Many connectives, such as "therefore" and "however," are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence-level…

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel…

Cognitive factors have been recognised as important in the interpreting process, but whether they could serve as valid components of interpreting aptitude still awaits further investigation. This study explores the predictive value of cognitive fluency in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance of trainee interpreters. Cognitive fluency…

Purpose: This study investigates the effects of left- and right-hemisphere damage (LHD and RHD) on the production of idiomatic or literal expressions utilizing acoustic analyses. Method: Twenty-one native speakers of Korean with LHD or RHD and in a healthy control (HC) group produced 6 ditropically ambiguous (idiomatic or literal) sentences in 2…

Communicative adequacy is a key construct in second language research, as the primary goal of most language learners is to communicate successfully in real-world situations. Nevertheless, little is known about what linguistic features contribute to communicatively adequate speech. This study fills this gap by investigating the extent to which…

Second language learning outcomes are highly variable, due to a variety of factors, including individual differences, exposure conditions, and linguistic complexity. However, exactly how these factors interact to influence language learning is unknown. This article examines the relationship between these three variables in language learners.…

Effects of lexical and sublexical variables on visual word recognition are often treated as homogeneous across participants and stable over time. In this study, we examine the modulation of frequency, length, syllable and bigram frequency, orthographic neighborhood, and graphophonemic consistency effects by (a) individual differences, and (b) item…

This investigation connects issues in second language (L2) acquisition to topics in quantitative sociolinguistics by exploring the relationship between native-speaker (NS) and L2 variation. It is the first large-scale analysis of L2 mood use (the subjunctive-indicative contrast) in Spanish. It applies variationist findings on the range of…

Oral fluency and foreign accent distinguish L2 from L1 speech production. In language testing practices, both fluency and accent are usually assessed by raters. This study investigates what exactly native raters of fluency and accent take into account when judging L2. Our aim is to explore the relationship between objectively measured temporal,…

During the past 2 decades, many respective reading processes have been delineated, and much is now known about reading acquisition in children. Most of this research has been completed using English-dominant subjects. As such, the literature focuses on an opaque orthography and aspects of learning to read in this context. In this study, predictors…

Verbs are one of the basic building blocks of grammar, yet few studies have examined the grammatical, morphological, and phonological factors contributing to lexical access and production of Spanish verb inflection. This report describes an online data set that incorporates psycholinguistic dimensions for 50 of the most common early-acquired…

The current study set out to examine the age-related effects on ultimate attainment of second language (L2) phonology and grammar. The goals of the study are threefold: (1) to unravel the complexity of ultimate L2 attainment by surveying multiple contributing factors, (2) to explore the relative strength of the Age of Arrival (AOA) variable and…

This paper reports the findings of a psycholinguistic study of the development of phonological awareness (PA) in Chinese children acquiring their first language and learning a foreign language at the same time. The language situation of these children in relation to PA is of particular interest because Chinese and English have not only different…