…

This study investigates how syntactic complexity affects speaking performance in first (L1) and second language (L2) in terms of speaking fluency. Participants (30 Dutch native speakers with an average to advanced level of English) performed two speaking experiments, one in Dutch (L1) and one in English (L2). Syntactic complexity was…

The present research demonstrates that very brief variations in affect, being around 1 s in length and changing from trial to trial independently from semantic relatedness of primes and targets, modulate the amount of semantic priming. Implementing consonant and dissonant chords (Experiments 1 and 5), naturalistic sounds (Experiment 2), and visual…

This study investigates the combined effects of task-based careful online planning and the storyline structure of a task on second language performance (complexity, accuracy and fluency). Sixty intermediate EFL learners were randomly assigned to four groups (n = 15). Participants were asked to perform two tasks with different degrees of storyline…

This study investigated the application of the speeded lexical decision task to L2 aural processing efficiency. One-hundred and twenty Japanese university students completed an aural word/nonword task. When the variation of lexical decision time (CV) was correlated with reaction time (RT), the results suggested that the single-word recognition…

Due to the lack of span test for the use in language-specific and cross-language studies, this study provides L1 and L2 researchers with a reliable language-independent span test (math span test) for the measurement of working memory capacity. It also describes the development, validation, and scoring method of this test. This test included 70…

Research indicates a strong relationship between phonological awareness and reading success. Phonemic intervention programs clearly show the benefits of explicitly teaching phonological awareness skills. Phonological awareness skills vary in nature and degree of difficulty and appear to follow a developmental progression. This study examined a…

We present four experiments on the interpretation of pronouns and reflexives in picture noun phrases with and without possessors (e.g. "Andrew's picture of him/himself, the picture of him/himself"). The experiments (two off-line studies and two visual-world eye-tracking experiments) investigate how syntactic and semantic factors guide the…

From an information processing perspective, humans have a limited attentional capacity for processing information. Thus, second language (L2) researchers have investigated the role of pretask planning in task performance, finding that planning results in greater fluency and complexity but has mixed effects on accuracy. However, most planning…

The idea that iconic visible gesture had something to do with the origin of language, particularly speech, is a frequent element in speculation about this phenomenon and appears early in its history. Socrates hypothesizes about the origins of Greek words in Plato's satirical dialogue, "Cratylus", and his speculation includes a possible…

During the English language learning, it is common for Chinese students to have to guess the meaning of new word groups or phrases. The guessing ability may be related to the cognitive sameness and differences between Chinese and English people. In order to validate this hypothesis, the author carried out a research by having students doing test…

This article argues for the crucial role of alignment in second language acquisition, as conceptualized from a broadly sociocognitive perspective. By "alignment," we mean the complex processes through which human beings effect coordinated interaction, both with other human beings and (usually human-engineered) environments, situations,…

This paper proposes a constructivist account of the development of morphosyntax in bilinguals, based on an examination of two populations--English-Spanish bilinguals in Miami and English-Welsh bilinguals in North Wales. Despite sociocultural and sociolinguistic differences across these groups, the development of bilinguals in the two groups…