This study investigated the impact of information density on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) listening comprehension, testing the hypothesis that listeners prioritize message understanding in information-rich discourse over grammar-focused analysis in rhetorical discourse. A quasi-experimental design was employed with 26 EFL college students,…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

Whereas a growing bulk of work has demonstrated that both adults and children are sensitive to frequently occurring word sequences, little is known about the potential role of meaning in the processing of such multiword chunks. Here, we take a first step toward assessing the contribution of meaningfulness in the processing of multiword sequences,…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

The paper reports on two experiments that investigate whether polarity, clause order and incentive influence derivation of Conditional Perfection in two types of inducements (promises and threats). Both experiments are designed as inference tasks, additionally measuring reaction times to inferences. The paper shows that the derivation of…

While most research on scalar implicature has focused on the lexical scale "some" vs "all," here we investigated an understudied scale formed by two syntactic constructions: categorizations (e.g., "Wilma is a nurse") and comparisons ("Wilma is like a nurse"). An experimental study by Rubio-Fernandez et al.…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

The number of people diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease (AD), a progressive and terminal kind of dementia, continues to rise with an estimated 14 million Americans affected by 2050. Prior to an AD diagnosis, many individuals are diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and have similar, but less severe, symptoms as those with AD. A common…

Previous experimental work shows that negation processing can be direct in bipolar contexts where positive/negative states of affairs can be expressed by available lexical opposites (remember/forget) in monolingual speakers. However, in a unipolar context where such opposites are not available (sing/not sing), the processing first proceeds through…

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…

Negative sentences are hard to process when they are presented out of context. When embedded in a context of plausible denial their processing difficulty decreases or is completely eliminated. We investigated in six behavioral experiments whether the processing of negation is eased in a denial context triggered by discourse markers (e.g.…

In four experiments, we investigated the impact of letter case (lower case vs. UPPER CASE) on the processing of sequences of written words. Experiment 1 used the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm with postcued identification of one word in a five-word sequence. The sequence could be grammatically correct (e.g., "the boy likes…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

Three experiments using a spelling error detection task investigated the extent to which morphemes and pseudomorphemes affect word processing. We compared the processing of transparent compound words (e.g., doorbell), pseudocompound words (e.g., carpet), and matched control words (e.g., tomato). In half of the compound and pseudocompound words,…

Empirical evidence collected so far has revealed that the bilingual advantage cannot be reduced to a single component of the executive functioning, and point to the need to understand the effects of bilingual experience on cognition as influencing a wider family of mental processes, including, but not limited to, cognitive control. The present…