We investigated whether cross-language activation is sensitive to shifting language demands and language experience during first and second language (i.e., L1, L2) reading. Experiment 1 consisted of L1 French-L2 English bilinguals reading in the L2, and Experiment 2 consisted of L1 English-L2 French bilinguals reading in the L1. Both groups read…

In the light of evidence that attention can facilitate and enhance learning, this study attempts to investigate the allocation of attention to meaning and form simultaneously in reading comprehension in the foreign language among monolingual and bilingual learners of English. To this end, three groups of learners namely, bilingual (knowing…

The current study investigated the extent to which L2 learners' productive vocabulary knowledge could predict multiple dimensions of spontaneous speech production. A total of 39 English as a foreign language (EFL) participants with varying L2 proficiency levels first completed a productive vocabulary knowledge task (Lex30). Their spontaneous…

Native-English speaking adults use morphological decomposition to understand complex words (e.g. "farmer" becomes "farm-er"). Whether decomposition is driven by semantic organization is still unclear. It is also unclear whether ESL adults and elementary age children use the same word processing strategies as native speaking…

This paper provides an agenda for replication studies focusing on second language (L2) writing and the use of natural language processing (NLP) tools and machine learning algorithms. Specifically, it introduces a range of the available NLP tools and machine learning algorithms and demonstrates how these could be used to replicate seminal studies…

Cross-situational word learning, like any statistical learning problem, involves tracking the regularities in the environment. However, the information that learners pick up from these regularities is dependent on their learning mechanism. This article investigates the role of one type of mechanism in statistical word learning: competition.…

Most current accounts of color word acquisition propose that the delay between children's first production of color words and adult-like understanding is due to problems abstracting color as a domain of meaning. Here we present evidence against this hypothesis, and show that, from the time children produce color words in a labeling task they use…

Kousta, Vigliocco, Del Campo, Vinson, and Andrews (2011) questioned the adequacy of dual coding theory and the context availability model as explanations of representational and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. They proposed an alternative approach that focuses on the role of emotional content in the processing of…

Focus structure has a profound effect on language production and processing. Yet, despite that focus has so much influence on an utterance, it still remains unclear what the meaning of focus is. Some theories consider focus to be entirely pragmatic, having no influence on the truth conditions or presuppositions of a focused sentence. Other…

The evolution of the Web brought new interesting problems to computer scientists that we loosely classify in the fields of social and semantic computing. Social computing is related to two major paradigms: computations carried out by a large amount of people in a collective intelligence fashion (i.e. wikis), and performing computations on social…

Many studies have demonstrated that listeners use information extracted from verbs to guide anticipatory eye movements to objects in the visual context that satisfy the selection restrictions of the verb. An important question is what underlies such verb-mediated anticipatory eye gaze. Based on empirical and theoretical suggestions, we…

We document weak garden paths after intransitive verbs, modulated by intransitivity type, in the treatment of DP[subscript 1] V[subscript intransitive] DP[subscript 2] V[subscript 2] sequences as in "As the journalist arrived the editor postponed the meeting" in first language (L1) and second language (L2) sentence processing. In a…

This study investigated the effectiveness of providing L1 explicit information (EI) with practice for making more accurate and faster interpretations of L2 French "Imparfait" (IMP). Two treatments were investigated: (a) "L2-only," providing EI about the L2 with L2 interpretation practice, and (b) "L2+L1," providing…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of healthy aging on the ability to suppress grammatically illicit antecedents during pronoun resolution. Method: In 2 reading-based acceptability-judgment experiments, younger and older speakers of German read sentences containing an object pronoun and 2 potential antecedent noun…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…