Considering the difficulties in understanding the global meaning of texts, this paper intends to give some suggestions on how to help students reach a deeper understanding of texts in intensive reading classroom within the framework of schema theory. The purpose of this paper is expressed in three ways. The first is to give a brief overview of…

Prosodic information, such as word stress and speech rhythm, is important in language acquisition, and sensitivity to stress patterns is present from birth onwards. Exposure to prosodic properties of the native language occurs prenatally. Preterm birth and an associated lack of exposure to prosodic information are suspected to affect language…

The present study investigated the effects of word-recognition training on the word-recognition processing of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). Providing 7-week word-recognition training, the study examined whether such training improves EFL learners' word-recognition performance. The main aspects of this study concerned word…

Two experiments examined the restriction of referential domains during unscripted conversation by analyzing the modification and online interpretation of referring expressions. Experiment 1 demonstrated that from the earliest moments of processing, addressees interpreted referring expressions with respect to referential domains constrained by the…

In this article we compare five groups of learners acquiring Dutch gender as marked on determiners and adjectival inflection. Groups of L1 (first language) children and L1-SLI (first-language specific-language-impairment) children are compared to three Turkish-Dutch L2 (second language) groups: adult L2, child L2 and child L2-SLI. Overall, our…

Background: Previous studies of outcome for children with early language delay have focused on measures of early language as predictors of language outcome. This study investigates whether very early processing skills (VEPS) known to underpin language development will be better predictors of specific language and social communication outcomes than…

This study was intended to compare processing instruction (VanPatten, 1993, 1996, 2000), an input-based focus on form technique, to dictogloss tasks, an output-oriented focus-on-form type of instruction to assess their effects in helping beginning-EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners acquire the simple English passive voice. Two intact…

We investigated the relationship between ear advantage scores on the Fused Dichotic Words Test (FDWT), and laterality of activation in fMRI using a verb generation paradigm in fourteen children with epilepsy. The magnitude of the laterality index (LI), based on spatial extent and magnitude of activation in classical language areas (BA 44/45,…

Real-time language comprehension is a principal cognitive ability and thereby relates to central properties of the human cognitive architecture. Yet how do the presumably universal cognitive and neural substrates of language processing relate to the astounding diversity of human languages (over 5,000)? The authors present a neurocognitive model of…

Two experiments were carried out to investigate the processing of the empty category PRO and the time-course of this in Spanish. Eye movements were recorded while participants read sentences in which a matrix clause was followed by a subordinate infinitival clause, so that the subject or the object of the main clause could act as controller of…

Two experiments in which participants named pictured objects with difficult or easier names, and a reanalysis and review of published data, reveal that problematic measures used in previous studies obscured the implications of group differences in tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) rates. In Experiment 1, increased age led to more TOTs for difficult but not…

For several languages, a preference for subject relative clauses over object relative clauses has been reported. However, Mak, Vonk, and Schriefers (2002) showed that there is no such preference for relative clauses with an animate subject and an inanimate object. A Dutch object relative clause as...de rots, die de wandelaars beklommen hebben...…

Stewart, Pickering, and Sanford (1998) reported a new type of semantic inference, implicit consequentiality, which they suggest is comparable to, although not directly related to, the well-documented phenomenon of implicit causality. It is our contention that there is a direct relation between these two semantic phenomena but that this relation…

By employing visual lexical decision and functional MRI, we studied the neural correlates of morphological decomposition in a highly inflected language (Finnish) where most inflected noun forms elicit a consistent processing cost during word recognition. This behavioral effect could reflect suffix stripping at the visual word form level and/or…

A semantic priming, lexical-decision study was conducted to examine the ability of left- and right-brain damaged individuals to perceive lexical-stress cues and map them onto lexical-semantic representations. Correctly and incorrectly stressed primes were paired with related and unrelated target words to tap implicit processing of lexical prosody.…