In the present study, the comparative effects of comprehensible input, output and corrective feedback on the receptive acquisition of L2 vocabulary items were investigated. Two groups of beginning EFL learners participated in the study. The control group received comprehensible input only, while the experimental group received input and was…

Discourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this article, we compare advanced learners' sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an on-line reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the…

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural basis of comprehension and perceptual learning of artificially degraded [noise vocoded (NV)] speech. Fifteen participants were scanned while listening to 6-channel vocoded words, which are difficult for naive listeners to comprehend, but can be readily learned with…

In motor speech disorders, dysarthric features impacting intelligibility, articulation, fluency and voice emerge more saliently in conversation than in repetition, reading or singing. A role of the basal ganglia in these task discrepancies has been identified. Further, more recent studies of naturalistic speech in basal ganglia dysfunction have…

Lexical access tasks are designed to measure efficiency of lexical access, but task demands and methods vary greatly. Many lexical access tasks do not account for confounding factors including competence in other linguistic abilities. In this study, preschoolers were given two lexical access tasks. In the single-category naming (SCN) task,…

Purpose: To determine whether 3 aspects of the word learning process--fast mapping, retention, and extension--are problematic for children with cochlear implants (CIs). Method: The authors compared responses of 24 children with CIs, 24 age-matched hearing children, and 23 vocabulary-matched hearing children to a novel object noun training episode.…

Purpose: On the basis of Baddeley's working memory model (1986), we examined working memory functioning in children with learning disorders with and without specific language impairment (SLI). We pursued the question whether children with learning disorders exhibit similar working memory deficits as children with additional SLI. Method: In…

Although developmental dyslexia is often referred to as a cross-modal disturbance, tests of different modalities using the same stimuli are lacking. We compared the performance of 23 children with dyslexia and 42 chronologically matched control readers on reading versus repetition tasks and visual versus auditory lexical decision using the same…

Previous research regarding the neural basis of semantic composition has relied heavily on violation paradigms, which often compare implausible sentences that violate world knowledge to plausible sentences that do not violate world knowledge. This comparison is problematic as it may involve extralinguistic operations such as contextual repair and…

Purpose: Research on the diagnostic accuracy of different language measures has focused primarily on English. This study examined the sensitivity and specificity of a range of measures of language knowledge and language processing for the identification of primary language impairment (PLI) in French-speaking children. Because of the lack of…

Relationships between attention/executive functions and language learning were investigated in students in Grades 4 to 9 (N = 88) with and without specific learning disabilities (SLDs) in multiword syntax in oral and written language (OWL LD), word reading and spelling (dyslexia), and subword letter writing (dysgraphia). Prior…

We examined how age of acquisition in Spanish heritage speakers and L2 learners interacts with implicitness vs. explicitness of tasks in gender processing of canonical and non-canonical ending nouns. Twenty-three Spanish native speakers, 29 heritage speakers, and 33 proficiency-matched L2 learners completed three on-line spoken word recognition…

Sentence imitation effectively discriminates between adults with and without specific language impairment (SLI). Little is known, however, about the factors that result in performance differences. This study evaluated the effects of working memory, processing speed, and argument status on sentence imitation. Working memory was measured by both a…

It is not clear how compound words are represented within the influential framework of the lemma-lexeme theory. Theoretically, compounds could be structured through a multiple lemma architecture, in which the lemma nodes of both the compound and its constituents are involved in lexical processing. If this were the case, syntactic properties of…

Bilinguals who are fluent in American Sign Language (ASL) and English often produce "code-blends"--simultaneously articulating a sign and a word while conversing with other ASL-English bilinguals. To investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying code-blend processing, we compared picture-naming times (Experiment 1) and semantic categorization…