Previous laterality studies have implicated the right hemisphere in the processing of metaphors, however it is not clear if this result is due to metaphoricity per se or another aspect of semantic processing. Three divided visual field experiments varied metaphorical and literal sentence familiarity. We found a right hemisphere advantage for…

This study furthers research in three crucial related areas: (1) comparing various online glossing and vocabulary learning tools; (2) language teaching and learning using a more natural bilingualized approach to developing online reading skills in a second or foreign language; and (3) comparing the relative level of enjoyment and effectiveness…

Listening is the most important of the four language skills and is used most often in everyday communication. Teachers need innovative ways to address the particular listening problems emerging in their own contexts. "Teaching Listening: Voices From the Field" shares successful practices employed by teachers at different levels of education around…

Two member onset consonant clusters with /s/ as the first member (#sC onsets) behave differently from other double onset consonant clusters in English. Phonological explanations of children's consonant cluster production have been posited to predict children's speech acquisition. The aim of this study was to consider the role of the Sonority…

The purpose of the current study is to document phonological change from a multidimensional perspective for a 3-year-old boy with phonological disorder by comparing three measures: (1) accuracy of consonant productions, (2) dynamic assessment, and (3) acoustic analysis. The methods included collecting a sample of the targets /s, [image omitted],…

In the current study, we explore the influence of orthographic knowledge on phonological awareness in children with cochlear implants and compare developmental associations to those found for hearing children matched for word reading level or chronological age. We show an influence of orthographic knowledge on syllable and phoneme awareness in…

We built a natural language processing (NLP) system implementing a "virtual writing conference" for elementary-school children, with German as the target language. Currently, state-of-the-art computer support for writing tasks is restricted to multiple-choice questions or quizzes because automatic parsing of the often ambiguous and fragmentary…

Task-based teaching is an area which has emerged from the upsurge of interest in cognitive approaches to language learning and teaching of the mid 1980s. Being a current vogue in a communicative language teaching, task-based language learning contains dangers if implemented without care. In particular, it is likely to create pressure for immediate…

Task-based teaching is an area which has emerged from the upsurge of interest in cognitive approaches to language learning and teaching of the mid-1980s. Being a current vogue in communicative language teaching, task-based language learning contains dangers if implemented without care. In particular, it is likely to create pressure for immediate…

Why females generally perform better on language tasks than males is unknown. Sex differences were here identified in children (ages 9-15) across two linguistic tasks for words presented in two modalities. Bilateral activation in the inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri and activation in the left fusiform gyrus of girls was greater than in…

We reported three experiments investigating subsyllabic unit preference in young Chinese children. In Experiment 1, a Chinese sound similarity judgment task was designed in which 48 pair of stimuli varied in terms of shared subsyllabic units (i.e., vowel, body, rime, onset-coda). Grade 1 Chinese-speaking monolingual children judged pairs with…

Models such as Eckman's markedness differential hypothesis, Flege's speech learning model, and Brown's feature-based theory of perception seek to explain and predict the relative difficulty second language (L2) learners face when acquiring new or similar sounds. In this paper, we test their predictive adequacy as concerns native English speakers'…

This article presents a series of studies focusing on L2 production and processing of adjective-noun collocations (e.g., "social services"). In Study 1, 810 adjective-noun collocations were extracted from 31 essays written by Russian learners of English. About half of these collocations appeared frequently in the British National Corpus (BNC);…

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency…

In this article we investigate the effects of first language (L1) on second language (L2) neural processing for two grammatical constructions (verbal domain dependency and grammatical gender), focusing on the event-related potential P600 effect, which has been found in both L1 and L2 processing. Native Dutch speakers showed a P600 effect for both…