Word finding difficulty is a frequently reported subjective cognitive concern among persons with Multiple Sclerosis (pwMS). Word-finding relies on several information retrieval processes, including search and retrieval from the conceptual store, the phonological store, the syllabary, as well as other stores of information. Neuropsychological…

This study investigates Mandarin-speaking children's knowledge of event semantics in interpreting spatial modifiers with "zai" 'at' after a posture verb or before a placement verb. The event-semantic principles investigated include subevent modification (Parsons, 1990) and aspect shift (Fong, 1997). We conducted an experimental study…

On the evidence of four lexical-decision tasks in German, we examine speakers' sensitivity to internal morphological composition and abstract morphological rules during the processing of derived words, real and novel. In a lexical-decision task with delayed priming, speakers were presented with two-step derived nouns such as "Heilung…

The present study aims to explore the semantic knowledge of a group of Iranian deaf individuals who, due mainly to auditory deprivation did not acquire language normally in early years of their life. The participants were ten deaf and a matched number of hearing individuals as control group. A test of five tasks was administrated to assess their…

Purpose: Despite the apparent primacy of syntactic deficits, children with developmental language disorder (DLD) often also evidence lexical impairments. In particular, it has been argued that this population have difficulty forming lexical representations that are detailed enough to support effective spoken word processing. In order to better…

Research on multilingual acquisition has investigated various combinations of languages to identify the factors determining how learners express motion. Our research examines the semantics of motion expression in learners whose first language (L1) exhibits more variation than their foreign language (L2/L3). The present study compares upward motion…

This article presents a study of preschool-aged children's knowledge of the semantics of the negative polarity item (NPI) "any". NPIs like "any" differ in distribution from non-polarity-sensitive indefinites like "a": "Any" is restricted to downward-entailing linguistic environments (Fauconnier 1975, 1979;…

Adult learners know that language is for communicating and that there are patterns in the language that need to be learned. This affects the way they engage with language input; they search for form-meaning linkages, and this effortful engagement could interfere with their learning, especially for things like grammatical gender that often have at…

Questions, just like plain declarative sentences, can give rise to multiple interpretations. As discussed by Spector & Egré (2015), among others, questions embedded under know are ambiguous between "weakly exhaustive" (WE), "intermediate exhaustive" (IE), and "strongly exhaustive" (SE) interpretations (for…

The acquisition of verbal morphology presents challenges for many second language (L2) learners, in part because they do not readily process those forms during sentence comprehension. Instead, L2 learners rely on lexical-semantic cues (e.g., temporal adverbs and explicit subjects). This study investigated the role of task-essential training in…

Successful anaphor comprehension in reading is related to the explicitness of the antecedent--anaphor relation. It mirrors one of the purposes of textual enhancement (TE), which is that it raises learners' awareness of linguistic forms by enhancing the salience of input. Therefore, learners notice the enhanced form and discover the rule or…

We describe a new educational tool that relies on Semantic Web technologies to enhance lessons content. We conducted an experiment with 32 students whose results demonstrate better performance when exposed to our tool in comparison with a plain native tool. Consequently, this prototype opens new possibilities in lessons content enhancement.

We examined whether 2 types of interpolated tasks (i.e., retrieval-practice via free recall or guessing a missing critical item) improved final recognition for related and unrelated word lists relative to restudying or completing a filler task. Both retrieval-practice and guessing tasks improved correct recognition relative to restudy and filler…

This study asks whether children accept both interpretations of ambiguous sentences with contexts supporting each option. Twenty-six 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children and a control group of 30 English-speaking adults participated in a truth value judgment task. As a step towards evaluating the complexity of syntactic ambiguity, the…

Associating a content word to its rational semantic relations is regarded as a language learning strategy which explicitly contributes to mental lexicon. Semantic mapping herein seems to constitute an efficacious pattern for its practice in language instruction. Conversely, it appears to be among the least frequently used vocabulary learning…