This study investigates how task complexity affects native speakers' and second language (L2) learners', and experts' perceptions of task difficulty in writing tasks. It also explores how task complexity influences English native speakers' and L2 learners' linguistic complexity in their writing. Ninety participants performed one simple and one…

Listening comprehension (LC) is considered an important but complex skill that predicts later reading comprehension in various languages. In this study, we aimed at understanding the relationship of LC with different linguistic and cognitive components. For this purpose, 262 Arabic-speaking kindergartners participated in this study. Our regression…

Children recruit verb syntax to guide verb interpretation. We asked whether 22-month-olds spontaneously encode information about a particular novel verb's syntactic properties through listening to sentences, retain this information in long-term memory over a filled delay, and retrieve it to guide interpretation upon hearing the same novel verb…

Background: Recent evidence suggests that specific language impairment (SLI) might be secondary to general cognitive processing limitations in the domain of executive functioning. Previous research has focused almost exclusively on monolingual children with SLI and offers little evidence-based guidance on executive functioning in bilingual…

There exists an increasing body of research demonstrating that language processing is aided by context-based predictions. Recent findings suggest that the brain generates estimates about the likely physical appearance of upcoming words based on syntactic predictions: words that do not physically look like the expected syntactic category show…

This study aimed to test the hypothesis that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) use their knowledge of complement syntax as a means of "hacking out" solutions to false belief tasks, despite lacking a representational theory of mind (ToM). Participants completed a "memory for complements" task, a measure of receptive vocabulary, and…

Background: Previous studies of outcome for children with early language delay have focused on measures of early language as predictors of language outcome. This study investigates whether very early processing skills (VEPS) known to underpin language development will be better predictors of specific language and social communication outcomes than…

Background: Figurative language, such as metaphor and metonymy, is very common in daily language use. Its underlying cognitive processes are sometimes viewed as lying at the interface of language and thought. Williams syndrome, which is a rare genetic developmental disorder, provides an opportunity to study this interface because individuals with…

Reports on a study designed to show that Tulving's theory of encoding specificity and Bahrick's theory of associative continuity are not contradictory, rather complementary. (CLK)

Two psycholinguistic processes are examined in a phoneme monitoring experiment and a sentence completion experiment. Tests were conducted with matched materials on subjects drawn from one population. With ambiguous lexical items all meanings are retrieved, but following a decision stage only one is transferred to memory. (SC)

In three experiments, the meaning of the textual materials was held constant while structural (surface) variables, such as vocabulary, syntax, and signals about idea importance, were manipulated. Findings in all cases indicated that aspects of the surface structure of text made demands on the reader's cognitive processing capacity. (Author/GK)

Adapted from "Work in Progress" n5, 1972, Department of Linguistics, University of Edinburgh. (DD)

Research performed, in part, while the author was a research assistant at the Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Cognitive Learning; remainder conducted at the University of Texas under a National Science Foundation - USDP grant. (VM)

This research characterizes how the mental lexicon functions during sentence processing. In sentence processing, access of meaning is seen to be dependent on interaction between syntactic and semantic information within the sentence. It had been previously thought that meaning had been located in an independent mental lexicon. Three experiments…

Following reading and listening tasks, adult long-term memory is high in semantic information and low in syntactic and lexical information. Comprehension during reading and listening must depend to some extent, however, on short term retention of linguistic information that is less abstract and shares more features of the input than the semantic…