Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

This research aims to address the current gaps in computer-assisted translation (CAT) courses offered in bachelor's and master's programmes in scientific and technical translation (STT). A multi-framework course design methodology is proposed to support CAT teachers from the computer engineering field, improve student engagement, and promote…

The radical exemplar model resonates with work on perceptual classification and categorization highlighting the role of exemplars in memory representations. Further development of the model requires acknowledgment of both the fleeting and fragile nature of perceptual representations and the gist-based, good-enough quality of long-term memory…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

This paper reports on an empirical experiment in which a group of MA student translators justified their translation solutions. The aim of the work was to determine to what extent students rely on their theoretical knowledge of translation in their justifications and use the metalanguage of the field. The data consists of transcribed…

Considerable reason exists to view the mind, and language within it, as modular, and this view has an important place in research and theory in second language acquisition (SLA) and beyond. But it has had very little impact on the study of working memory and its role in SLA. This article considers the need for modular study of working memory,…

Analysis of second language (L2) learners' language development can allow valid and reliable assessment of the learners' L2 linguistic knowledge, which can enable the teachers and researchers to choose appropriate teaching or experimental materials (Bardovi-Harlig & Bofman, 1989; Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1997). However, most language development…

Discourse coherence is a common phenomenon in linguistic studies, and plays an important role in discourse analysis. As a common and extremely important type of language phenomena, discourse coherence has drawn more and more scholars' attention, but they emphasis on partial discourse coherence, paying a little attention to holistic coherence. The…

I will propose a tentative framework of how words in two languages could be organized in the cerebral cortex based on neural assembly theory, according to which neurons that fire synchronously are bound into large-scale distributed functional units (assemblies), which represent a mental event as a whole ("gestalt"). For language this…

Understanding the place of consciousness in second language acquisition (SLA) is crucial for an understanding of how acquisition occurs. Considerable work has been done on this topic, but nearly all of it assumes a highly non-modular view, according to which language and its development is "nothing special". As this assumption runs…

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as "In the park".... Three self-paced reading…

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…

This article presents a didactic experience carried out in the Degree of Translation and Interpreting (English) at Pablo de Olavide University in Seville and it is part of a project of Innovation and Teaching Development. The main objective is the development in students of a metaphoric competence -- metaphorical awareness and strategies to…

We examined anaphora resolution in children with and without Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) to clarify whether (i) DLD is best understood as missing knowledge of certain linguistic operations/elements or as unreliable performance and (ii) if comprehension of sentences with anaphoric expressions as objects and exceptionally case marked (ECM)…