Prediction is one characteristic of the human mind. But what does it mean to say the mind is a "prediction machine" and "inherently forward looking" as is frequently claimed? In natural languages, many contexts are not easily predictable in a forward fashion. In English, for example, many frequent verbs do not carry unique…

Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners' prior expectations about how component units co-occur. In this study, we investigated how adults' prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning…

Individuals with aphasia (IWA) often exhibit challenges in single word reading as well as in reading comprehension. Recently, eye-tracking technology has become instrumental in delving deeper into reading behaviors. Specifically, it has illuminated the differences in word reading and comprehension abilities among aphasic English speakers. However,…

Aspectual and mood morphology are vulnerable domains in adult heritage speakers. This paper investigates the root of such vulnerability within the domain of Turkish evidentiality system by comparing 20 second-generation adult and 20 school-age child Turkish heritage speakers to 20 first-generation immigrants (main input providers for child…

This article discusses the function of a particular feature of sign language--mouth action--as it is expressed in various discourse contexts. Specifically, we examine forms of mouthing and mouth gesture as they are used in signed narrative and expository texts, highlighting the signers' choices during the production of these two text types. We…

Purpose: The current study aimed to investigate the behavioral and electrophysiological patterns of the sentence superiority effect (SSE) in sentence repetition in monolingual adults with typical language development. The ultimate goal of this study is to establish the foundation for future studies of SSE in sentence repetition in individuals with…

Verbal morphology has been identified as a particularly vulnerable domain for adult heritage speakers (HSs) of Spanish, especially when it involves the selection of subjunctive mood. A minimal amount is known, however, about the potential effects of the variability associated with these forms on the acquisition of related epiphenomena, such as the…

This study investigated English phonological awareness in adult native speakers of English (L1) and in relation to their phonological awareness skills and proficiency in their German (L2). Most research in L1 phonological awareness focuses on younger children, their phonological awareness development, the relationship between reading and…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

Foreign accents can vary considerably in the degree to which they deviate from the listener's native accent, but little is known about how the relationship between a speaker's accent and a listener's native language phonology mediates adaptation. Using an artificial accent methodology, we addressed this issue by constructing a set of three…

This paper explores the hypothesis that children pay more attention to phonological cues than semantic cues when acquiring grammatical patterns. In a series of artificial allomorphy learning experiments with adults and children we find support for this hypothesis but only for those learners who do not show clear signs of explicit learning. In…

The study investigates the effect of the perception of text and task difficulty on adults' performance in reading tests in L1 and L2. The relationship between the following variables is studied: (a) readers' perception of text and task difficulty in L1 and L2 measured in a self-reported post-task questionnaire, (b) the number of correct answers to…

This study compared Spanish-English bilinguals' and English monolinguals' VOT values for /b, d, g/ in cognates and non-cognates. Twenty-six young adult participants (fourteen bilinguals and twelve monolinguals, mean age 24 years) were administered a picture-naming task, balanced for cognate and non-cognate forms. VOT values of 30 target words per…

This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers' use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers' sensitivity to cues "all" and "any" in scalar implicature (SI) computation for "some." This article and our experimental setup does…

Access to definitions facilitates the learning of word meanings when novel words are encountered in reading. However, the memorial costs and benefits of inferring word meanings from context, compared to seeing definitions of unfamiliar words before reading, are not yet well understood. We conducted two experiments with adult L1 (English) and L2…