In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, this dissertation examines the role of literacy on predictive processing during spoken language comprehension. Previous studies have shown that comprehenders can use morphosyntactic cues available in the input to generate predictions about upcoming information. Recent key findings also suggest that…

The study explored the role of verbal fluency in determining reading and comprehension skills in Bengali among 10-year old typically developing Bengali children. Robust correlations were found between semantic fluency and word reading (0.63) as well as semantic fluency and comprehension (0.70). Good correlation was found between letter fluency and…

Purpose: Using the printed-word paradigm with eye tracking, this study conducted three experiments to examine (a) how multiple words in spoken overlapping ambiguity strings (OASs) are activated, (b) how word frequency influences the word segmentation of spoken OASs, and (c) whether the multiple words in spoken OASs are activated competitively or…

Background and aims: Previous studies suggest that syntactic development in children with intellectual disabilities (ID) is positively correlated with verbal short-term memory (VSTM). This study investigated the characteristics of syntactic development and their relationships of VSTM in children with ID based on type. Methods: The participants…

The present study endeavors to investigate the learning of the comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by EFL learners at Albalqa Applied University, Jordan. Moreover, the study attempts to see the role of mother tongue influences in the learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in…

Background: There is a clear predominance of programmes aimed at improving aspects related to language production in pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, programmes aimed at improving their receptive skills are limited. Aims: The main aim was to assess the effectiveness of an intervention programme for oral language…

Word retrieval and lexical organization were explored in 16 Danish children with slight to severe hearing loss (HL), 11 children with developmental language disorder (DLD), and 25 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7 to 12 years. There is a special focus on children with HL with and without language difficulties compared with…

Purpose: This study aimed to develop and test a measure of real-time continuous speech understanding to be used with natural dialogues. Method: The measure was based on a category monitoring paradigm and employed five existing recordings of natural dialogues from which the different test categories and associated target words were derived. For…

Purpose: This study investigated the auditory comprehension of Japanese sentences including relative clauses (RCs) by 52 Japanese-speaking children with typical development (TD) and 16 children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: A picture-pointing task measured RC and main clause (MC) comprehension for object and subject relatives in…

Purpose: This study examined whether monolingual German-speaking preschool children with developmental language disorder (DLD) were facilitated by the presence of case-marking cues in their interpretation of German subject and object "welcher" ("which")-questions, as reported for their typically developing peers. We also…

Previous research accounting for pronoun resolution as a problem of probabilistic inference has not explored the phenomenon of adaptation, whereby the processor constantly tracks and adapts, rationally, to changes in a statistical environment. We investigate whether Brazilian (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) speakers adapt to variations in the…

Recently, researchers interested in the nature and origins of semantic representations have investigated an especially informative case study: The acquisition of the word "most"--a quantifier which by all accounts demands a sophisticated second-order logic, and which therefore poses an interesting challenge to theories of language…

Most current models of sentence comprehension assume that the human parsing mechanism (HPM) algorithmically computes detailed syntactic representations as basis for extracting sentence meaning. These models share the assumption that the representations computed by the HPM accurately reflect the linguistic input. This assumption has been challenged…

It is well established that the comprehension of spoken words referring to object concepts relies on high-level visual areas in the ventral stream that build increasingly abstract representations. It is much less clear whether basic low-level visual representations are also involved. Here we asked in what task situations low-level visual…

We used event-related potentials (ERP) to investigate whether Spanish-English bilinguals preactivate form and meaning of predictable words. Participants read high-cloze sentence contexts (e.g., "The student is going to the library to borrow a..."), followed by the predictable word ("book"), a word that was form-related…