Purpose: Following the Rehabilitation Treatment Specification System (RTSS) framework, the current study investigated the active ingredients in the modified semantic feature analysis (mSFA) targeting either noun or verb retrieval in Mandarin-English bilingual adults with aphasia (BWA). Method: Twelve Mandarin-English BWA completed mSFA treatment…

Most words in natural languages are polysemous; that is, they have related but different meanings in different contexts. This one-to-many mapping of form to meaning presents a challenge to understanding how word meanings are learned, represented, and processed. Previous work has focused on solutions in which multiple static semantic…

At conceptual and linguistic levels of cognition, events are said to be represented in terms of abstract categories, for example, the sentence "Jackie cut the bagel with a knife" encodes the categories Agent (i.e., "Jackie") and Patient (i.e., "the bagel"). In this paper, we ask whether entities such as "the…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to develop and validate a new corpus of sentences without semantic context to facilitate research aimed at isolating the effects of semantic context in speech perception. Method: The newly developed corpus contains nonsensical sentences but is matched in vocabulary and syntactic structure to the existing Basic…

This study investigates the nature of L2 sentence processing mechanisms by examining whether or to what extent the sensitivity to prosody would affect the resolution of relative clause attachment ambiguity. The study examines how native speakers of a high attachment language would resolve the attachment ambiguity of their second language which has…

Translation ambiguity, which occurs commonly when one word has more than one possible translation in another language, causes language processing disadvantage. The present study investigated how Chinese--English bilinguals process translation-ambiguous words, and whether it is affected by the second language (L2) proficiency and sentence context,…

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs -- "zenzen" 'at all' and "amari" '(not) very' -- as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by…

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…

The objective of this research is to build automated models that emulate VerbNet, a semantic resource for English verbs. VerbNet has been built and expanded by linguists, forming a hierarchical clustering of verbs with common semantic and syntactic expressions, and is useful in semantic tasks. A major drawback is the difficulty of extending a…

An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van…

Reading in difficult or novel fonts results in slower and less efficient reading (Slattery & Rayner, 2010); however, these fonts may also lead to better learning and memory (Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, & Vaughan, 2011). This effect is consistent with a desirable difficulty effect such that more effort during encoding results in better…

We examined whether the position of modifiers in English influences how words are encoded and subsequently retrieved from memory. Compared with premodifiers, postmodifiers might confer more perceptual significance to the associated head nouns, are more consistent with the "given-before-new" information structure, and might also be easier…

Purpose: We investigated cross-linguistic differences in fundamental frequency range (FFR) in Welsh-English bilingual speech. This is the first study that reports gender-specific behavior in switching FFRs across languages in bilingual speech. Method: FFR was conceptualized as a behavioral pattern using measures of span (range of fundamental…

This study tested the effect of constraining sentence context on word recognition time (RT) in the first and second language. Native (L1) and nonnative (L2) speakers of English performed self-paced reading and listening tasks to see whether a semantically-rich preceding context would lead to the activation of a probable upcoming word prior to…

This article reports on an empirical study on the acquisition of Chinese imperfective markers ("zai," "-zhe[subscript P]" and "-zhe[subscript R]") by English-speaking learners at three proficiency levels. Compared to English, Chinese has a richer imperfective aspect in terms of markers (forms) and features (meanings).…