Are oral sentences accompanied by pictures easier to understand than written sentences accompanied by the same pictures? This question--intensely discussed for more than two decades in educational, psychological, and psycholinguistic research in terms of "modality effect in multimedia learning," "split-attention effect," or…

Prediction in language comprehension has become a key mechanism in recent psycholinguistic theory, with evidence from lexical prediction as a primary source. Less work has focused on whether comprehenders also make structural predictions above the lexical level. Previous research shows that processing is facilitated for syntactic structures which…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

Two experiments tracked the encoding of relational information (actions at the level of the prelinguistic message and verbs at the level of the sentence) during formulation of transitive event descriptions (e.g., The tiger is scratching the photographer). At what point during message and sentence formulation do speakers encode actions and verbs?…

Vocabulary researchers have started expanding their assessment toolbox by incorporating timed tasks and psycholinguistic instruments (e.g., priming tasks) to gain insights into lexical development (e.g., Elgort, 2011; Godfroid, 2020b; Nakata & Elgort, 2020; Vandenberghe et al., 2021). These timed sensitive and implicit word measures differ…

Previous studies have found that bilinguals differ in their response times on the bilingual version of Stroop Task. Automaticity and control and Language proficiency have emerged as important factors that lead to differences in the response time. This study aimed to understand Stroop Effect in Hindi-English bilinguals on the computerized version…

Most research in psycholinguistics relies on online measures such as reading time to inform and test theories of language comprehension. However, the value of offline measures such as question-answering performance is sometimes overlooked in sentence processing work. Consequently, psycholinguists do not yet understand how the tasks and measures…

One of the major aims of discourse-processing literature is to understand whether and when readers form discourse-level representations online. To test this, two word-by-word, self-paced reading experiments investigated the time course of integrating incoming information about the protagonist into the unfolding discourse-level representation in…

This article on interactional competence provides an overview of the historical influences that have shaped theoretical conceptualisations of this construct as it relates to spoken language use, leading to the current view of it as involving both cognitive and social dimensions, and then describes its operationalisation in tests and assessment…

This dissertation aims to identify the locus of L2 processing inefficiency. Previous studies suggest that non-native processing is a specific result of an inefficient predictive mechanism that limits the ability of learners to generate linguistic expectations (Gruter, Rohde, & Schafer, 2014; 2016). Thus, this study employs two distinct online…

This study investigates the on-line processing of scrambled sentences in Japanese by preschool children and adults using a combination of self-paced listening and speeded picture selection tasks. The effects of a filler-gap dependency, reversibility, and case markers were examined. The results show that both children and adults had difficulty in…

This article provides experimental evidence for the role of lexically specific representations in the processing of passive sentences and considerable education-related differences in comprehension of the passive construction. The experiment measured response time and decision accuracy of participants with high and low academic attainment using an…

Indirect metaphors are pervasive in everyday language: People talk about "long" vacations, "short" tempers, and "colorful" language. But, why do we use concrete lexical items that are associated with the physical world when we talk about abstract, or non-physical, concepts? A potential answer is provided by proponents…

Two experiments examined the restriction of referential domains during unscripted conversation by analyzing the modification and online interpretation of referring expressions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that from the earliest moments of processing, addressees interpreted referring expressions with respect to referential domains constrained by the…

In two experiments, naive participants took turns telling each other to click on a target picture while gaze was monitored. Critical trials included a "contrast" picture that differed from the target only in size. In both experiments, the timing of speakers' fixations on the contrast predicted whether the contrast was encoded in a phrase with a…