Digital tools are not always used in the manner their designers had in mind. Therefore, it is not enough to assume that learning through CALL tools occurs in intended ways, if at all. We have studied the use of an enhanced word processor for writing essays in Swedish as a second language. The word processor contained natural language processing…

Purpose: In this study, the authors aimed to examine the long-term effects of prenatal cocaine exposure (PCE) on the language development of 12-year-old children using a prospective design, controlling for confounding prenatal drug exposure and environmental factors. Method: Children who were exposed to cocaine in utero (PCE; "n" = 183)…

Bilinguals sometimes outperform age-matched monolinguals on non-language tasks involving cognitive control. But the bilingual advantage is not consistently found in every experiment and may reflect specific attributes of the bilinguals tested. The goal of this dissertation was to determine if the way in which bilinguals use language, specifically…

This dissertation explores the second language acquisition of Mandarin Chinese tones by speakers of non-tonal languages within the framework of Optimality Theory. The effects of three L1s are analyzed: American English, a stress-accent language; Tokyo Japanese, a lexical pitch accent language; and Seoul Korean, a non-stress and non-pitch accent…

A classifier which is capable of distinguishing a syntactically well formed sentence from a syntactically ill formed one has the potential to be useful in an L2 language-learning context. In this article, we describe a classifier which classifies English sentences as either well formed or ill formed using information gleaned from three different…

This functional magnetic resonance imaging study contrasted case-deviant and letter-deviant forms with familiar forms of the same phonological words (e.g., "TaXi" and "Taksi" vs. "Taxi") and found that both types of deviance led to increased activation in a left occipito-temporal region, corresponding to the visual word form area (VWFA). The…

The spelling of many disyllabic English word endings holds cues to their grammatical category, beyond obvious inflectional endings such as "-ing" for verbs. For example, some letter sequences are clearly associated with nouns (e.g., "-oon") and others with verbs (e.g., "-erge"). This study extended recent research by Arciuli and Cupples (2006),…

Spatial frequency filtering was used to test the hypotheses that low-spatial frequency information in printed text can: (1) lead to a rapid lexical decision or (2) facilitate word recognition. Adult proficient readers made lexical decisions in unprimed and masked repetition priming experiments with unfiltered, low-pass, high-pass and notch…

Lexical priming, whereby a prime word facilitates recognition of a related target word (e.g., "nurse" [right arrrow] "doctor"), is typically attributed to association strength, semantic similarity, or compound familiarity. Here, the authors demonstrate a novel type of lexical priming that occurs among unassociated, dissimilar,…

Recent work using functional neuroimaging with early bilinguals has found little evidence for separate neural systems for each language during picture naming (Hernandez, A. E., Dapretto, M., Mazziotta, J., & Bookheimer, S. (2001). "Language switching and language representation in Spanish-English bilinguals: An fMRI study." "Neuroimage, 14,"…

A number of recent studies have argued that grammatical illusions can arise in the process of completing linguistic dependencies, such that unlicensed material is temporarily treated as licensed due to the presence of a potential licensor that is semantically appropriate but in a syntactically inappropriate position. A frequently studied case…

In recent years, it has been reported that WM (working memory) is concerned with word generation, but many points regarding the relationship between the individual differences of WM capacity and the patterns of word generation remain unclear. This study is to investigate these unclear points by using three types of word fluency task with different…

The study examined heritage speaker grammars and to what extent they diverge with respect to grammatical gender from adult L2 learners. Results from a preference task involving code-mixed Determiner Phrases (DPs) and code-mixed copula constructions show a difference between these two types of operations. Heritage speakers patterned with the…

Background: Sentence construction and syntactic organization are known to be poor in children with specific language impairments (SLI), but little is known about the way in which children with SLI approach language tasks, and static standardized tests contribute little to the differentiation of skills within the population of children with…

The present study reports the development of a theoretically motivated measure that provides estimates of a preschooler's ability to recall auditory text, to make text-based inferences, to access knowledge from long-term memory, and to integrate this accessed knowledge with new information from auditory text. This new preschooler component…