This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

This study analyses the expression of locative and existential predicates elicited through an oral production task in the speech of two groups of learners of Spanish as a second language (L2) (first language English, n = 18; first language Moroccan Arabic, n = 14), and a native control group (n = 18). A total of 25,000 words were analysed, with…

Learning to navigate toward a goal is an essential skill. Place learning is thought to rely on the ability of animals to associate the location of a goal with surrounding environmental cues. Using the Morris water maze, a task popularly used to examine place learning, we demonstrate that distal cues provide animals with distance and directional…

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child…

In the early stages of word learning, children demonstrate considerable flexibility in the type of symbols they will accept as object labels. However, around the 2nd year, as children continue to gain language experience, they become focused on more conventional symbols (e.g., words) as opposed to less conventional symbols (e.g., gestures). During…

A recent cross-cultural comparison (Shaki, Fischer, & Petrusic, 2009) suggested that spatially consistent processing habits for words and numbers are a necessary condition for the spatial representation of numbers (Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes; SNARC effect). Here we reexamine the SNARC in Israelis who read text from right…

One of the most prominent issues in early cognitive and linguistic development concerns how children figure out meanings of words from hearing them in context, since in many contexts there are multiple words and multiple potential referents for those words. Recent findings concerning on-line sentence comprehension suggest that, within the…

This study explores different aspects of the mapping between phonological form and meaning of signs in British Sign Language (BSL) by means of four tasks to measure meaning recognition, form recognition, form recall, and meaning recall. The aim was to investigate whether there is a hierarchy of difficulty for these tasks and, therefore, whether…

Recent research demonstrated that although 24-month-old infants do well on the initial pairing of a novel word and novel object in fast-mapping tasks, they are unable to retain the mapping after a 5 min delay. The current study examines the role of familiarity with the objects and words on infants' ability to bridge between the initial fast…

Despite their lack of vision, congenitally blind subjects are able to build and manipulate cognitive maps for spatial navigation. It is assumed that they thereby rely more heavily on echolocation, proprioceptive signals and environmental cues such as ambient temperature and audition to compensate for their lack of vision. Little is known, however,…

de Hevia and Spelke (de Hevia and Spelke (2009). Spontaneous mapping of number and space in adults and young children, "Cognition, 110", 198-207) investigated the mapping of number onto space. To this end, they introduced a non-symbolic flanker task. Here subjects have to bisect a line that is flanked by a 2-dot and a 9-dot array. Similar to the…

We investigate the hypothesis that our conceptual systems provide two formally distinct ways of representing categories by investigating the manner in which lexical nominals (e.g., "tree," "picnic table") and phrasal nominals (e.g., "black bird," "birds that like rice") are interpreted. Four experiments found that lexical nominals may be mapped…

The representation of numerical and non-numerical ordered sequences was investigated in children from preschool to grade 3. The child's conception of how sequence items map onto a spatial scale was tested using the Number-to-Position task (Siegler & Opfer, 2003) and new variants of the task designed to probe the representation of the alphabet…

Heritage language speakers struggle in European classrooms with insufficient material provided for second language (SL) learning and assessment. Considering the amount of instruments and pertinent studies in English SL, immigrant students are better prepared than their peers in Romance language settings. This study investigates how factors such as…

Brain-imaging research has shown that a viewed acting hand is mapped to the observer's hand representation that corresponds with the identity of the hand. In contrast, behavioral research has suggested that rather than representing a seen hand in relation to one's own manual system, it is represented in relation to the midline of an imaginary…