A comparative investigation of word reading efficiency indicates that different strategies may be used by English and Swedish early readers. In a first study, 328 native English speakers from UK Years 3 and 6 completed a pen-and-paper word recognition task (the "Wordchains" test). Results were analysed for frequency and type of errors…

A number of studies of second language (L2) sentence processing have investigated whether ambiguity resolution biases in the native language (L1) transfer to superficially similar cognate structures in the L2. When transfer effects are found in such cases, it is difficult to determine whether they reflect surface parallels between the languages or…

Truscott and Sharwood Smith (henceforth T&SS) propose a novel theory of language acquisition, "Acquisition by Processing Theory" (APT), designed to account for both first and second language acquisition, monolingual and bilingual speech perception and parsing, and speech production. This is a tall order. Like any theoretically ambitious…

Two reading experiments investigated the extent to which the presence of phonemic repetition in sentences influenced processing difficulty during syntactic ambiguity resolution. In both experiments, participants read sentences silently as reading time was measured. Reading time on sentences containing a temporary syntactic ambiguity was compared…

We assessed 19-month-olds' appreciation of the conventional nature of object labels versus desires. Infants played a finding game with an experimenter who stated her intention to find the referent of a novel word (word group), to find an object she wanted (desire group), or simply to look in a box (control group). A 2nd experimenter then…

An adult developmental model of self-regulated language processing (SRLP) is introduced, in which the allocation policy with which a reader engages text is driven by declines in processing capacity, growth in knowledge-based processes, and age-related shifts in reading goals. Evidence is presented to show that the individual reader's allocation…

Fifteen children diagnosed with specific language impairment (SLI) and 15 typically developing (TD) children were tested for identification performance on 2 synthetic speech continual varying in formant transition durations (FTDs). One continuum varied from /ba/ to /wa/, and the other varied from /da/ to /ja/. Various d'-related measures from…

Although developmental increases in the size of the position effect within a mispronunciation detection task have been interpreted as consistent with a view of the lexical restructuring process as protracted, the position effect itself might not be reliable. The current research examined the effects of position and clarity of acoustic-phonetic…

Children with ADHD have difficulty understanding causal connections and goal plans within stories. This study examined mediators of group differences in story narrations between children ages 7-9 with and without ADHD, including as potential mediators both the core deficits of ADHD (i.e., inattention, disinhibition, planning/working memory) as…

Examines patterns of transfer in the sentence processing strategies displayed by Chinese-English and English-Chinese bilinguals. Results indicate that late bilinguals display strong evidence for forward transfer: late Chinese-English bilinguals transfer animacy-based strategies to English sentences; late Chinese-English bilinguals transfer…

This study examined word identification skills between two groups of college students with different first language (L1) backgrounds (Chinese and Korean) learning to read English as a second language (ESL). Word identification skills were tested in a naming experiment and an auditory category judgment task. Both groups of ESL learners demonstrated…

This study examined development of pragmatic comprehension ability across time. Twenty native speakers and 92 Japanese college students of English completed a computerized listening task measuring ability to comprehend two types of implied meaning in dialogues: indirect refusals (k = 24) and indirect opinions (k = 24). The participants'…

In this article, we report on an investigation that aimed to describe adolescent multilinguals' use of the different languages they were learning at school when performing a translation task. We wanted to find out whether written translations of a mother tongue text into the learner's different foreign languages would reflect a multilingual rather…

This study examined how writing (copying) target words and word fragments affects intentional second language (L2) vocabulary learning. English-speaking first-semester learners of Spanish attempted to learn 24 Spanish nouns via word-picture repetition in three conditions: (1) word writing, (2) fragment writing, and (3) no writing. After the…

In general terms automaticity could be defined as the subconscious condition wherein "we perform a complex series of tasks very quickly and efficiently, without having to think about the various components and subcomponents of action involved" (DeKeyser 2001: 125). For language learning, Segalowitz (2003) characterised automaticity as a…