This research addressed the question of whether children understand proper names differently from descriptions. We examined how children extend these two types of expressions from an initial object (a truck) owned by the experimenter to two identical objects created by transforming the initial object, both owned by the experimenter. Adults and…

How do we decide whether a statement is literally true? Here, we contrast participants' eventual evaluations of a speaker's meaning with the real-time processes of comprehension. We record participants' eye movements as they respond to potentially misleading instructions to click on one of two objects which might be concealing treasure ("the…

It hasn't been clear how holistic and analytic processing contribute to character recognition yet. The current study focused on two issues: (1) whether configural processing is sufficient to support the performance of identifying characters in absence of analytic processing; (2) whether configural processing involves multiple levels of character…

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used…

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-…

Contemporary models of adult speech perception acknowledge that the processing of linguistic and nonlinguistic aspects of the speech signal are interdependent. But when in development does this interdependence first emerge? In the adult literature, one way to demonstrate this relationship has been to examine how language experience affects talker…

Although major advances have been made in research on language learning strategies (LLS), there are some areas that have been somewhat surprisingly neglected by specialists. This applies without doubt to the strategies that learners draw on to better understand and learn grammar rules but also to employ grammar structures in real-time processing,…

Purpose: The ability to recognize individuals from their vocalizations is an important trait of human beings. In the current study, we aimed to examine how congenital amusia, an inborn pitch-processing disorder, affects discrimination and identification of talkers' voices. Method: Twenty Mandarin-speaking amusics and 20 controls were tested on…

Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

Purpose: Recovery from aphasia is thought to depend on neural plasticity, that is, functional reorganization of surviving brain regions such that they take on new or expanded roles in language processing. To make progress in characterizing the nature of this process, we need feasible, reliable, and valid methods for identifying language regions of…

This study investigated the presence of word reading difficulties in a sample of students in Grades 1-4 (n = 357) identified with language and reading comprehension difficulties. This study also examined whether distinct word reading and listening comprehension profiles emerged within this sample and the extent to which these groups varied in…

This exploratory study aimed at developing a dyslexia assessment tool in the Amharic language and to collect initial reliability and validity data on the tool designed to identify dyslexia in Grade 3. The developed battery consists of 10 tests. Data were collected from 121 Amharic-speaking children, aged 9-12 years. Evidence of construct validity…

In recent years, stronger literacy development has emerged as a critically important issue in Arabic speaking nations. Results of international assessments indicate that most of the participating Arab countries are near the bottom of achievement levels. Additionally, recent studies indicate the prevalence rate of reading disability ranges from…

Background: Idiom skills are essential for children to access age-appropriate media, curriculum resources and teaching. Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) require support to develop the ability to understand and define idioms. However, research investigating one-to-one and classroom-based idiom skill intervention for children with…