Speech errors reveal the speaker's implicit knowledge of phonotactic constraints, both languagewide constraints (e.g., /K/ cannot be a syllable onset when one is speaking English) and experimentally induced constraints (e.g., /k/ cannot be an onset during the experiment). Four experiments investigated the acquisition of novel 2nd-order…

Interaction research about the role of language production in second language (L2) development has focused largely on modified output, specifically learners' responses to negative feedback (Iwashita, 2001; Loewen & Philp, in press; Mackey & Philp, 1998; McDonough, 2005; McDonough & Mackey, in press; Nobuyoshi & Ellis, 1993; Pica, 1988; Shehadeh,…

Research on C-testing has given us few accounts of the relationship between text characteristics and the nature of processing in the C-test completion. The present investigation set out to contribute to this line of research. The purpose of the study was two-fold: First, it attempted to explore the factors by which the difficulty of the C-test can…

The effect of word frequency on the processing of monomorphemic vs. inflected words was investigated in a morphologically relatively limited language, Swedish, with two participant groups: early Finnish-Swedish bilinguals and Swedish monolinguals. The visual lexical decision results of the monolinguals suggest morphological decomposition with…

To investigate the stability of trace reactivation in healthy older adults, 22 older volunteers with no significant neurological history participated in a cross-modal priming task. Whilst both object relative center embedded (ORC) and object relative right branching (ORR) sentences were employed, working memory load was reduced by limiting the…

Five theories of how letter position is coded are contrasted: position-specific slot-coding, Wickelcoding, open-bigram coding (discrete and continuous), and spatial coding. These theories make different predictions regarding the relative similarity of three different types of pairs of letter strings: substitution neighbors,…

The goal of the present study was to explore the pattern of lexical connections between translation equivalents represented in the cognitive system of an Arabic-Hebrew bilingual. To achieve this goal, repetition priming effects (reaction times (RTs) and accuracy measures) were compared between translation equivalents in the two forms of Arabic,…

Purpose: This study reports the findings of an investigation designed to examine the effects of acoustic enhancement on the processing of low-phonetic-substance inflections (e.g., 3rd-person singular "-s," possessive "-s") versus a high-phonetic-substance inflection (e.g., present progressive "-ing") by children with specific language impairment…

Most current models of speech production predict interference from related context words in picture-naming tasks. However, Glaser and Dungelhoff (1984) reported semantic facilitation when the task was changed from basic-level naming to category-level naming. The authors explore two proposals to account for this change in polarity of the semantic…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language…

In this article we investigate the use of latent semantic analysis (LSA), critiquing systems, and knowledge building to support computer-based teaching of English composition. We have built and tested an English composition critiquing system that makes use of LSA to analyze student essays and compute feedback by comparing their essays with…

The linguistic and cognitive profiles of five deaf adults with a sign language disorder were compared with those of matched deaf controls. The test involved a battery of sign language tests, a signed narrative discourse task and a neuropsychological test protocol administered in sign language. Spatial syntax and facial processing were examined in…

Fifteen children ages 7 to 9 years who had persistent reading difficulties despite adequate instruction were provided with intensive tutorial interventions. The interventions targeted deficient phonological processing and decoding skills for 8 weeks (2 hours per day) followed by an 8-week, 1-hour-per-day intervention that focused on the…

In the past years, there have been an increasing number of instrumental investigations as to the nature of speech production errors, prompted by the concern that decades of transcription-based speech error data may be tainted by perceptual biases. While all of these instrumental studies suggest that errors are not, as previously thought,…

This study examines well-compensated adults with dyslexia to see if they experience more problems with pragmatic awareness than the normal population. Social interaction requires an individual to process language at speed by using working memory efficiently, in order to understand the intended, rather than literal, meaning between speaker and…