Bilinguals can be proficient in oral language without necessarily knowing how to read and write in at least one of their languages. Literacy has been shown to affect language processing in monolinguals. In the present study, we test if literacy affects grammaticality judgments for Cantonese-English bilinguals who varied in Chinese literacy…

This study examines the cognitive processes underlying the comprehension of L2 idiomatic expressions by using two different visual instructional techniques -- pictorial representation of literal meanings versus pictorial representation of figurative meanings of each idiomatic expression -- considering two settings (EFL vs. ESL), two different…

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

Formulaic sequences are found to be processed faster than their matched novel phrases in previous studies. Given the variety of formulaic types, few studies have compared processing on different types of formulaic sequences. The present study explored the processing among idioms, speech formulae and written formulae. It has been found that in…

Learning to talk about motion in a second language is very difficult because it involves restructuring deeply entrenched patterns from the first language. In this paper we argue that statistical learning can explain why L2 learners are only partially successful in restructuring their second language grammars. We explore to what extent L2 learners…

This paper examines the status-unequal requests of 89 advanced mixed-L1 learners and 87 British English native speakers elicited by a written discourse completion task. Significant differences were observed in all three dimensions analysed: internal and external modification, and perspective. The data demonstrate learners' overuse of zero marking…

In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair ("red scissors," given "purple scissors") when instructions to click on it carried a…

A study investigated the role of certain discourse and language processing factors in the production of narratives under controlled conditions. Subjects watched a short segment from a movie and then narrated the events to a researcher. The narrations were taped, transcribed, and analyzed in terms of such factors as: (1) the number and types of…

Thirty undergraduate students were asked to read and recall information presented in one of two parallel expository passages about the professional athlete. These passages differed only in their use of the "he" or "she" generic referent. The passages were parsed into 19 idea units, and 5 target words in each conveying the…

Evidence is presented to demonstrate that arranging word lists on distinctive visual patterns results in better recall performance than does presenting the same word lists on a pattern that is always the same. Results of three experiments using college age students are reported. (Author/LMO)

Two experiments were conducted to test competing explanations of the levels effect in memory for text. In both experiments subjects (college students) read paragraphs in which the height of target propositions was held constant while the amount of target elaboration differed across versions of the paragraphs. (Author/LMO)

A study investigated whether the phonological properties of visually represented words routinely influenced the process of lexical access. Subjects were 40 college students and 40 fourth graders. Results provide little support for the claim that the phonological attributes of words are used standardly to achieve lexical access. (Author/MSE)