In spoken discourse, understanding irony requires the apprehension of subtle cues, such as the speaker's tone of voice (prosody), which often reveal the speaker's affective stance toward the listener in the context of the utterance. To shed light on the interplay of linguistic content and prosody on impressions of spoken criticisms and compliments…

Learner corpus studies using syntactic complexity as a construct for characterizing learner proficiency have found that higher proficiency permits learners to produce more complex syntactic structures. However, the majority of previous studies have focused on writing, almost exclusively with adult second language (L2) learners. Given the…

In recent years translators have experienced a new variation imposed by market dynamics and new technologies with many translation-like activities (e.g., transediting, post-editing, intralingual work, etc.). The question which arises is whether these new practices require the translator's skill set to be redesigned. In this article, we argue that…

A fundamental skill required for vocabulary development is word recognition ability. According to Perfetti (1985), word recognition ability relies on low-level cognitive processing skill to be automatic and efficient in order for cognitive resources to be allocated to high-level processes such as inferencing and schemata activation needed for…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

The present study examined the locus responsible for the effect of emotional state on sentence processing in healthy native speakers of Japanese, using event-related brain potentials. The participants were induced into a happy, neutral, or sad mood and then subjected to electroencephalogram recording during which emotionally neutral sentences,…

Languages often use different constructions to convey the same meaning. For example, the meaning of a causative construction in English ("Jen had her computer fixed") is conveyed using an active structure in Korean ("Jen-NOM her computer-ACC fixed"), and yet little is known about how bilinguals represent and process such…

Children with specific learning disabilities (SLD) exhibit specific difficulties in high-order components of emotional understanding that involve language (e.g., recognition of complex emotions from situations), or defining emotions and providing examples. The objectives of the current study were to study (a) modifiability of emotional…

The study assessed 30-month-old Mandarin-speaking children's awareness of aspectual distinctions involving the perfective marker "le" and the imperfective marker "zhe" in a preferential looking experiment. In the experiment, we presented our child subjects with a choice between two video clips (one depicting a closed event and…

Current models of word-meaning access typically assume that lexical-semantic representations of ambiguous words (e.g., 'bark of the dog/tree') reach a relatively stable state in adulthood, with only the relative frequencies of meanings and immediate sentence context determining meaning preference. However, recent experience also affects…

The selection and ordering of response units (phonemes, letters, keystrokes) represents a transversal issue across different modalities of language production. Here, the issue of serial order was investigated with respect to typewriting. Following seminal investigations in the spoken modality, we conducted an experiment where participants typed as…

Purpose: Successful speech processing depends on our ability to detect and integrate multisensory cues, yet there is minimal research on multisensory speech detection and integration by children. To address this need, we studied the development of speech detection for auditory (A), visual (V), and audiovisual (AV) input. Method: Participants were…

Adults recognize talkers better when the talkers speak a familiar language than when they speak an unfamiliar language. This language familiarity effect (LFE) demonstrates the inseparable nature of linguistic and indexical information in adult spoken language processing. Relatively little is known about children's integration of linguistic and…

This study examined associations between caregiver talk and language skills in full term (FT) and preterm (PT) children (n = 97). All-day recordings of caregiver-child interactions revealed striking similarities in amount of caregiver talk heard by FT and PT children. Children who heard more caregiver talk at 16 months demonstrated better…

This study explores how Korean English learners process English caused-motion constructions (CMC) through online and offline experiments. The focus was on how Korean learners' processing of English CMC is affected by the typological difference between English and Korean. Of the 77 volunteer participants recruited, 17 were native English speakers…