In this study, neural representation of adult second language (L2) speakers' implicit grammatical knowledge was investigated. Advanced L2 speakers of Japanese living in Japan, as well as L1 Japanese speakers, performed a word-monitoring task (proposed as an implicit knowledge test) in the MRI scanner. Behavioral measures were obtained from…

There is a general consensus in theories of human speech recognition that humans engage in predictive processing during online speech processing. There are also claims that predictive processing indicates the operation of a predictive coding (PC) mechanism (Rao & Ballard, 1999). Formally, PC is a generative model where top-down signals consist…

This study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual…

Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns--those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as "if the vowel is [near-close near-front unrounded vowel], then [s] can only appear at the end of the…

Children with reading difficulties (RD) share challenges in executive functions (EF). Neurobiological correlates provide evidence for EF challenges during reading among these readers, but an online cognitive load detection mechanism has yet to be developed. Nevertheless, eye-movement tracking can provide online data of reading patterns (pupil…

We assessed the effect of bilingualism on metacognitive processing in the artificial language learning task, in 2 experiments varying in the difficulty to segment the language. Following a study phase in which participants were exposed to the artificial language, segmentation performance was assessed by means of a dual forced-choice recognition…

Background: Alzheimer's disease is characterized by macrolinguistic changes. This decline is often analyzed with quantitative scales. Aims: To analyze discourse production in early Alzheimer's disease (AD) and to identify qualitative markers of macrolinguistic decline. Methods & Procedures: We analyzed macrolinguistic features of a clinical…

The processing of morphological information during Chinese word memorization was investigated in the present study. Participants were asked to study words presented to them on a computer screen in the studying phase and then judge whether presented words were old or new in the test phase. In addition to parent words (i.e. the words studied in the…

The present study examines the representation and composition of meaning in scalar implicatures. Scalar implicature is the phenomenon whereby the use of a less informative term (e.g., "some") is inferred to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g., to mean "not all"). The experiments reported here investigate how the…

Two important research lines in neuro- and psycholinguistics are studying natural or experimentally induced slips of the tongue and investigating the symptom patterns of aphasic individuals. Only few studies have focused on explaining aphasic symptoms by provoking aphasic symptoms in healthy speakers. While all experimental techniques have so far…

Background: Children with speech sound disorders (SSD) form a heterogeneous group who differ in terms of the severity of their condition, underlying cause, speech errors, involvement of other aspects of the linguistic system and treatment response. To date there is no universal and agreed-upon classification system. Instead, a number of…

Neighborhood density influences adult performance on several word processing tasks. Some studies show age-related effects of density on children's performance, reflecting a developmental restructuring of the mental lexicon from holistic into segmental representations that may play a role in phonological awareness. To further investigate density…

Ease of processing of 3,969 English words for native speakers and Japanese learners was investigated using lexical decision and naming latencies taken from the English Lexicon Project (Balota et al. The English Lexicon Project: A web-based repository of descriptive and behavioral measures for 40,481 English words and nonwords, 2002) and accuracy…

The present paper looks at the growing population of Russian heritage speakers from a linguistic and psycholinguistic perspective. The study attempts to clarify further the notion of heritage language by comparing the linguistic performance of heritage speakers with that of monolinguals and second language learners. The amount of exposure to…

Neighborhood size and neighborhood frequency were orthogonally varied in two experiments on Italian nonwords. In Experiment 1, an inhibitory effect of neighborhood frequency on visual lexical decision was found: The presence of one high-frequency neighbor increased response latencies and error rates to nonwords. By contrast, no effect of…