Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…

Research on pragmatic awareness of language learners has mainly focused on the target language. As argued by some scholars, a multilingual perspective should also be adopted in the analysis of pragmatic awareness. In fact, existing findings point to the peculiar characteristics of multilingual pragmatic comprehension and awareness. Bearing these…

Material development is important for training beginner student interpreters, as it guides the direction of interpreting learning. One key principle is difficulty progression, which requires a good knowledge of the indicators of difficulty. Since text structure outweighs words and sentences in the information processing of consecutive…

The present study aims to explore the effects of corpus-based teaching on English language learners' pragmatic comprehension and production of 19 formulaic sequences (FS), categorized under agreements, disagreements, self-clarifications and other-clarifications. The study had a quasi-experimental research design with a pre-test, immediate…

This article on interactional competence provides an overview of the historical influences that have shaped theoretical conceptualisations of this construct as it relates to spoken language use, leading to the current view of it as involving both cognitive and social dimensions, and then describes its operationalisation in tests and assessment…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

During speech comprehension, bilinguals co-activate both of their languages, resulting in cross-linguistic interaction at various levels of processing. This interaction has important consequences for both the structure of the language system and the mechanisms by which the system processes spoken language. Using computational modeling, we can…

Construction grammar (CG) has been proposed as an adequate grammatical formalism for building intelligent language tutoring systems because it is highly compatible with the learning strategies observed in second language learning. Unfortunately, the lack of computational CG implementations has made it impossible in the past to corroborate these…

We used eye-tracking to investigate lexical processing in aphasic participants by examining the fixation time course for rhyme (e.g., "carrot-parrot") and cohort (e.g., "beaker-beetle") competitors. Broca's aphasic participants exhibited larger rhyme competition effects than age-matched controls. A re-analysis of previously reported data (Yee,…

Children find object relative clauses difficult. They show poor comprehension that lags behind production into their fifth year. This finding has shaped models of relative clause acquisition, with appeals to processing heuristics or syntactic preferences to explain why object relatives are more difficult than subject relatives. Two studies here…

The phonetic context in which word-medial flaps occur (in contrast to [t[superscript h]]) in American English is explored. The analysis focuses on stress placement, following phone, and syllabification. In Experiment 1, subjects provided their preference for [t[superscript h]] or [flapped t] in bisyllabic nonce words. Consistent with previous…

Hesitation disfluencies after phonetically prominent stranded function words are thought to reflect the cognitive coding of complex structures. Speech fragments following the Swedish function word "att" "that" were analyzed syntactically, and divided into two groups: one with "att" in disfluent contexts, and the other with "att" in fluent…

Recent research suggests that phonotactic probability (the likelihood of occurrence of a sound sequence) and neighborhood density (the number of words phonologically similar to a given word) influence spoken language processing and acquisition across the lifespan in both normal and clinical populations. The majority of research in this area has…

We report an experiment in which subjects named 120 pictures, consisting of series of five pictures drawn from each of 24 semantic categories (and intermixed with 45 fillers). The number of intervening trials (lag) between successive presentations of members of the same category varied from two to eight. Subjects' naming latencies were slowed by…