It is widely assumed that subliminal word priming is case insensitive and that a short SOA (< 100 ms) is required to observe any effects. Here we attempted to replicate results from an influential study with the inclusion of a longer SOA to re-examine these assumptions. Participants performed a semantic categorisation task on visible word…

In 'Against Stored Abstractions,' Ambridge uses neural and computational evidence to make his case against abstract representations. He argues that storing only exemplars is more parsimonious -- why bother with abstraction when exemplar models with on-the-fly calculation can do everything abstracting models can and more -- and implies that his…

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

Existing work on the acquisition of polarity-sensitive expressions (PSIs) suggests that children show an early sensitivity to the restricted distribution of negative polarity items (NPIs), but may be delayed in the acquisition of positive polarity items (PPIs). However, past studies primarily targeted PSIs that are highly frequent in children's…

Spelling poses a challenge to Arabic-speaking learners due to the complexity of the morphological and orthographic systems in Arabic. Arabic morphology has been argued to play a critical role in spelling since its morphological operations are built on a system consisting of a root that is interlocking into different patterns of vowels to form…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

Despite the proliferation of video-based instruction and its benefits--such as promoting student autonomy and self-paced learning--the complexities of online teaching remain a challenge. To be effective, educators require extensive training in digital teaching methodologies. As such, there's a pressing need to examine and comprehend the…

Two lines of evidence emerged in the past suggesting that lexical form seemed to play a more important role in the organization of the second language (L2) mental lexicon than in that of the first language (L1) lexicon. They were masked orthographic priming in L2 word recognition and an elevated proportion of form-related responses in L2 word…

In view of the complicated translation cognitive process, the study investigated and compared students' translation process of Chinese Classics through translation thinking path schema. Seventy-six participants learning translation courses based on parallel level in two classes of one Chinese university, some of them trained for four months…

In order to investigate the internal factors present in the interlanguage of learners of English as a foreign language, a qualitative research study was implemented to analyze the written productions of college students. The main objective of this case study was to identify the type of errors the students made and suggest the cognitive reasons…

Language exposure plays a large role in language acquisition, and bilingual children must acquire both of their languages in environments that typically include abundant speech variability. The specific goals of this dissertation were to examine how speech exposure affected phonological retuning and lexical access in bilingual children's second…

This study examined two possible sources of asymmetrical lexical access: phonetic proximity to the nearest L1 category and orthographic information. Three groups of native Korean speakers learned Arabic non-words with sound pairs with/without an L1-dominant category (/l-r/ vs. /?-h/), and then their phonetic categorization and lexical encoding…

Subject-verb agreement constitutes a robust characteristic of French. However, especially at beginner and intermediate levels, second language (L2) learners might substitute or fail to recognize an infinitive for a conjugated verb, or a 3rd person singular form for a plural form, as "Les enfants mangera" (The children will eat--3rd…