Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

The Multimedia Principle (Fletcher & Tobias, 2005) states that people learn better and comprehend more when words and pictures are presented together. The potential for English language learners to increase their comprehension of video through the use of captions, which graphically display the same language as the spoken dialogue, has been…

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…

This study examined Italian 7- to 9-year-olds' understanding of the connective "but" when used to relate two events in sentences embedded in short stories. Performance was largely accounted for by the cognitive complexity of the sentence that included the connective and the salience of its meaning (confirmed in a second study with…

This article discusses perceptions of and performance in listening by a group of heritage and non-heritage learners of Portuguese. Our data include a survey containing background information and perceptions about listening, two listening tasks and a post-task self-report on how learners arrived at their answers. Quantitative and qualitative…

This paper examines the impact of task complexity on L2 production. The study increases task complexity by progressively removing pre-task planning time and increasing the number of elements. The combined effects of manipulating these two variables of task complexity simultaneously are also analyzed. Using a repeated measures design, 42…

We examined free recall and metacognitive judgments of ambiguous sentences studied with and without clues to facilitate their comprehension. Sentences were either studied without clues, with clues meaningfully embedded, or with clues following a 10-s interval delay. After presentation, subjects made judgments of comprehension (JCOMPs) or judgments…

This paper analyses the effects of manipulating the cognitive complexity of L2 oral tasks on language production. It specifically focuses on self-repairs, which are taken as a measure of accuracy since they denote both attention to form and an attempt at being accurate. By means of a repeated measures design, 42 lower-intermediate students were…