The topic of this article is the link between research on the neurocognition of the teaching--acquisition interface and research on second language teaching. This recent scientific enterprise investigates whether and how different aspects of second language instruction may change both the anatomy and the functioning of an adult learner's brain…

Increasing project complexity and a high level of specialization in the language industry have resulted in a demand for translation professionals with sophisticated technical skills. This has made computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools indispensable for translators in order to meet project requirements. With a rapidly changing industry…

This study describes a stylistics-based pedagogical approach to literary translation. Such a stylistic approach was conceived in an attempt to resolve what might be seen as a paradox in today's classroom: that despite style being persistently invoked as a top priority in literary translation, it is seldom examined in systematic detail or dissected…

According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), second language (L2) speakers, unlike native speakers, build shallow syntactic representations during sentence processing. In order to test the SSH, this study investigated the processing of a syntactic movement in both native speakers of English and proficient late L2 speakers of English using…

To understand spoken words, listeners must appropriately interpret co-occurring talker characteristics and speech sound content. This ability was tested in 6- to 14-months-olds by measuring their looking to named food and body part images. In the "new talker" condition (n = 90), pictures were named by an unfamiliar voice; in the…

Evidence from both alphabetic and nonalphabetic languages has suggested the role of orthography in the processing of spoken words in individuals' native language (L1). Less evidence has existed for such effects in nonnative (L2) spoken-word processing. Whereas in L1 orthographic representations are learned only after phonological representations…

Analyzing the quality of classroom talk is central to educational research and improvement efforts. In particular, the presence of authentic teacher questions, where answers are not predetermined by the teacher, helps constitute and serves as a marker of productive classroom discourse. Further, authentic questions can be cultivated to improve…

The most distinctive feature of conundrum is the deliberate misinterpretation in the course of its application. The present paper attempts a new cognitive approach to the understanding of conundrums. Based on psychological laws of mankind, the conundrum begins with the questioner's leaving a certain linguistic item on purpose, which will…

It has been hypothesized that known words in the lexicon strengthen newly formed representations of novel words, resulting in words with dense neighborhoods being learned more quickly than words with sparse neighborhoods. Tests of this hypothesis in a connectionist network showed that words with dense neighborhoods were learned better than words…

Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both "locality" effects, in which having more dependents…

The way in which letters are assigned their position when recognizing a visually presented word was examined in three experiments using nonwords created by transposing the two medial consonants of a bisyllabic baseword (e.g., "nakpin," "semron"). The difficulty in responding to such "TL" nonwords in a lexical decision task was shown to be lower…

Scalar implicatures often incur a processing cost in sentence comprehension tasks. We used a novel mouse-tracking technique in a sentence verification paradigm to test different accounts of this effect. We compared a two-step account, in which people access a basic meaning and then enrich the basic meaning to form the scalar implicature, against a…

We present a new dorsal-ventral stream framework for language comprehension which unifies basic neurobiological assumptions (Rauschecker & Scott, 2009) with a cross-linguistic neurocognitive sentence comprehension model (eADM; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006). The dissociation between (time-dependent) syntactic structure-building and…

In this paper, we present an examination of the literature on prolonged periods of silence in children from the perspective of two different scientific fields. The aim is to call attention to the inherent complexity of the factors that may be involved in the etiology of mutistic behavior during child development. Medical and linguistic literature…

I will propose a tentative framework of how words in two languages could be organized in the cerebral cortex based on neural assembly theory, according to which neurons that fire synchronously are bound into large-scale distributed functional units (assemblies), which represent a mental event as a whole ("gestalt"). For language this…