The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

While recent studies find that contextual diversity (CD) is a better determinant of visual word recognition than token frequency, there is a dearth of work comparing contextual diversity and token frequency in developing readers. In two sets of character and lexical decision experiments we examined token frequency and contextual diversity effects…

Vocabulary researchers have started expanding their assessment toolbox by incorporating timed tasks and psycholinguistic instruments (e.g., priming tasks) to gain insights into lexical development (e.g., Elgort, 2011; Godfroid, 2020b; Nakata & Elgort, 2020; Vandenberghe et al., 2021). These timed sensitive and implicit word measures differ…

Recent research investigating embedded stem priming effects with the masked priming paradigm and pseudoword primes (e.g., "quickify"--"quick") has shown that priming effects can be obtained even when the embedded target word is followed by a non-morphological ending (e.g., "quickald"--"quick"). Here we…

This study investigated the effects of word frequency, collocational frequency, L1 congruency, and L2 proficiency, on L2 collocational processing. Two groups of L1 Japanese speakers of English (intermediate and advanced) and one group of English native speakers (NSs) performed an online acceptability judgment task on four types of adjective-noun…

The present research examines the mechanisms underlying the comprehension of focus alternatives. In particular, we investigate whether listeners determine alternatives based on general semantic priming mechanisms or whether they only consider contrastive alternatives, elements that can replace the expression in focus. In a probe recognition…