Legal and court interpreters require advanced professional skills to perform their demanding tasks. How well does Australia prepare interpreters to fulfil the linguistic needs of its numerous communities, including 'established' migrant, indigenous, 'new and emerging' and deaf, in a variety of legal settings? Based on the online data and…

Children struggle with the resolution of pronouns during reading, but little is known about the sources of their difficulties. We conducted a longitudinal eye tracking experiment with 70 children in the final years of primary school. The children read sentences with a contextual resolution preference in which gender was either an informative…

One of the special arrangements in testing contexts is to allow dyslexic students to listen to the text while they read. In our study, we investigated the effect of read-aloud assistance on young English learners' language comprehension scores. We also examined whether students with dyslexia identification benefit from this assistance differently…

The most distinctive feature of conundrum is the deliberate misinterpretation in the course of its application. The present paper attempts a new cognitive approach to the understanding of conundrums. Based on psychological laws of mankind, the conundrum begins with the questioner's leaving a certain linguistic item on purpose, which will…

It has been hypothesized that known words in the lexicon strengthen newly formed representations of novel words, resulting in words with dense neighborhoods being learned more quickly than words with sparse neighborhoods. Tests of this hypothesis in a connectionist network showed that words with dense neighborhoods were learned better than words…

Probabilistic expectations and memory limitations are central factors governing the real-time comprehension of natural language, but how the two factors interact remains poorly understood. One respect in which the two factors have come into theoretical conflict is the documentation of both "locality" effects, in which having more dependents…

The way in which letters are assigned their position when recognizing a visually presented word was examined in three experiments using nonwords created by transposing the two medial consonants of a bisyllabic baseword (e.g., "nakpin," "semron"). The difficulty in responding to such "TL" nonwords in a lexical decision task was shown to be lower…

Scalar implicatures often incur a processing cost in sentence comprehension tasks. We used a novel mouse-tracking technique in a sentence verification paradigm to test different accounts of this effect. We compared a two-step account, in which people access a basic meaning and then enrich the basic meaning to form the scalar implicature, against a…

We present a new dorsal-ventral stream framework for language comprehension which unifies basic neurobiological assumptions (Rauschecker & Scott, 2009) with a cross-linguistic neurocognitive sentence comprehension model (eADM; Bornkessel & Schlesewsky, 2006). The dissociation between (time-dependent) syntactic structure-building and…

Four experiments were conducted to examine the role of orthotactic probability, i.e. the sequential letter probability, in the early stages of vocabulary acquisition by adult native speakers and advanced learners of German. The results show different effects for orthographic probability in incidental and intentional vocabulary acquisition: Whereas…

A large body of literature has characterized unimodal monolingual and bilingual lexicons and how neighborhood density affects lexical access; however there have been relatively fewer studies that generalize these findings to bimodal (M2) second language (L2) learners of sign languages. The goal of the current study was to investigate parallel…

Although it has been established that human beings process concrete and abstract words differently, it is still a matter of debate what factors contribute to this difference. Since concrete concepts are closely tied to sensory perception, perceptual experience seems to play an important role in their processing. The present study investigated the…

This paper provides an overview of the theories on the organization and development of L1 mental lexicon and the representation mode of bilingual mental lexicon. It analyzes the structure and characteristics of Chinese EFL learners and their problems in English vocabulary acquisition. On the basis of this, it suggests that English vocabulary…

The current study addresses a discrepancy in the psycholinguistic literature about the chronology of information processing during the visual recognition of morphologically complex words. "Form-then-meaning" accounts of complex word recognition claim that morphemes are processed as units of form prior to any influence of their meanings,…

This paper reports on the potential of Oral Elicited Imitation (OEI) as a format for output practice, building on an analysis of picture-matching and spoken data collected from 36 university-level learners of German as a second language (L2) in a web-based assessment task inspired by Input Processing (VanPatten, 2004). The design and development…