Several previous studies showed that prime-target pairs with orthographical overlap but no semantic or morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-free) produced a masked priming effect in second language (L2) speakers but not in first language (L1) speakers. The present study further explored this intriguing L1-L2 difference by comparing English…

We examined the impact of images on novel word learning and consolidation, in a conceptual replication of Liu and Van Hell (2020). After participants had learned one set of novel words with definitions and images on Day 1 (remote words) and a different set on Day 2 (recent words), they judged the semantic relatedness of word pairs on Days 2 and 8…

Three experiments investigated adult learners' acquisition of a novel adjective. In English and other languages, meanings of some gradable adjectives are said to include an absolute standard of comparison (e.g., "full" means completely filled with content). However, actual usage is often imprecise, where a maximum absolute standard of…

Previous event-related potentials (ERP) research has investigated how foreign accent modulates listeners' neural responses to lexical-semantic and morphosyntactic errors. We extended this line of research to consider whether pronunciation errors in Mandarin Chinese are processed differently when a foreign-accented speaker makes them relative to…

This study compared the lexical-semantic organization skills of bilingually developing deaf children in American Sign Language (ASL) and English with those of a monolingual hearing group. A repeated meaning-association paradigm was used to assess retrieval of semantic relations in deaf 6-10-year-olds exposed to ASL from birth by their deaf…

Research on second language lexical development during reading has found positive effects for word frequency, the provision of glosses, and elaborative word processing. However, findings have been inconclusive regarding the effect of such intervention tasks on long-term retention. Likewise, few studies have looked at the cumulative effect of…

Deaf and hearing students' knowledge of English sentences containing universal quantifiers was compared through their performance on a 50-item, multiple-picture task that required students to decide whether each of five pictures represented a possible meaning of a target sentence. The task assessed fundamental knowledge of quantifier sentences,…

Demonstrates the operation of the universal principles of lexical simplification, through an examination of its use in translation; second language learning and teaching, and simplified reading texts. (Author/AM)

A semantic-relatedness test and a cloze-type/sentence-completion test compared meanings ascribed to spatial prepositions by adult native English and advanced English-as-a-second-language speakers. Non-native speakers differed from native speakers in the semantic boundaries ascribed to the words, with the differences deriving from weighting…