While morphology constitutes a crucial component of the human language system, the neural bases of morphological processing in the human brain remains to be elucidated. The current study aims at exploring the extent to which the second language (L2) morphological processing would resemble or differ from that of their first language (L1) in adult…

It has been proposed that second language (L2) learners differ from native speakers in processing due to either influence from their native language or an inability to integrate information from multiple linguistic domains in a second language. To shed new light on the underlying mechanism of L2 processing, we used an event-related potentials…

Conjunctions play a crucial role in the construction of a coherent mental representation by signaling coherence relations between clauses, especially for second language users. By using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study aimed to investigate how different conjunctions ("so," "and," "although," or a "full…

The value of a dictionary is traditionally considered to be proportional to its physical volume, measured in the number of entries. However, the amount of useful data varies depending on existing hypertextual links across a dictionary. Therefore, its utility might also be calculated as proportional to the number of useful links among its…

Research suggests that second language words are learned faster when they are similar in phonological structure or accent to the words of an individual's first language. Many major theories suggest this happens because of differences in frequency of exposure and context between first and second language words. Here, we examine the independent…

Natural language is highly complex and can be challenging for some learners, yet the contribution of complexity to individual differences in language learning remains poorly understood. This poor understanding appears due to both a lack of consensus among researchers regarding what complexity is, and to on-line language research often employing…

The present study aimed to refine current hypotheses regarding thematic reversal anomalies, which have been found to elicit either N400 or--more frequently--"semantic-P600" (sP600) effects. Our goal was to investigate whether distinct ERP profiles reflect aspectual-thematic differences between Agent-Subject Verbs (ASVs; e.g., "to eat") and…

Previous studies suggest that whereas the left hemisphere (LH) is involved in fine semantic processing, the right hemisphere (RH) is uniquely engaged in coarse semantic coding including the comprehension of distinct types of language such as figurative language, lexical ambiguity and verbal humor (e.g., and ). The present study examined the…

Cross-language priming is a widely used experimental paradigm in psycholinguistics to study how bilinguals' two languages are represented and organized. Researchers have observed a number of interesting patterns from the priming effects of both translation equivalents and semantically related word pairs across languages. In this study, we…

Event structure describes the relationships between general semantics ("Aktionsart") of the verb and its syntactic properties, separating verbs into two classes: telic verbs, which denote change of state events with an inherent end-point or boundary ("catch, rescue"), and atelic, which refer to homogenous activities ("tease, host"). As telic verbs…

The field of research in bilingualism and second language (L2) acquisition has yielded overwhelming evidence that acquiring a second language later in life will result in less accurate production and perception of consonants and vowels in the second language. These effects, in part, are a result of interference from the already formed phonetic…

Recently, the significant role that pronunciation and prosody plays in processing spoken language has been widely recognized and a variety of teaching methodologies of pronunciation/prosody has been implemented in teaching foreign languages. Thus, an analysis of how similarly or differently native and L2 learners of a language use…

The purpose of this investigation was to test the assumption of asymmetric mapping between words and concepts in bilingual memory as proposed by the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM, Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Twenty four Spanish-English bilinguals (experiment 1) and twenty English-Spanish bilinguals (experiment 2) were presented with pairs of words,…

We report the case of an English-speaking aphasic patient (JP) with left posterior-frontal damage affecting the inferior frontal and precentral gyri. In speaking, JP was impaired with the regular inflections of nouns and pseudonouns, making errors like "pears" instead of "pear" or "door" for "doors", while the spoken production of noun stems and…

This paper demonstrates systematic cross-linguistic differences in the electrophysiological correlates of conflicts between form and meaning ("semantic reversal anomalies"). These engender P600 effects in English and Dutch (e.g. [Kolk et al., 2003] and [Kuperberg et al., 2003]), but a biphasic N400--late positivity pattern in German (Schlesewsky…