We investigated relative clause (RC) comprehension in 44 Russian-speaking children with typical language (TD) and developmental language disorder (DLD) (M age = 10;67, SD = 2.84) and 22 adults. Flexible word order and morphological case in Russian allowed us to isolate factors that are obscured in English, helping us to identify sources of…

This article addresses a current theoretical debate between the standard pragmatic model, the graded salience hypothesis, and the implicit display theory, by investigating the roles of the context and of the properties of the sarcastic utterance itself in the comprehension of a sarcastic remark. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted where we…

Purpose: This study examined the potential roles of phonological sensitivity and processing speed in age-related declines of verbal working memory. Method: Twenty younger and 25 older adults with age-normal hearing participated. Two measures of verbal working memory were collected: digit span and serial recall of words. Processing speed was…

This study examined whether 30 learners of Japanese in the United States who engaged in a semester-long video-based eTandem course made gains in global language comprehensibility, that is, ease of understanding (Derwing & Munro, 2009), and what linguistic correlates contributed to these gains. Speech excerpts from Week 2 and 8 of tandem…

In two experiments, this article investigates the predictive processing of gender agreement in adult second language (L2) acquisition. We test (1) whether instruction on lexical gender can lead to target predictive agreement processing and (2) how variability in lexical gender representations moderates L2 gender agreement processing. In a…

The aim of this study is to construct a model of a simple lexical network showing the strength and asymmetry of the connections between vocabulary items in the L2 mental lexicon of Japanese learners. The study focuses on eight nouns and investigates how they are networked, and whether the existing network structure formed by these nouns would be…

This study examines English and Arabic binomials, identifies the similarities and differences in their semantic features, semantic structure, and semantic relations between the members of binomials. It also investigates translation students' ability to comprehend and translate binomials from English to Arabic and vice versa. It was found that…

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…