This study investigates the influence of semantic maturation on early lexical development by examining the impact of contextual diversity--known to influence semantic development--on word promotion from receptive to productive vocabularies (i.e., comprehension-expression gap). Study 1 compares the vocabularies of 3685 American-English-speaking…

Language switch costs have been explored less in receptive tasks than in productive tasks, and previous studies have produced mixed findings with regard to switch cost symmetry and the relationship of switch costs to executive function. To address these unresolved gaps, one hundred Chinese-English bilingual adults completed a bilingual lexical…

Purpose: We investigated four theoretically based latent variable models of word learning in young school-age children. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second graders with typical development from three U.S. states participated. They completed five different tasks designed to assess children's creation, storage, retrieval, and…

Individuals with autism exhibit significant impairments in prosody production, yet there is a paucity of research on prosody comprehension in this population. The current study adapted a psycholinguistic paradigm to examine whether individuals with autism are able to use prosody to resolve syntactically ambiguous sentences. Participants were 21…

Emphasizes that auditory lexical decision has wide applicability and that the paradigm is currently used to study basic processes in word recognition, the nature of the mental lexicon, effects of word frequency, neighbor effects and various other phenomena of isolated word perception. Article reviews the strengths and weaknesses of this task. (54…

Communicative proficiency, defined as native-like ability to use the language as a medium of two-way communication, is most effectively and efficiently achieved through instruction emphasizing development of listening and reading comprehension skills, and virtually excluding training in production. The comprehension approach avoids the teaching of…