Predictive Processing accounts of autism claim that autistic individuals assign higher precision to their prediction errors than non-autistic individuals, that is, autistic individuals update their predictions more readily when faced with unexpected sensory input. Since setting the level of precision is a fundamental part of perception and…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

Impaired procedural learning has been suggested as a possible cause of developmental dyslexia (DD) and developmental language disorder (DLD). We evaluate this theory by performing a series of meta-analyses on evidence from the six procedural learning tasks that have most commonly been used to test this theory: the serial reaction time, Hebb…

The capacities of detecting visual regularities were tested among twenty typical (age 11.1 ± 0.32), and twenty poor (age 11.03 ± 0.28) native-Arab readers. Two stages were implemented, passive exposure to visual regularities and forced decision task. In the first stage, the participants were passively presented with four shapes; each shape was…

Research shows that meaning-focused reading offers opportunities for incidental grammar acquisition. However, the number of such studies remains limited and none have examined the role of both in-text encounters with grammar structures and reading comprehension in this learning. The present study filled these gaps. Employing a between-group,…

The temporal contiguity effect (TCE) is the tendency for the recall of one event to cue recall of other events originally experienced nearby in time. Retrieved context theory proposes that the TCE results from fundamental properties of episodic memory: binding of events to a drifting context representation during encoding and the reinstatement of…

We can incidentally learn regularities in a visual scene, and this kind of learning facilitates subsequent processing of similar scenes. One example of incidental learning is referred to as "contextual cueing," a phenomenon in which repetitive exposure to a particular spatial configuration facilitates visual search performance in the…

This study was to assess the spoken vocabulary knowledge and its role in incidental vocabulary learning from captioned television. The participants were a total of 87 minority students learning English as a foreign language in Australia. The breadth of their vocabulary knowledge was measured with a vocabulary size test, while the depth of their…

A large body of evidence shows an animacy effect on memory in that animate entities are better remembered than inanimate ones. Yet, the reason for this mnemonic prioritization remains unclear. In the survival processing literature, the assumption that richness of encoding is responsible for adaptive memory benefits has received substantial…

Stimuli that capture the central tendency of presented exemplars are often preferred--a phenomenon also known as the classic beauty-in-averageness effect. However, recent studies have shown that this effect can reverse under certain conditions. We propose that a key variable for such ugliness-in-averageness effects is the category structure of the…

This study examines the effect of textual enhancement on learners' attention to and learning of multiword units from captioned audiovisual input. We adopted a within-participants design in which 28 learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) watched a captioned video containing enhanced (underlined) and unenhanced multiword units. Using…

The study examined the predictions of regulatory fit theory (Higgins, 2000) in relation to task-based incidental vocabulary learning. A total of 189 English as a second language learners completed a vocabulary pretest, a regulatory focus questionnaire, an integrated reading/writing task, and finally an unannounced vocabulary posttest. The…

The present study brings together methods of extensive reading studies and eye-movement research to track the cognitive effects of exposure frequency on vocabulary processing and learning. Forty-two advanced second language learners of English read a stage 1 graded reader, "Goodbye Mr. Hollywood," on a computer screen while their eye…

This article reports on a classroom-based experiment that tested the effects of three vocabulary teaching constructs (involvement load, spacing, and intentionality) on the learning of English verb-noun collocations--for example, "shelve a plan." Laufer and Hulstijn's (2001) "involvement load" predicts that the higher the…

The relation between incidental word learning and two cognitive-linguistic variables--phonological memory and phonological awareness--is not fully understood. Thirty-five typically developing, 5-year-old, preschool children participated in a study examining the association between phonological memory, phonological awareness, and incidental word…