As speakers interact, they add references to their common ground, which they can then reuse to facilitate listener comprehension. However, all references are not equally likely to be reused. The purpose of this study was to shed light on how the speakers' conceptualizations of the referents under discussion affect reuse (along with a generation…

This study examined the relationship between targeted pronunciation instruction in French as a second language (L2) and listener-based ratings of accent, comprehensibility, and fluency. The ratings by 20 French listeners evaluating the speech of 30 adult L2 French learners enrolled in a 15-week listening and speaking course targeting segments,…

In 4 experiments we showed that picture naming latencies are affected by beliefs about the task concurrently performed by another speaker. Participants took longer to name pictures when they believed that their partner concurrently named pictures than when they believed their partner was silent (Experiments 1 and 4) or concurrently categorized the…

This article reports on a study on the effect of orthography on L1-based phonological transfer in L2 production in 40 novice English-speaking learners of Spanish. In particular, the role of auditory-orthographic training and production and the influence of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are examined. Data elicited via a picture-naming task…

Developing mechanisms for predicting human action is a critical task of early conceptual development. Three studies examined whether 4-year-old children (N = 149) use social allegiances to predict behavior, by testing whether they expect the experiences of social partners to influence individual action. After being exposed to a conflict between…

The day-night paradigm, where children respond to a pair of pictures with opposite labels for a series of trials, is a widely used measure of interference control. Recent research has shown that a happy-sad variant of the day-night task was significantly more difficult than the standard day-night task. The present research examined whether the…

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of first language thinking-for-speaking patterns on the acquisition of Greek as a second language (L2), as well as to determine whether proficiency level and stays in the target-language country have an effect on such influence. The participants (N = 50) were Spanish/Catalan learners of…

Children have served as research subjects in several surveys on attitudes to insects and invertebrates. Most of the studies have used quantitative scoring methods to draw conclusions. This paper takes a different approach as it analyzes children's free-text comments to gain an understanding of their viewpoints. A total of 246 children aged 9-13…

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between explicit and implicit forms of Theory of Mind reasoning and to test the influence of experience on implicit Theory of Mind reasoning in individuals with autism spectrum disorders and in neurotypical adults. Results from two standard explicit Theory of Mind tasks are mixed: Individuals with…

This study introduces photomontage as a task to facilitate talking in English as a Foreign Language classrooms. Thirty-three undergraduate English major students studying at the University of Guilan were assigned to design a composite photographic image by combining images from separate photographic sources, and use it as the stimulus to initiate…

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis (Schacter & Addis, 2007), both remembered past and imagined future events rely heavily on episodic memory. An alternative hypothesis is that observed similarities between remembering and imagining reflect the influence of broader factors such as descriptive ability, narrative style,…

So far, the comprehension and production language modes have typically been studied separately in generative second language acquisition research, with the focus shifting from one to the other. This article revisits the asymmetric relationship between comprehension and production by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of the noun phrase…

Young monolingual children typically demonstrate frequent tense shifting during narrative development, whereas older children maintain a consistent narration tense. Therefore, inconsistent tense usage in older children could be an indication of overall limited language skills. However, information regarding tense use in bilinguals has been…

Learning Chinese characters is a difficult task for adult English native speakers due to the significant differences between the Chinese and English writing system. The visuospatial properties of Chinese characters have inspired the development of instructional methods using both verbal and visual information based on the Dual Coding Theory. This…

Research on the use of software programs and tools such as pedagogical agents has peaked over the last decade. Pedagogical agents are on-screen characters that facilitate instruction. This meta-analysis examined the effect of using pedagogical agents on learning by reviewing 43 studies involving 3,088 participants. Analysis of the results…