Second language learners are faced with the challenging task of remembering many new words. Exactly how learners are supposed to accomplish that task is disputed. Research on lexical processing that has been carried out in cognitive psychology showed that rehearsing words in expanded patterns, that is, with a delay between each rehearsal, leads to…

This paper reports three studies of bilingual lexical processing, using the semantic competitor priming (SCP) method of Lee and Williams (2001). Study 1 found a trend of within-language SCP effect for Chinese-English bilinguals with both higher and lower levels of vocabulary knowledge. There was also a cross-language SCP effect, but this was…

Is the bilingual language production system a dynamic system that can operate in different language activation states? Three experiments investigated to what extent cross-language phonological co-activation effects in language production are sensitive to the composition of the stimulus list. L1 Dutch-L2 English bilinguals decided whether or not a…

This paper focuses on the dearth of language-processing research addressing Spanish heritage speakers in assimilationist communities. First, we review key offline work on this population, and we then summarize the few psycholinguistic (online) studies that have already been carried out. In an attempt to encourage more such research, in the next…

Empirical evidence suggests oral language proficiency is correlated with literacy outcomes; however, the relationship between oral language proficiency and literacy outcomes for English Language Learners is highly variable. As a result, the field lacks critical direction to identify children who are English Language Learners experiencing general…

Learners frequently experience phonologically inconsistent input, such as exposure to multiple accents. Yet, little is known about the consequences of phonological inconsistency for language learning. The current study examines vocabulary acquisition with different degrees of phonological inconsistency, ranging from no inconsistency (e.g., both…

Prior research has established an executive function advantage among bilinguals as compared to monolingual peers. These non-linguistic cognitive advantages are largely assumed to result from the experience of managing two linguistic systems. However, the possibility remains that the relationship between bilingualism and executive function is…

This volume brings together theoretical perspectives and empirical studies in second language (L2) acquisition and bilingualism and discusses their implications for L2 pedagogy. The book is organized into three sections that focus on prominent linguistic and cognitive theories and together provide a compelling set of state-of-the-art works. Part I…

The present study examined whether written syllable units are perceived in first steps of letter string processing. An illusory conjunction experiment was conducted while event-related potentials were recorded. Colored pseudowords were presented such that there was a match or mismatch between the syllable boundaries and the color boundaries. The…

To investigate the neural bases of consonant and vowel processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read words and pseudowords in a lexical decision task. The stimuli were displayed in three different conditions: (i) simultaneous presentation of all letters (baseline condition); (ii) presentation of all letters,…

The electrophysiological response to words during the "N400" time window (approximately 300-500 ms post-onset) is affected by the context in which the word is presented, but whether this effect reflects the impact of context on "access" of the stored lexical information itself or, alternatively, post-access "integration" processes is still an open…

The independent cue technique has been developed to test traditional interference theories against inhibition theories of forgetting. In the present study, the authors tested the critical criterion for the independence of independent cues: Studied cues not presented during test (and unrelated to test cues) should not contribute to the retrieval…

Given that summer abroad programs are becoming more and more popular, the aim of the present study is to find out whether foreign language proficiency can be significantly improved during a summer stay of 3-4 weeks. The present study examines learners' linguistic gains through oral fluency and accuracy measures as well as a listening comprehension…

Two experiments investigated the ability of adults with a history of language-based learning disability (hLLD) and their normal language (NL) peers to learn prosodic patterns of a novel language. Participants were exposed to stimuli from an artificial language and tested on items that required generalization of the stress patterns and the…

The lexical quality hypothesis assumes that skilled readers rely on high quality lexical representations that afford autonomous lexical retrieval and reduce the need to rely on top-down context. This experiment investigated this hypothesis by comparing the performance of adults classified on reading comprehension and spelling performance. "Lexical…