Recent research on the effects of processing instruction (PI) have incorporated online research methods in order to demonstrate that PI has effects on cognitive processing behaviors as well as on accuracy (e.g. Lee & Doherty, 2019a). The present study uses self-paced reading and a moving windows technique to examine the effects of PI on second…

Many studies have previously reported that the recognition of a stem target (e.g., "teach") is facilitated by the prior masked presentation of a prime consisting of a derived form of it (e.g., "teacher"). We conducted two lexical decision experiments to investigate masked morphological priming in Spanish. Experiment 1 showed…

Why is it more difficult to comprehend a 2nd (L2) than a 1st language (L1)? In the present article we investigate whether difficulties during L2 sentence comprehension come from differences in the way L1 and L2 speakers anticipate upcoming words. We recorded the brain activity (event-related potentials) of Spanish monolinguals, French-Spanish late…

This study investigates brain potentials to derived word forms in Spanish. Two experiments were performed on derived nominals that differ in terms of their productivity and semantic properties but are otherwise similar, an acceptability judgment task and a reading experiment using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) in which correctly and…

Word age-of-acquisition (AoA) affects reading. The mapping hypothesis predicts AoA effects when input--output mappings are arbitrary. In Spanish, the orthography-to-phonology mappings required for word naming are consistent; therefore, no AoA effects are expected. Nevertheless, AoA effects have been found, motivating the present investigation of…

The study of lexical aspect is one of the linguistic fields that has aroused most interest over the past 50 years. However, the psychological reality of the lexical aspect is a question that still remains unresolved. Empirical evidence is needed to account for the fact that speakers set cognitive differences among aspectual classes, as well as how…

This paper reports the findings of a small-scale study which focused on reading strategy instruction for learners of French or Spanish as a modern foreign language. The objective of the study was to explore the potential of reading strategy instruction in raising the learner readers' awareness of reading strategies, in extending the range of…