The study aims to investigate whether second language learners perform sentence processing based on syntactic or structure-based parsing strategies during real-time comprehension of constructions with syntactic ambiguities. To this end, the recordings of eye movements from Turkish learners of English and native English speakers as a control group…

Although children may productively use concrete nouns after limited exposure, complete mastery of adult-like patterns of noun usage can take up to 14 years. We evaluated whether a transition from universal to language-specific naming is part of the refinement in later lexical development, and we compared how this refinement plays out in…

The present study aimed to examine and validate a rubric for translation quality assessment using Rasch analysis. To this end, the researchers interviewed 20 expert translation instructors to identify the factors they consider important for assessing the quality of students' translation. Based on the specific commonalities found throughout the…

As a form of aptitude testing for interpreting, recall across languages has long been considered as a valid means of assessing candidates' linguistic, cognitive and communicative abilities. However, most of the existing research on this topic is only derived from the consensus among or the professional experience of interpreting researchers,…

The use of relative pronouns is an intriguing topic for learners and teachers. The past two decades have witnessed exponential growth in research on the use of relative pronouns. However, little attention has been given to relativizer omission among nonnative speakers in writing. This research examined the distribution of zero relativizers and the…

The present study investigated the potential benefits of extended exposure to captioned videos for second language pronunciation. We tested 90 L2 adult learners of English on speech processing skills (segmentation, speed of lexical access, and sentence processing) and phonological accuracy in perception (ABX discrimination) and production…

Previous studies on individuals with pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) have pointed to difficulties in comprehension of figurative language. Using the divided visual field paradigm, the present study examined hemispheric processing of idioms and irony in 23 adults with PDD and in 24 typically developing (TD) adults. The results show that…

Previous investigations into metonymy comprehension in ASD have confounded metonymy with anaphora, and outcome with process. Here we show how these confounds may be avoided, using data from non-diagnosed participants classified using Autism Quotient. Participants read sentences containing target words with novel or established metonymic senses…

Three children with neurosensory deafness who used cochlear implants were taught to match video clips to dictated sentences. We used matrix training with overlapping components and tested for recombinative generalization. Two 3?×?3 matrices generated 18 sentences. For each matrix, we taught 6 sentences and evaluated generalization with the…

Semantic priming effects are popularly explained in terms of an automatic spreading activation process, according to which the activation of a node in a semantic network spreads automatically to interconnected nodes, preactivating a semantically related word. It is expected from this account that semantic priming effects should be routinely…

Computational modeling and eye-tracking were used to investigate how phonological and semantic information interact to influence the time course of spoken word recognition. We extended our recent models (Chen & Mirman, 2012; Mirman, Britt, & Chen, 2013) to account for new evidence that competition among phonological neighbors influences…

The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g., Hayashibe in "Descr Appl Linguist" 8:1-18, 1975; Sano in "Descr Appl Linguist" 10:213-233, 1977;…

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of…

Forty-one high-risk infants (HR) with an older sibling with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were observed longitudinally at 10, 12, 18 and 24 months of age during a tool use task in a play-like scenario. Changes in grasp types and functional actions produced with a spoon were assessed during elicited tool use. Outcome and vocabulary measures were…

Recent research investigating embedded stem priming effects with the masked priming paradigm and pseudoword primes (e.g., "quickify"--"quick") has shown that priming effects can be obtained even when the embedded target word is followed by a non-morphological ending (e.g., "quickald"--"quick"). Here we…