Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to compare brain activation from native Japanese (L1) readers reading hiragana (syllabic) and kanji (logographic) sentences, and English as a second language (L2). Kanji showed more activation than hiragana in right-hemisphere occipito-temporal lobe areas associated with visuospatial…

Forty children, aged 1 ; 8-2 ; 0, participated in one of three training conditions meant to enhance their comprehension of the spatial term "under": the +Gesture group viewed a symbolic gesture for "under" during training; those in the +Photo group viewed a still photograph of objects in the "under" relationship; those in the Model Only group did…

The article aims at investigating speech processing prerequisite claims made by Pienemann's Processability Theory (1998). Longitudinal data from eight English L1 and one French L1 speaker learning Arabic as an L2 were used to investigate the emergence/processing of demonstrative-predicate gender agreement and verbal agreement structures…

It is generally accepted that the presence of a second language (L2) has an impact on the neuronal substrates build up and used for language processing; the influence of the age of L2 exposure, however, is not established. We tested the hypothesis that the age of L2 acquisition has an effect on the cortical representation of a multilingual…

Encountering trouble producing a word in the midst of a turn at talk is an everyday experience for foreign language learners. By employing conversation analysis (CA) as a central tool for analysis, the current study explores how students undertake a range of word searches while they organize a pair work session designed for the purpose of language…

The main goal of this paper is to shift the focus on "learning" away from the traditional locus of inquiry in SLA--the L2 classroom--in order to extend the SLA empirical database, and by so doing extend and broaden our understanding of what it means to learn and use (in mutually reinforcing and enlightening ways) an additional, or second,…

Abstract Does native language phonology influence visual word processing in a second language? This question was investigated in two experiments with two groups of Russian-English bilinguals, differing in their English experience, and a monolingual English control group. Experiment 1 tested visual word recognition following semantic…

Two sentence processing experiments on a dative NP ambiguity in Korean demonstrate effects of phrase length on overt and implicit prosody. Both experiments controlled non-prosodic length factors by using long versus short proper names that occurred before the syntactically critical material. Experiment 1 found that long phrases induce different…

The inherent confound between the organization of articulation and the acoustic-phonetic structure of the speech signal makes it exceptionally difficult to evaluate the competing claims of motor and acoustic-phonetic accounts of how listeners recognize coarticulated speech. Here we use Granger causation analysis of high spatiotemporal resolution…

Despite a history of reading or spelling difficulties, some adults attain age-appropriate spelling skills and succeed at university. We compared the spelling of 29 such high-functioning dyslexics with that of 28 typical students, matched on general spelling ability, and controlling for vocabulary and non-verbal intelligence. Participants wrote…

We explored children's early interpretation of numerals and linguistic number marking, in order to test the hypothesis (e.g., Carey (2004). Bootstrapping and the origin of concepts. "Daedalus", 59-68) that children's initial distinction between "one" and other numerals (i.e., "two," "three," etc.) is bootstrapped from a prior distinction between…

Instead of assessing activation in distinct brain regions, approaches to investigating the networks underlying distinct brain functions have come into the focus of neuroscience research. Here, we provide a completely data-driven framework for assessing functional and causal connectivity in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data,…

This study investigated the situation of teaching and learning idioms at a university level in Vietnam, a foreign language context. It also examined the evaluation of the idiom teaching process in three language classes over a 15-week period for pre-service teachers of English. The data were collected though questionnaires, in-depth interviews and…

In this paper, we present a novel approach for semiautomatic question generation to support academic writing. Our system first extracts key phrases from students' literature review papers. Each key phrase is matched with a Wikipedia article and classified into one of five abstract concept categories: Research Field, Technology, System, Term, and…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate an idea of producing an assistive and augmentative communication (AAC) tool that uses natural human computer interfacing to accommodate the disabilities of children with cerebral palsy (CP) and assist them in their daily communication. Design/methodology/approach: The authors developed a…