Purpose: Spontaneous speech tasks are critically important for characterizing spoken language production deficits in aphasia and for assessing the impact of therapy. The utility of such tasks arises from the complex interaction of linguistic demands (word retrieval, sentence formulation, articulation). However, this complexity also makes…

This project explores how children disambiguate and retain novel object-label mappings in the face of semantic similarity. Burgeoning evidence suggests that semantic structure in the developing lexicon promotes word learning in ostensive contexts, whereas other findings indicate that semantic similarity interferes with and temporarily slows…

Frames--defined as mental structures built through language and symbols that categorize our thoughts and experiences--have a significant impact on partnerships, shaping how participants understand the nature of the collaboration. While scholars have explored how teachers might frame engagement partnerships for university students and…

Although major advances have been made in research on language learning strategies (LLS), there are some areas that have been somewhat surprisingly neglected by specialists. This applies without doubt to the strategies that learners draw on to better understand and learn grammar rules but also to employ grammar structures in real-time processing,…

Mandarin requires neither determiners nor morphological inflections, which casts doubt on Mandarin-speaking children's ability to use function words as a syntactic bootstrapping tool to identify the form class of a new word. This study examined 3- and 5-year-old Mandarin learners' ability to use function words to interpret new words as either…

Word forms such as "walked" or "walker" are decomposed into their morphological constituents (walk + -ed/-er) during language comprehension. Yet, the efficiency of morphological decomposition seems to vary for different languages and morphological types, as well as for first and second language speakers. The current study…

Translating religious expressions from Arabic into English seems problematic where the cultural backgrounds must be known for the translator to choose the appropriate equivalence and to help bridging the cultural gap between two cultures. As a result, this paper investigates to what extent have Venuti's strategies (domestication and…

Mind-wandering (i.e., thoughts irrelevant to the current task) occurs frequently during reading. The current study examined whether mind-wandering was associated with reduced rereading when the reader read the so-called garden-path jokes. In a garden-path joke, the reader's initial interpretation is violated by the final punchline, and the…

This article provides a commentary within the special issue, Integration: The Keystone of Comprehension. According to most contemporary frameworks, a driving force in comprehension is the reader's ability to generate the links among the words and sentences (ideas) in the texts and between the ideas in the text and what the readers already know. As…

With the increased adoption and use of smart home speakers in households, many young children have learned to use listening and speaking to interact with the voice assistants (VAs) for a variety of daily activities (e.g., asking questions, listening to music). Despite the proliferation of VAs, due to the technical limitations such as automatic…

The current study examined the extent to which first language (L1) utterance fluency measures can predict second language (L2) fluency and how L2 proficiency moderates the relationship between L1 and L2 fluency. A total of 104 Japanese-speaking learners of English completed different argumentative speech tasks in their L1 and L2. Their speaking…

Empirical evidence remains sparse about how videos enhanced with first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) subtitles influence cognitive load in L2 learners. To address this point, 25 Korean undergraduate students were exposed to six short videos: baseline, L1-subtitled, and L2-subtitled videos at both high and low difficulty levels (determined…

The looking-while-listening (LWL) paradigm is frequently used to measure toddlers' lexical processing efficiency (LPE). Children's LPE is associated with vocabulary size, yet other linguistic, cognitive, or social skills contributing to LPE are not well understood. It also remains unclear whether LPE measures from two types of LWL trials…

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months)…

After countless petitions and complaints from end users, live subtitling quality is slowly attracting the attention of broadcasters, regulators, the subtitling industry and scholars working in Media Accessibility. These stakeholders share an interest in providing better live subtitles, but their quality assessment is a thorny issue. Although…