"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

It has been proposed that an implicit learning deficit explains the difficulties with grammar commonly observed in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study further investigates this link in two ways. Firstly, we investigate whether kindergartners with DLD have more difficulties with preposition understanding and…

Topic models are mathematical and statistical models used to analyze textual data. The objective of topic models is to gain information about the latent semantic space of a set of related textual data. The semantic space of a set of textual data contains the relationship between documents and words and how they are used. Topic models are becoming…

Bilingualism is associated with a number of false beliefs, myths and misconceptions, which carry implications for bilingual education and policymaking. While the language used, often in the media, to express such misconceptions may have become more subtle, a negative bias remains and is arguably more difficult to detect and defend against. The…

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…

This mixed methods study draws upon theoretical perspectives from usage-based linguistics (UBL) and variationist sociolinguistics to explore four learners' use of second language (L2) Spanish present tense indicative verbal inflectional morphology (i.e., simple present conjugations). The study compares the frequency and distribution of students'…

Multilingualism presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Natural Language Processing, with code-switching representing a particularly interesting problem for computational models trained on monolingual datasets. In this paper, we explore how code-switched data affects the task of Machine Translation, a task which only recently has started…

Using written texts elicited from students with different proficiency levels, we studied the acquisition of nominal cases in Russian as a second language. We established the order in which cases were acquired (nominative, locative, accusative, genitive, instrumental, and dative), as well as certain characteristics of their acquisition…

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…

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…

This study is a replication and extension of Morgan-Short et al.'s (2018) investigation into the role of attention in input processing by L1-Polish learners of L2-Spanish, with proficiency and language of assessment explored as two key methodological factors. Our aims were twofold: to investigate learners' comprehension in different conditions…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

Some words have more than one translation across languages. Such translation-ambiguous words are harder to learn, recognize, and produce for individuals across the language learning spectrum. Past research demonstrates that learning both translations of translation-ambiguous words on consecutive trials confers an accuracy advantage relative to…

Human word learning is remarkable: We not only learn thousands of words but also form organized semantic networks in which words are interconnected according to meaningful links, such as those between "apple," "juicy," and "pear." These links play key roles in our abilities to use language. How do words become…

My Career Story (MCS) comprises a self-guided autobiographical workbook designed to assist individuals across life's diverse spectrum to narrate and shape their career stories. We describe the development and use of the MCS and its relevance for all people contemplating career transitions. Results of a study using the MCS with 20 emerging adults…