Previous research indicates that, under explicit instructions to listen to spoken stimuli or in speech-oriented behavioural tasks, the brain's responses to senseless pseudowords are larger than those to meaningful words; the reverse is true in non-attended conditions. These differential responses could be used as a tool to trace linguistic…

Children up to school age have been reported to perform poorly when interpreting sentences containing restrictive and additive focus particles by treating sentences with a focus particle in the same way as sentences without it. Careful comparisons between results of previous studies indicate that this phenomenon is less pronounced for restrictive…

Although it is assumed that semantics is a critical component of visual word recognition, there is still much that we do not understand. One recent way of studying semantic processing has been in terms of semantic neighbourhood (SN) density, and this research has shown that semantic neighbours facilitate lexical decisions. However, it is not clear…

Mediated priming refers to the faster word recognition of a target (e.g., milk) following presentation of a prime (e.g., pasture) that is related indirectly via a connecting "mediator" (e.g., cow). Association strength may be an important factor in whether mediated priming occurs prospectively (with target activation prior to its presentation) or…

Bilingual speakers generally manifest slower word recognition than monolinguals. We investigated the consequences of the word processing speed on semantic access in bilinguals. The paradigm involved a stream of English words and pseudowords presented in succession at a constant rate. English-Welsh bilinguals and English monolinguals were asked to…

This experiment used the masked priming lexical decision task to address previous contradictory evidence about the relative strength of priming for (i) transparent pairs (e.g., "worker" "WORK") which are morphologically and semantically related; (ii) opaque pairs (e.g., "corner" "CORN") which appear to be morphological relatives but are not…

An ongoing debate on second language (L2) processing revolves around whether or not L2 learners process syntactic information similarly to monolinguals (L1), and what factors lead to a native-like processing. According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a), L2 learners' processing does not include abstract syntactic…

This study investigated fast mapping in late-talking (LT) toddlers and toddlers with normal language (NL) development matched on age, nonverbal cognition, and maternal education. The fast-mapping task included novel object labels and familiar words. The LT group scored significantly lower than the NL group on novel word comprehension and…

The present study sheds light on the interplay between lexical and decision processes in the lexical decision task by exploring the effects of lexical decision difficulty on semantic priming effects. In 2 experiments, we increased lexical decision difficulty by either using transposed letter wordlike nonword distracters (e.g., JUGDE; Experiment 1)…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

It remains controversial whether children are able to process and integrate specific linguistic cues in their mental model to the same extent as adults. In the present study, a sentence continuation task was employed to determine how Italian speakers (4-, 5-, 6-year-olds and adults) interpret prosodic cues to decide which referent is more salient…

In addition to serving as question markers with interrogative force, "wh"-words such as "shenme" "what" in Mandarin Chinese have a noninterrogative meaning. For the noninterrogative meaning, these words have been typically analyzed as negative polarity items, i.e., as "wh"-pronouns that are similar in…

The field of Instructed Second Language Acquisition (ISLA) has expressed interest in pursuing a research agenda that expands the current heritage language (HL) strand of research to investigate how this heterogeneous population re-learns their family language, and how this experience differs from that of second language (L2) learners. This…

Knowledge about word and object meanings can be organized taxonomically (fruits, mammals, etc.) on the basis of shared features or thematically (eating breakfast, taking a dog for a walk, etc.) on the basis of participation in events or scenarios. An eye-tracking study showed that both kinds of knowledge are activated during comprehension of a…

Accounts of memory that postulate complementary learning systems (CLS) have become increasingly influential in the field of language learning. These accounts predict that generalisation of newly learnt linguistic information to untrained contexts requires offline memory consolidation. Such generalisation should not be observed immediately after…