Purpose: Children with hearing loss (CHL) who use hearing devices (cochlear implants or hearing aids) and communicate orally have trouble comprehending sentences with noncanonical order. This study explores sentence comprehension strategies in Spanish-speaking CHL, focusing on their ability to integrate morphosyntactic cues (word order,…

Purpose: Persons with unilateral brain damage in the right hemisphere (RH) or left hemisphere (LH) show limitations in processing linguistic prosody, with yet inconclusive results on their ability to process prosodically marked structural boundaries for syntactic ambiguity resolution. We aimed at systematically investigating production and…

Network analyses of the phonological mental lexicon show that words are clustered into communities and phonologically dissimilar words can be connected to each other through distant paths. Here we investigate whether behavioral traces of the large-scale structure of the phonological lexicon can be obtained. Participants listened to pairs of spoken…

Purpose: Predictive language comprehension has become a major topic in psycholinguistic research. The study described in this article aims to investigate if German children with developmental language disorder (DLD) use grammatical gender agreement to predict the continuation of noun phrases in the same way as it has been observed for typically…

Speech listeners focus on a speaker's face to acquire different information in social communication. Fixation on the mouth associates with language processing and attention to the eyes is mainly driven by social/emotional cues. Here, we investigated how selective attention to the eyes and mouth would vary with language-emotion interaction during…

A considerable amount of research has emerged in recent years concerning second language (L2) learner sensitivity to various information types. From this, Clahsen and Felser proposed the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) to account for increased learner sensitivity to certain kinds of non-structural (e.g., contextual, discoursal, semantic, and…

This study investigates for the first time the comprehension of rhetorical questions (RhQs) in bilingual children. RhQs are non-canonical questions, as they are not used to request information, but to express the speaker's belief that the answer is already obvious. This special pragmatic meaning often arises by means of specific prosodic and…

Research has observed that monitoring one's own learning modifies memory for some materials but not for others. Specifically, making judgments of learning (JOLs) while learning word pairs improves subsequent cued-recall memory performance for related word pairs but not for unrelated word pairs. Theories that have attempted to explain this pattern…

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where…

It has been well-documented that although children around 4 years start to attribute false beliefs to others in classic false-belief tasks, they are still less able to evaluate the truth-value of propositional belief-reporting sentences, especially when belief conflicts with reality. This article investigates whether linguistic cues, verb…

The relationship between language switching and task switching has been well studied in bilingualism literature. This study employs novel experiments involving magnitude-parity switching and transparency-orientation switching and compares the costs associated with these two types of task switching with language switching. Switching costs and the…

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.…

A standard treatment of proper names in second language (L2) vocabulary analyses is to categorize them as known items. This treatment is often supported by the assumption that the form of the proper name (i.e., the initial capital letter) and the context will indicate to the L2 reader that the item is a proper name. The aim of this work-in-…

This article unfolds and argues for Biliteracy Metaphor Analysis (BMA), a methodology for examining the interpretation and use of metaphors in canon literature in a biliteracy context, in this case the canon of Danish literature read and interpreted by multilingual students in a ninth grade classroom. BMA combines Spradley's ethnographic framework…

In an upcoming coverage-comprehension study, we plan to assess learners' meaning-recall knowledge of words as they occur in the study's reading passage. As several meaning-recall test formats exist, the purpose of this small-scale study (N = 10) was to determine which of three formats was most similar to a criterion interview regarding mean score…