Confrontation naming tasks assess cognitive processes involved in the main stage of word production. However, in fMRI, the occurrence of movement artifacts necessitates the use of covert paradigms, which has limited clinical applications. Thus, we explored the feasibility of adopting multichannel functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to…

The phonological trace of perceived words starts fading away in short-term memory after a few seconds. Spoken utterances are usually 2-3 s long, possibly to allow the listener to parse the words into coherent prosodic phrases while they still have a clear representation. Results from this brain potential study suggest that even during silent…

We report three experiments investigating how people process anomalous sentences, in particular those in which the anomaly is associated with the verb. We contrast two accounts for the processing of such anomalous sentences: a syntactic account, in which the representations constructed for anomalous sentences are similar in nature to the ones…

When an elided constituent and its antecedent do not match syntactically, the presence of a word implying the non-actuality of the state of affairs described in the antecedent seems to improve the example. ("This information should be released but Gorbachev didn't." vs. "This information was released but Gorbachev didn't.") We model this effect in…

Purpose: In the present study, the authors aimed to investigate the language confounds of filtered words tests by examining the repetition of real words versus nonsense words as a function of level of filtering. Method: Fifty-five young, native-English-speaking women with normal hearing were required to repeat 80 real-word and 80 nonsense-word…

Cumulating evidence suggests that the establishment of high-quality phonological representations is the "cognitive precursor" that facilitates the acquisition of language (spoken, signed, and written). The authors present two studies that contrast the nature of bilingual profoundly deaf children's phonological representations derived…

Optionality is a central phenomenon in second language acquisition (SLA), for which any adequate theory must account. Amaral and Roeper (this issue; henceforth A&R) offer an appealing approach to it, using Roeper's Multiple Grammars Theory, which was created with first language in mind but which extends very naturally to SLA. They include…

One of the many new features of English language learners' dictionaries derived from the technological developments that have taken place over recent decades is the presence of corpus-based examples to illustrate the use of words in context. However, empirical studies have generally not been able to produce conclusive evidence about their…

Studies have begun to focus on what skills contribute to the development of phonological awareness, an important predictor of reading attainment. One of these skills is the perception of prosody, which is the rhythm, tempo and stress of a language. To examine whether prosodic perception contributes to phonological awareness prior to reading…

This study presents an experiment that explores the patterns of answers to yes-no truth-functional questions in English and Korean. The answering patterns are examined from 12 Korean-English bilingual children and 10 Korean-monolingual children. Four types of sentences in relation to given situations (Wason in "Br J Psychol" 52:133-142,…

While speech analysis technology has become an integral part of phonetic research, and to some degree is used in language instruction at the most advanced levels, it appears to be mostly absent from the beginning levels of language instruction. In part, the lack of incorporation into the language classroom can be attributed to both the lack of…

Lexical categories like noun and verb are foundational to language acquisition, but these categories do not come neatly packaged for the infant language learner. Some have proposed that infants can begin to solve this problem by tracking the frequent nonadjacent word (or morpheme) contexts of these categories. However, nonadjacent relationships…

Cross-linguistic research on motion events has shown that Spanish speakers and English speakers have different patterns of thinking for speaking about motion, both linguistically and gesturally (for a review, see Stam, 2010b). Spanish speakers express path linguistically with verbs, and their path gestures tend to occur with path verbs, whereas…

The typological contrast between verb- and satellite-framed languages (Talmy, 1985) has set the basis for many empirical studies on L2 acquisition. The current analysis goes beyond this typology by looking in detail at the conceptualization of the path of motion in a motion event. We take as a starting point the cognitive salience of specific…

Word finding difficulties are often seen in children with language difficulties. Their problem is readily observed and has led to investigations of its nature and encouraged attempts at intervention. Semantic errors in their naming suggest that their knowledge of items is poorly developed and that therapies to strengthen it may be effective.…