This study examined the effects of communication mode ("i.e.", face to face versus computer mediated communication) on the instances of negotiation of meaning (NofM) and its level of noticing by learners. Sixty-four participants (32 dyads) completed two jigsaw tasks in two different mediums (one in each) and four days after the tasks…

Language processing plays a crucial role in language development, providing the ability to assign structural representations to input strings (e.g., Fodor, 1998). In this paper we aim at contributing to the study of children's processing routines, examining the operations underlying the auditory processing of relative clauses in children…

Tests of nonword repetition (NWR) have often been used to examine children's phonological knowledge and word learning abilities. However, theories of NWR primarily explain performance either in terms of phonological working memory or long-term knowledge, with little consideration of how these processes interact. One theoretical account that…

Purpose: The abilities of 5-year-old children with and without language impairment (LI) to detect anomalies involving lexical items and grammatical morphemes in stories were compared. The influence of sentence versus discourse context on lexical anomaly detection rates was explored. Method: The participants were read 3 story scripts and asked to…

Purpose: To examine how language production interacts with speech motor and gross and fine motor skill in children with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: Eleven children with SLI and 12 age-matched peers (4-6 years) produced structurally primed sentences containing particles and prepositions. Utterances were analyzed for errors and for…

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as "In the park".... Three self-paced reading…

Quantifier scope disambiguation (QSD) is one of the most challenging problems in deep natural language understanding (NLU) systems. The most popular approach for dealing with QSD is to simply leave the semantic representation (scope-) underspecified and to incrementally add constraints to filter out unwanted readings. Scope underspecification has…

This study reports on a self-paced reading experiment in which native and non-native speakers of English read sentences designed to evaluate the predictions of usage-based and rule-based approaches to second language acquisition (SLA). Critical stimuli were four-word sequences embedded into sentences in which phrase frequency and grammaticality…

The two main components of Processing Instruction (PI) are Explicit Information (EI) and Structured Input (SI). Most researchers have concluded that the SI is more responsible for learner gains than the EI (Benati, 2004a, 2004b; VanPatten & Oikennon, 1996; Wong, 2004). However, some researchers have found that EI does significantly impact…

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

The current study looks at whether bilinguals varying in language dominance show a processing advantage for idiomatic over non-idiomatic phrases and to what extent this effect is modulated by idiom transparency (i.e., the degree to which the idiom's figurative meaning can be inferred from its literal analysis) and cross-language similarity (i.e.,…

This study investigated the relationship between specific cognitive patterns of strengths and weaknesses (PSWs) and the errors children make in reading, writing, and spelling tests from the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement-Third Edition (KTEA-3). Participants were selected from the KTEA-3 standardization sample based on five cognitive…

A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for a common pattern underlying diverse behavioral phenomena: Words follow Zipf's law of brevity (the…

The present study explores phonetic processing in deaf children with cochlear implants (CIs) when they have to learn phonetically similar words. Forty-six 34-to-78-month-old French-speaking deaf children with CIs were tested on 16 different trials. In each trial, they were first trained with two word-object pairings, and then a third object was…

Relative to abstract words, concrete words typically elicit faster response times and larger N400 and N700 event-related potential (ERP) brain responses. These effects have been interpreted as reflecting the denser links to associated semantic information of concrete words and their recruitment of visual imagery processes. Here, we examined…