In this study we asked whether nonwords created by transposing two phonemes (/biks[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) are perceived as being more similar to their base words (/bisk[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/) than nonwords created by substituting two phonemes (/bipf[open-mid back rounded vowel]t/). Using the short-term phonological priming and a…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

Examining how bilingual infants experience their dual language input is important for understanding bilingual language acquisition. To assess these language experiences, researchers typically conduct language interviews with caregivers. However, little is known about the reliability of these parent reports in describing how bilingual children…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate children's processing of dysphonic speech in a realistic classroom setting, under the influence of added classroom noise. Method: Typically developing 6-year-old primary school children performed two listening tasks in their regular classrooms--a phoneme discrimination task to assess speech…

The present study examined transposed-word effects in a same-different matching task with sequences of 5 words. The word sequences were presented one after the other, each for 400 ms, the first in lowercase and the second in uppercase. The first sequence, the reference, was either a grammatically correct sentence or a scrambled ungrammatical…

Past work has suggested that L1 readers retrieve idioms (i.e., "spill the tea") directly vs. matched literal controls ("drink the tea") following unbiased contexts, whereas L2 readers process idioms more compositionally. However, it is unclear whether this occurs when a figuratively or literally biased context…

During spoken word processing, native (L1) listeners use allophonic variation to predictively rule out word competitors and speed up word recognition. There is some evidence that second language (L2) learners develop an awareness of allophonic distributions in their L2, but whether they use their knowledge to facilitate word recognition online,…

Although research in Translation Studies has burgeoned in the last decades, the number of studies dealing with the role of foreign language teaching for translator and interpreter trainees is still scarce. With a view to filling this void, the present article reports on students' perspectives on foreign language learning as an inherent part of…

Three experiments explored how retrieval practice and corrective feedback affect a third language (L3) vocabulary learning. In the first two experiments, Chinese-English bilinguals without prior French language experience studied English (Second Language, L2)--French (L3) word pairs in repeated studying or retrieval practice without (Experiment…

Mobile artifacts are the objects that increasingly surround us in life. They provide us with the opportunity to engage in activities outside the traditional context and at our own pace. In this article, we present the results of the tests of our mobile application intended for the learning of the French language with the concept of SPOC with a…

This study revisits and extends McManus and Marsden (2019a) to better understand "how" and "why" providing additional explicit information (EI) about learners' first language (L1) alongside EI and comprehension practice in the second language (L2) improved the accuracy, speed, and stability of L2 comprehension of the French…

Despite much research on how multilingual learners view the linguistic properties of language, how they perceive languages as cultural capital has been far less investigated. Drawing on the theories of social cognition, this study explores how multiple foreign language learners' impressions, as a lens to observe their multilingual awareness, are…

In the growing market of the translation industry, where 90% of the global output consists of specialised translation, the acquisition of familiarity with different specialised genres is critical for translation trainees to confidently prepare for their future professional challenges. Not only do professionals report dealing with a high diversity…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…