This study tested whether individual sensitivity to an auditory perceptual cue called amplitude rise time (ART) facilitates novel word learning. Forty adult native speakers of Polish performed a perceptual task testing their sensitivity to ART, learned associations between nonwords and pictures of common objects, and were subsequently tested on…

When hearing an object label, a specific object may come to mind. With the phrase, "There was a balloon in the pack/air" the representation of balloon varies based on the implied shape (deflated vs. inflated). The current study investigated whether the implied shape affects sentence-picture verification for adults and preschool children.…

Pictorial representations are often used to help children understand the situation described in a given number-sentence scheme. These static pictorial problems essentially attempt to depict a dynamic situation (e.g., one bird flies away while there are three birds still sitting on the fence). Previous research suggested that such pictorial…

It is well known that the semantic features of gender associated with peoples' names are represented in the conceptual semantic system. However, there is scant evidence that such knowledge plays a role in name comprehension, and if so, in which processing stage this occurs. The aim of this study was to provide evidence concerning the time course…

During face-to-face communication, people use visual cues about what their partners are attending to as they process language. An eyetracking experiment explored how addressees use speakers' eye gaze and head orientation while interpreting references to objects in a spatial task. Thirty-six naive director/matcher pairs seated face-to-face were…

Accurate perception of emotional (facial) expressions is an essential social skill. It is currently debated whether emotion categorization in infancy emerges in a "broad-to-narrow" pattern and the degree to which language influences this process. We used an habituation paradigm to explore (a) whether 14- and 18-month-old infants perceive…

Two experiments critically examined a predictive-coding based account of the vulnerability of short-term memory (STM) to auditory distraction, particularly the disruptive effect of changing-state sound on verbal serial recall. Experiment 1 showed that providing participants with the opportunity to predict the contents of an imminent spoken…

Previous studies have reported contradictory findings regarding the effects of item repetition on the subsequent encoding of contextual details associated with items (i.e., source memory). Whereas some studies reported repetition-induced enhancement in source memory, other studies observed repetition-induced impairment. To resolve these…

Having historically received less attention than other linguistic structures (Derwing & Munro, 2005), second language (L2) pronunciation instruction represents an emergent area of research in the field (Thomson & Derwing, 2015). While several methods have been shown to be effective for improving L2 segmental production, including explicit…

In the light of continuous change of global perspectives, current educational contexts have been evolving to cover the necessary 21st century skills that the individuals must acquire. Two of the 4Cs (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration and communication) of the 21st century educational trends; creativity and creative thinking are the key…

The development of the ability to categorize speech sounds is often viewed as occurring primarily during infancy via perceptual learning mechanisms. However, a number of studies suggest that even after infancy, children's categories become more categorical and well defined through about age 12. We investigated the cognitive changes that may be…

Recent studies on the learning of L2 prosody have suggested that pitch gestures can enhance the learning of the L2 lexical tones. Yet it remains unclear whether the use of these gestures can aid the learning of L2 intonation, especially by tonal-language speakers. Sixty-four Mandarin speakers with basic-level Spanish were asked to learn three…

Purpose: Humans have a near-automatic tendency to entrain their motor actions to rhythms in the environment. Entrainment has been hypothesized to play an important role in processing naturalistic stimuli, such as speech and music, which have intrinsically rhythmic properties. Here, we studied two facets of entraining one's rhythmic motor actions…

Over time, people who spend a lot of time together (e.g., roommates) begin sounding alike. Even over the course of short conversations, interlocutors often become more acoustically similar to one another. This phenomenon -- known as phonetic alignment -- has been well studied in adult interactions, but much less is known about alignment patterns…

Numerous studies suggest that by elementary school, children have implicit and explicit gender stereotypes about the toys, activities, roles, and abilities associated with boys vs. girls. Furthermore, these stereotypes have been shown to affect children's goals and behaviors, leading them to pursue activities that are associated with their own…