Givenness tends to lead to acoustic reduction in speech, but little is known about whether linguistic and non-linguistic givenness affect reduction similarly, and there is little consensus about the underlying psychological mechanisms. We examined speakers' pronunciations of target object nouns in an instruction-giving task, where speakers saw…

Task effects in semantic processing were investigated by contrasting the neural activation associated with two semantic categorization tasks (SCT) using event-related fMRI. The two SCTs involved different decision categories: "is it an animal?" vs. "is it a concrete thing?" Participants completed both tasks and, across participants, the same core…

The maze task is a psycholinguistic experimental procedure that measures real-time incremental sentence processing. The task has recently been tested as a language learning tool with promising results. Therefore, the present study examines the merits of a contextualized version of this task: the story maze. The findings are consistent with…

The purpose of this research was to understand better how morphemic units are encoded and auto-organised in memory and how they are accessed during writing. We hypothesised that the activation of morphemic units would not depend on rule-based learning during primary school but would be determined by frequency-based learning, which is a process…

The present study investigates the influence of word category on naming performance in two populations: bilingual and monolingual children. The question is whether and, if so, to what extent monolingual and bilingual children differ with respect to noun and verb naming and whether a noun bias exists in the lexical abilities of bilingual children.…

We investigated whether individual differences in inhibitory control relate to bilingual spoken word recognition. While their eye movements were monitored, native English and native French English-French bilinguals listened to English words (e.g., "field") and looked at pictures corresponding to the target, a within-language competitor…

In order to comprehend speech, listeners have to combine low-level phonetic information about the incoming auditory signal with higher-order contextual information to make a lexical selection. This requires stable phonological categories and unambiguous representations of words in the mental lexicon. Unlike native speakers, second language (L2)…

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…

Linguistic dependencies between non-adjacent words have been shown to cause comprehension difficulty, compared with local dependencies. According to one class of sentence comprehension accounts, non-local dependencies are difficult because they require the retrieval of the first dependent from memory when the second dependent is encountered.…

Several neuropsychological studies have reported that patients with memory deficits exhibit a dissociation of effects attributed to semantic and lexical-phonological information in verbal working memory (e.g., Reilly, Martin, & Grossman, 2005; Romani & Martin, 1999). The present study reports on 3 experiments conducted with individuals without…

In this article we focus on "false cognates", lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them.…

This study explores the widely documented difficulty children have with object clitics in the acquisition of Romance languages. It reports on two experiments: a production task and a comprehension task. Results from the elicitation task confirm that object omission occurs at nonnegligible rates in 2- and 3-year-olds. Findings from the…

While it is well recognized that students are prone to difficulties when performing linguistic-to-algebra translations, the nature of students' difficulties remain an issue of contention. Moreover, the literature indicates that these difficulties are not easily remediated by domain-specific instruction. Some have opined that this is the case…

The present study aims to investigate the role of extensive reading in the acquisition of implicit phonological knowledge. Through extensive exposure to print, L2 learners can improve their phonological processing skills, and this could contribute to their word recognition fluency. On the basis of the Oxford Placement Test, 30 9th graders and 30…

Three experiments were conducted to investigate how syntactic-category and semantic information is processed in visual word recognition. The stimuli were two-character Chinese words in which semantic and syntactic-category ambiguities were factorially manipulated. A lexical decision task was employed in Experiment 1, whereas a semantic relatedness…