In the history of psycholinguistics, there are traditional accounts that have been told about language learning and processing. These accounts revolve around the constraints imposed by the age of language learning and by universal principles that are assumed to be natively given. The contribution of Brian MacWhinney and his collaborators has been…

Word finding difficulty is a frequently reported subjective cognitive concern among persons with Multiple Sclerosis (pwMS). Word-finding relies on several information retrieval processes, including search and retrieval from the conceptual store, the phonological store, the syllabary, as well as other stores of information. Neuropsychological…

It has long been believed across languages that the "Agent-First" strategy, a comprehension heuristic that maps the first noun onto the agent role, is a general cognitive bias which applies automatically and faithfully to children's comprehension. The present study asks how this strategy interplays with such grammatical cues as the…

Using a free-recall paradigm, we explored the effects of age of acquisition and category size on verbal fluency in Turkish Sign Language (Türk Isaret Dili [TID]). We studied the semantic and phonological fluency task performances of deaf native and deaf late adult signers. We measured the number of correct responses and performed a time course…

Understanding how a child's language system develops into an adult-like system is a central question in language development research. An increasingly influential account proposes that the brain constantly generates top-down predictions and matches them against incoming input, with higher-level cognitive models serving to minimize prediction…

A central question in multilingualism research is how multiple languages interact. Most studies have focused on first (L1) and second language (L2) effects on a third language (L3), but a small number of studies dedicated to the opposite transfer direction have suggested stronger L3 influence on L2 than on L1 in postpuberty learners. In our study,…

Redundant modifiers can facilitate referential interpretation by narrowing attention to intended referents. This is intriguing because, on traditional accounts, redundancy should impair comprehension. Little is known, however, about the effects of redundancy on older adults' comprehension. Older adults may show different patterns due to…

This text comments on the Keynote article 'Microvariation in multilingual situations: The importance of property-by-property acquisition' by Marit Westergaard, who argues for Full Transfer Potential within the Linguistic Proximity Model in third language (L3) acquisition. The commentary points at some theoretical and methodological issues related…

Perception verbs and mental verbs have significant overlap in their syntax and semantics; both reference mental representations when taking embedded clauses, as in "I see that Maria was here" and "I think that Maria was here." Some have suggested that perception is more accessible for young children than mental states, raising…

A large body of research suggests that spoken language processing is heavily influenced by social characteristics of the speaker, and conversely, that socio-cognitive processing is influenced by the language spoken by our interlocutors. However, little is known about the extent to which this interaction that is observed in adulthood has its roots…

Word knowledge and the speed of word processing in monolingual children and adults are influenced by word properties, such as the age of acquisition (AoA), imageability, and frequency. Understanding how different properties of words contribute to the ease of processing by bilingual children is a critical step for establishing models of childhood…

Purpose: This study examines intraword variability in 40 typically developing French-speaking monolingual and bilingual children, aged 2;6-4;8 (years;months). Specifically, it measures rate of intraword variability and investigates which factors best account for it. They include child-specific ones such as age, expressive vocabulary, gender,…

This study examined whether the proposed bilingual advantage in inhibitory control and working memory can be extended to a trilingual advantage, and assessed any age-related effects on a continuum in young adults to older adults. Trilinguals, bilinguals and monolinguals' performance on the Simon task and a numerical version of the N-back task was…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

Introduction: Baddeley's model of working memory establishes the basis for identifying components that intervene in immediate repetition verbal tasks. Based on this model, the overall aim of the present study was to analyze the relationship between auditory sequential memory and verbal memory in students with intellectual disabilities and thereby…