Purpose: Right hemisphere brain damage (RHD) commonly causes pragmatic language disorders that are apparent in discourse production. Specific characteristics and approaches to assessment, diagnosis, and treatment of these disorders are not well-defined. RHDBank, a shared database of multimedia interactions for the study of communication using…

Structural priming is the tendency to repeat syntactic structure across sentences and can be divided into short-term (prime to immediately following target) and long-term (across an experimental session) components. This study investigates how nondeclarative memory could support both the transient, short-term and the persistent, long-term…

Using the 2.4-million-word written Spanish subsection of the Corpus of Utah Dual Language Immersion, collected from a large-scale standardized writing assessment of K-12 Spanish second language (L2) students, this study focuses on lexical complexity as operationalized by three measures: lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical…

Prosody is a linguistic feature in spoken English that is complex yet plays an important role in oral communication. Nevertheless, many EFL pronunciation classes in Thailand have not adequately emphasized the importance and functions of prosody to learners. This research study aims to investigate effect of an oral fluency instructional method…

This study set out to inspect Laufer and Hulstijn's (2001) motivational-cognitive construct of task-induced involvement. Involvement load hypothesis predicts that tasks with the same involvement loads lead to the same amount of learning. To this end, three output task types which induce equal involvement indices of 3 were employed to examine the…

Extensive research has demonstrated the impact of working memory (WM) on first language (L1) reading comprehension across age groups (Peng et al., 2018), and on foreign language (FL) reading comprehension of adults and older adolescents (Linck et al., 2014). Comparatively little is known about the effect of WM on young FL readers' comprehension,…

This cross-sectional study compares the written language of Thai EFL students in their first two years of university study. First- and second-year students (N = 170) wrote opinion paragraphs by hand in response to six prompts. Using automated textual analysis tools, clausal (subordination), phrasal (coordinated phrases and complex nominals), and…

This research paper presents a quasi-experimental empirical study investigating the effects of structured input and structured output tasks on the acquisition of English causative forms. This research is framed on VanPatten's (1996) input processing theory. The grammatical form chosen for this investigation is affected by a processing strategy…

The Bottleneck Hypothesis argues that properties of inflectional morphology explain why second-language learners may face persistent difficulties in articulating meaning in target-language forms. In particular, the acquisition task proves even harder when first and second languages differ in the way they organize the mapping of functional features…

This experiment investigated comprehension monitoring in children learning English as an additional language (EAL) compared to monolinguals. Sixty-three 9-10-year-old children read texts containing an internal inconsistency (e.g. a barking kitten vs. barking puppy) while their eye movements were monitored. Standardized tests measured word reading…

Scientific reasoning is crucial to any scientific discipline. One sub-skill particularly relevant to the scientific enterprise is theory evidence coordination. This study, underpinned by Kuhn's framework for scientific reasoning, investigates how university students coordinate their self-generated theory and evidence in a physics topic (energy)…

Special ability in computing the day of week for given dates was observed in a 24 year-old male (FB) diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. FB performed almost flawlessly (98.2%) both with past and future dates, over a span of 40 years. Response latency was slower as temporal remoteness of future dates increased. Within the future timespan, FB's…

Processes of knowledge construction are investigated. A learner is constructing knowledge about the trigonometric functions and their geometric meaning on the unit circle. The analysis is based on the dynamically nested epistemic action model for abstraction in context. Different tasks are offered to the learner. In his effort to perform the…

The "familiarity effect" (Shen and Reingold, "Perception & Psychophysics" 63(3):464-475, 2001) is a phenomenon in which unfamiliar symbols perceptually "pop-out" when placed among familiar symbols (e.g., letters). In contrast, searching for familiar symbols among unfamiliar symbols is more challenging. Failure to…

Purpose: An impoverished production of routinized expressions, namely, formulaic language, has been reported for monolingual speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Little is known regarding how formulaic expressions might be manifested in individuals with neurological damage who speak more than one language. This study investigated the processing…