Graduate school recommendations are an important part of admissions in higher education, and natural language processing may be able to provide objective and consistent analyses of recommendation texts to complement readings by faculty and admissions staff. However, these sorts of high-stakes, personal recommendations are different from the…

We examine cross-linguistic influence in the processing of motion sentences by L2 users from an embodied cognition perspective. The experiment employs a priming paradigm to test two hypotheses based on previous action and motion research in cognitive psychology. The first hypothesis maintains that conceptual representations of motion are embodied…

Three experiments investigated the acquisition of English epistemic modal verbs (e.g., "may", "have to"). Semantically, these verbs encode possibility or necessity with respect to available evidence. Pragmatically, the use of weak epistemic modals often gives rise to scalar conversational inferences (e.g., "The toy may be…

Purpose: Classifying children into two language ability groups, with and without language impairment, may underestimate the number of groups with distinct language ability patterns, or, alternatively, there may be only a single group characterized by a continuum of language performance. The purpose of the current study was to identify the number…

This study shows that the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state--the sense that a word is in memory when its retrieval fails--is used as a heuristic for inferring that an inaccessible word has characteristics that are consistent with greater word perceptibility. When reporting a TOT state, people judged an unretrieved word as more likely to…

Sign language comprehension requires visual attention to the linguistic signal and visual attention to referents in the surrounding world, whereas these processes are divided between the auditory and visual modalities for spoken language comprehension. Additionally, the age-onset of first language acquisition and the quality and quantity of…

This study examined lexical processing in English by native speakers of Korean and Chinese, compared to that of native speakers of English, using normal, alternated, and inverse fonts. Sixty four adult students participated in a lexical decision task. The findings demonstrated similarities and differences in accuracy and latency among the three L1…

A number of previous studies showed that comprehenders make use of lexically based constraints such as subcategorization frequency in processing structurally ambiguous sentences. One piece of such evidence is lexically specific syntactic priming in comprehension; following the costly processing of a temporarily ambiguous sentence, comprehenders…

We introduce a set of biologically and computationally motivated design choices for modeling the learning of language, or of other types of sequential, hierarchically structured experience and behavior, and describe an implemented system that conforms to these choices and is capable of unsupervised learning from raw natural-language corpora. Given…

Because of the globalisation of business transactions and trade, the demand for translation and interpreting (T&I) services has continued to grow in South Korea. A 20-week-long Business Interpreting and Translation (BIT) Certificate Program was designed to teach basic T&I skills to people who were interested in acquiring such skills for…

This study investigated the effects of three fluency-enhancing activities on interpreting learners' performance. Four groups of students took part in the experiment. They were assigned to one of the four task conditions: pre-task planning, task repetition, formulae acquisition, and a control group. A temporal approach was adopted to measure…

We asked whether parental questionnaires on the heritage language proficiency of bilingual children might elucidate how proficient bilingual children are in their heritage language. We tested 20 UK-based Polish-English bilingual children between 4;5 and 5;9 years on Polish and English versions of the Cross-linguistic Lexical Tasks (CLTs). These…

Though previous research has shown a decreased sensitivity to emotionally-laden linguistic stimuli presented in the non-native (L2) compared to the native language (L1), studies conducted thus far have not examined how different modalities influence bilingual emotional language processing. The present experiment was therefore aimed at…

Development of reading skills has been shown to be tightly linked to phonological processing skills and to some extent to speech perception abilities. Although speech perception is also known to play a role in reading development, it is not clear which processes underlie this connection. Using event-related potentials (ERPs) we investigated the…

There is growing research on the linguistic features that most contribute to making second language (L2) speech easy or difficult to understand. Comprehensibility, which is usually captured through listener judgments, is increasingly viewed as integral to the L2 speaking construct. However, there are shortcomings in how this construct is…