Language learning requires linguistic input, but several studies have found that knowledge of second language (L2) rules does not seem to improve with more language exposure (e.g., Johnson & Newport, 1989). One reason for this is that previous studies did not factor out variation due to the different rules tested. To examine this issue, we…

We assessed 24-month-old infants' lexical processing efficiency for both novel and familiar words. Prior work documented that 19-month-olds successfully identify referents of familiar words (e.g., The dog is so little) as well as novel words whose meanings were informed only by the surrounding sentence (e.g., The vep is crying), but that the speed…

This article investigates how children leverage intonational and gestural cues to an individual's belief state through unimodal (intonation-only or facial gesture-only) and multimodal (intonation + facial gesture) cues. A total of 187 preschoolers (ages 3-5) participated in a disbelief comprehension task and were assessed for Theory of Mind (ToM)…

The aim of the study was to test whether proficient L2 users living in an L1-dominant environment would exhibit significant L2-L1 translation priming in a lexical decision task (LDT) and in a semantic categorisation task (SCT). Only a few previous studies have found significant L2-L1 priming in LDT whereas significant results have often been…

This paper presents a rule-based task-oriented dialogue system for second language learning and a knowledge extraction method which automatically extracts the training data for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and dialogue rules for dialogue management from a Dialogue Map (DM). The DM consists of turn-by-turn utterances between the system and…

This study explores the effect of translation strategies on undergraduate students' second language writing in three French composition classes. After the grammar translation method was used in foreign language teaching, translation in the foreign language classroom was banned for a long time. It is now reappearing in those language classrooms and…

This study investigated the impact of anonymizing text on predicted scores made by two kinds of automated scoring engines: one that incorporates elements of natural language processing (NLP) and one that does not. Eight data sets (N = 22,029) were used to form both training and test sets in which the scoring engines had access to both text and…

Eye movements of Chinese readers were recorded for sentences in which high- and low-frequency target words were presented normally or with reduced stimulus quality in two experiments. We found stimulus quality and word frequency produced strong additive effects on fixation durations for target words. The results demonstrate that stimulus quality…

Event-based prospective memory (PM) involves remembering to perform intended actions after a delay. An important theoretical issue is whether and how people monitor the environment to execute an intended action when a target event occurs. Performing a PM task often increases the latencies in ongoing tasks. However, little is known about the…

Purpose: Cognitive effort is a clinically important facet of linguistic processing that is often overlooked in the assessment and treatment of people with aphasia (PWA). Furthermore, there is a paucity of valid ways to index cognitive effort in PWA. The construct of cognitive effort has been indexed for decades via pupillometry (measurement of…

The present research investigated the attraction phenomenon, which commonly occurs in the domain of production but is also apparent in comprehension. It particularly focused on its accessibility to conceptual influence, in analogy to previous findings in production in Hebrew (Deutsch and Dank, "J Mem Lang," 60:112-143, 2009). The…

Morphological awareness facilitates many reading processes. For this reason, L1 and L2 learners of English are often directly taught to use their knowledge of English morphology as a useful reading strategy for determining parts of speech and meaning of novel words. Over time, use of morphological awareness skills while reading develops into an…

Since the publication of Clahsen and Felser's (2006) keynote article on grammatical processing in language learners, the online study of sentence comprehension in adult second language (L2) learners has quickly grown into a vibrant and prolific subfield of SLA. As online methods begin to establish a foothold in SLA research, it is important…

In this study we show how complex creative relations can arise from fairly frequent semantic relations observed in everyday language. By doing this, we reflect on some key cognitive aspects of linguistic and general creativity. In our experimentation, we automated the process of solving a battery of Remote Associates Test tasks. By applying…

The purpose of intelligent tutoring systems is to provide students with personalized instruction and feedback. The focus of these systems typically rests in the adaptability of the feedback provided to students, which relies on automated assessments of performance in the system. A large focus of my previous work has been to determine how natural…