Sentence production and comprehension both draw on linguistic knowledge, but current research is unclear on whether these fundamental language tasks involve similar or distinct competitive processes. Previous studies suggest that production and comprehension may involve similar conflict resolution processes, but that production may additionally…

Individuals differ in their ability to perceive and learn unfamiliar speech sounds, but we lack a comprehensive theoretical account that predicts individual differences in this skill. Predominant theories largely attribute difficulties of non-native speech perception to the relationships between non-native speech sounds/contrasts and…

Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. Previous research on the recovery from misinterpretations has focused on sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. The present study instead investigated the outcome of…

Comprehension substantially benefits from attending to, thinking about, and mentally representing the sources of any presented information. Such processes require mental effort and unfortunately people do not always engage in such activities. The current article presents a nascent, evolving model of discourse comprehension that formalizes…

The public debate on the use of the German nonbinary gender asterisk ("Lehrer*in" 'teacher') is emotionally charged. While it has been adopted by political and educational institutions, opponents argue that it is inappropriate for making persons identifying themselves beyond the male-female-dichotomy more visible. We investigated this…

In Troyer and Kutas (2018), individual differences in knowledge of the world of Harry Potter (HP) rapidly modulated individuals' average electrical brain potentials to contextually supported words in sentence endings. Using advances in single-trial electroencephalogram analysis, we examined whether this relationship is strictly a result of domain…

Studies that have measured pragmatic fluency in the form of planning time and speech rate, as indicators of processing ability, have confirmed that learners' processing ability and pragmatic knowledge are independent from each other. The present study is a longitudinal, developmental investigation which investigates whether the study abroad stay…

Extant research has compared the processing of affectively laden words between L1 and L2. However, most studies used verbal stimuli that were validated for a single language or for both languages but using independent samples. We systematically compared ratings of valence, emotional intensity and subjective familiarity of negative, neutral,…

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., "mow"; French homophone…

This study examined the simultaneous effects of L2 individual difference (ID) variables (aptitude, motivation, strategy use, language processing experience, and gender) on English as a foreign language (EFL) breadth and depth of L2 vocabulary knowledge of 492 Korean university-level learners. Independent variable measures included the: (1) Korean…

Usage-based linguistics posits that communicative functions, including pragmatics, are at the core of language (Tomasello, 1992). It is surprising, then, that pragmatics is rarely systematically included in second language curricula (e.g., Bardovi-Harlig, 2017), especially since pragmatics instruction has been shown to significantly contribute to…

Lexical access is a core component of word processing. In order to produce or comprehend a word, language users must access word forms in their mental lexicon. However, despite its involvement in both tasks, previous research has often studied lexical access in either production or comprehension alone. Therefore, it is unknown to which extent…

The current study focused on emergent processes during real-time second language (L2) writing activity in an English as a foreign language university context, examining differences in these processes across individual capacities. Participants included 22 adult Japanese learners of L2 English and their tutor. The data were collected using digital…

The present study investigated a group of cognitive individual differences considered advantageous in second language learning and their role in language learning under implicit and explicit feedback conditions using both language awareness and language development measures. The study further investigated whether different types of awareness are…

In order to understand variability in second language (L2) acquisition, this study addressed how individual differences in cognitive abilities may contribute to development for learners in different contexts. Specifically, we report the results of two short-term longitudinal studies aimed at examining the role of cognitive abilities in accounting…