Two visual-world eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of prediction in the processing of repair disfluencies (e.g., "The chef reached for some salt uh I mean some ketchup ..."). Experiment 1 showed that listeners were more likely to fixate a critical distractor item (e.g., "pepper") during the processing of repair…

Previous evidence suggests that grammatical constraints have a rapid influence during language comprehension, particularly at the level of word categories (noun, verb, preposition). These findings are in conflict with a recent study from Angele, Laishley, Rayner, and Liversedge (2014), in which sentential fit had no early influence on word…

Purpose: The acquisition of literacy skills influences the perception and production of spoken language. We examined if orthography influences implicit processing in speech production in child readers and in adult readers with low and high reading proficiency. Method: Children (n = 17), adults with typical reading skills (n = 17), and adults…

We examined how reading mode (i.e., silent vs. oral reading) influences parafoveal semantic and phonological processing during the reading of Chinese sentences, using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. In silent reading, we found in 2 experiments that reading times on target words were shortened with semantic previews in early and late…

It has been noted that Chinese shows both satellite- and verb-framed properties (Beavers, Levin, & Tham, 2010; Slobin, 2004), a fact that offers the opportunity to explore the typological influence of learners' dominant language because they can choose either option to describe the same motion events and be grammatically correct. This study…

Historically, the manner in which translation ambiguity and emotional content are represented in bilingual memory have often been ignored in many theoretical and empirical investigations, resulting in these linguistic factors related to bilingualism being absent from even the most promising models of bilingual memory representation. However, in…

Background: The spoken language difficulties of children with moderate or severe to profound hearing loss are mainly related to limited auditory speech perception. However, degraded or filtered auditory input as evidenced in children with cochlear implants (CIs) may result in less efficient or slower language processing as well. To provide insight…

In vision, typically-developing (TD) individuals perceive "global" (whole) before "local" (detailed) features, whereas individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) exhibit a local bias. However, auditory global-local distinctions are less clear in ASD, particularly in terms of age and attention effects. To these aims, here…

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment," respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by "in"…

This study is a mixed methods analysis of reading processes and language experiences of deaf and hearing readers. The sample includes four groups each with fifteen adults--identified as: deaf/high-achieving readers, deaf/struggling/non-academic readers, hearing/high-achieving readers, and hearing/non-academic readers. The purpose of this study is…

This article contributes to typological plausibility of Processability Theory (PT) (Pienemann, 1998, 2005) by providing empirical data that show that the stages predicted by PT are followed in the second language (L2) acquisition of Spanish syntax and morphology. In the present article, the PT stages for L2 Spanish morphology and syntax are first…

We respond here to Pienemann's critique of our study that appeared earlier this year in the Language Learning Special Issue entitled "Orders and Sequences in the Acquisition of L2 Morphosyntax, 40 Years On" and guest edited by Jan Hulstijn, Rod Ellis, and Søren Eskildsen. Pienemann objected to our claim that the Teachability Hypothesis…

In this article we present two lexical decision experiments that examine the role of base frequency and of derivative suffix productivity in visual recognition of Spanish words. In the first experiment we find that complex words with productive derivative suffixes result in lower response times than those with unproductive derivative suffixes.…

Traditionally, acquisition of syntactic knowledge and the development of sentence comprehension behaviors have been treated as separate disciplines. This article reviews a growing body of work on the development of incremental sentence comprehension mechanisms and discusses how a better understanding of the developing parser can shed light on two…

Previous studies about the orthographic neighborhood size (NS) in Chinese have overlooked the morphological processing, and the co-variation between the character frequency and the the NS. The present study manipulated the word frequency and the NS simultaneously, with the leading character frequency controlled, to explore their influences on word…