Reading disability in children with dyslexia has been proposed to reflect impairment in auditory timing perception. We investigated one aspect of timing perception--"temporal grouping"--as present in prosodic phrase boundaries of natural speech, in age-matched groups of children, ages 6-8 years, with and without dyslexia. Prosodic phrase…

The provision of visual support to individuals with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is widely recommended. We explored one mechanism underlying the use of visual supports: efficiency of language processing. Two groups of children, one with and one without an ASD, participated. The groups had comparable oral and written language skills and…

Negated words take longer to recognize than non-negated words following sentences with negation, suggesting that negated concepts are less active. The present experiments tested the possibility that this reduced activation would not persist beyond immediate testing. Experiment 1 used a probe task and materials similar to those used in previous…

Models of bilingual reading such as Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002) do not predict a central role for domain-general executive control during bilingual reading, in contrast with bilingual models from other domains, such as production (e.g., the Inhibitory Control Model; Green, 1998). We thus investigated…

Verb inflectional morphology and prepositions are loci of difficulty for bilingual children with typical language development (TLD) as well as children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI). This paper examines errors in these linguistic domains in these two populations. Bilingual English-Hebrew and Russian-Hebrew preschool children, aged five…

Whether information is routinely and nonstrategically evaluated for truth during comprehension is still a point of contention. Previous studies supporting the assumption of nonstrategic validation have used a Stroop-like paradigm in which participants provided yes/no judgments in tasks unrelated to the truth or plausibility of the experimental…

Purpose: To test the effects of 24 hr of sleep deprivation on auditory and linguistic perception and to assess the magnitude of this effect by comparing such performance with that of aging adults on speech perception and with that of dyslexic readers on phonological awareness. Method: Fifty-five sleep-deprived young adults were compared with 29…

This study intends to shed light on the inconclusive argument pertaining to children's acquisition of logical form (LF) operation. Specifically, we examined children's interpretations of sentences with the ambiguous modal verb "yinggai" "should," like "Xiaohua yinggai shangchuang shuijiao le", whose meanings…

In two self-paced, sentence-by-sentence reading experiments, we examined the difference in the processing of Spanish discourses containing overt and null pronouns. In both experiments, antecedents appeared in a single phrase ("John met Mary") or in a conjoined phrase ("John and Mary met"). In Experiment 1, we compared reading…

Why do questions about idioms often leave us "tongue-tied" in our classrooms? This book takes a look at learning and teaching idioms from two perspectives. First is a survey of recent work on learning and teaching idioms from diverse perspectives in the linguistics and educational research literature. The survey includes definitions of…

In this study, we report the results of two self-paced reading experiments that investigated working memory capacity effects on the processing of globally ambiguous relative clauses by advanced Korean second language (L2) learners of English. Consistent with previous monolingual literature on the processing of temporary ambiguity, we found that…

Research on morphological awareness has shown that it contributes to literacy outcomes. However, because of the way morphological awareness is traditionally measured, there is speculation that tasks may reflect cognitive flexibility, working memory, or some other type of executive processing, versus awareness of morphology. Further complicating…

In an English Foreign Language learning context, where access to native like use of metaphorical language is limited, gaining this ability becomes challenging. For many years, foreign language educators didn't pay much attention to idiomatic language and assumed that idioms could only be taught through rote learning. For this reason, they face…

This dissertation aims to identify the locus of L2 processing inefficiency. Previous studies suggest that non-native processing is a specific result of an inefficient predictive mechanism that limits the ability of learners to generate linguistic expectations (Gruter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014; 2016). Thus, this study employs two distinct online…

There is a growing theoretical, empirical, and methodological debate in the SLA field as to whether unawareness plays a role during attention to or processing of new incoming second language (L2) data. Indeed, studies that have methodologically addressed the construct of unawareness in their research designs offer both empirical support (e.g.,…