Purpose: Language sample analysis is widely regarded as the gold standard of language assessment. However, the uncertainty regarding the optimal length of sample and the limited availability of developmental language data for nonmainstream languages such as Afrikaans complicate reliable use of the method. The study aimed to provide guidelines on…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

Although previous research has observed a facilitative influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition and processing of gender agreement in a second language (L2), particularly in language pairs with similar gender agreement marking, the question of whether knowledge of two languages with gender can confer an additional advantage for…

Previous studies comparing emotion and emotion-laden word processing have used various cognitive tasks, including an Affective Simon Task (Altarriba and Basnight-Brown in "Int J Billing" 15(3):310-328, 2011), lexical decision task (LDT; Kazanas and Altarriba in "Am J Psychol", in press), and rapid serial visual processing…

Salience influences grammatical structure during production in a language-dependent manner because different languages afford different options to satisfy preferences. During production, speakers may always try to satisfy all syntactic encoding preferences (e.g., salient entities to be mentioned early, themes to be assigned the syntactic function…

This study uses a structural priming technique with young Spanish speakers to test whether exposure to a rare syntactic form in Spanish ("fue"-passive) would increase the production and comprehension of that form. In Study 1, 14 six-year-old Spanish speakers described pictures of transitive scenes. This baseline study revealed that…

We investigate the acquisition of sentential complementation under causative, perception, and object control verbs in European Portuguese, a language rich in complement types, including the typologically marked inflected infinitives. We tested 58 children between 3 and 5 years of age and 24 adults on a sentence completion task. The results support…

This piece of work proposes to descriptively investigate the structures of complex verbs in Meiteilon. The categorization of such verbs is based on the nature of semantic and syntactic functions of a lexeme or verbal lexeme. A lexeme or verbal lexeme in Meiteilon may have multifunctional properties in the nature of occurrence. Such lexical items…

Learning to map words onto their referents is difficult, because there are multiple possibilities for forming these mappings. Cross-situational learning studies have shown that word-object mappings can be learned across multiple situations, as can verbs when presented in a syntactic context. However, these previous studies have presented either…

Within the field of psycholinguistics there are those who argue for a close relationship between working memory capacity (WMC) and syntactic processing (Just and Carpenter, 1992) and those who argue that there is no such relationship (Waters and Caplan, 1996b; 2004). Despite years of research, empirical data has yet to settle this disagreement,…

This paper provides a set of five indicators of CAS use, which provide a means to analyse a student's written solution to determine whether they used CAS for solving a given problem. These indicators provide a way for researchers and teachers to determine CAS use without requiring classroom observation or the explicit recording of extra…

Background: Previous research has suggested that speech perception in elderly adults is influenced not only by age-related hearing loss or presbycusis but also by declines in cognitive abilities, by background noise and by the syntactic complexity of the message. Aims: To gain further insight into the influence of these cognitive as well as…

The present study examines the tradeoff between the on-line construction of modifier-noun gender agreement and verb-subject person/number agreement vs. the automatization and entrenchment of agreement, through the study of bilingual speakers of Spanish and the Afro-Colombian creole language Palenquero, whose lexicon is highly cognate with Spanish,…

The Spanish mood contrast is a good test case for research on acquiring form-meaning connections in contexts where input is variable and multiple areas of the grammar are implicated (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Nevertheless, research on interpretation of this contrast lags and little is known about how individual lexical items and…

As posited by the simple view of reading, listening comprehension and decoding are necessary for reading comprehension. Thus, the present study examined subcomponents of listening comprehension (i.e., vocabulary, morphology, and syntax) and their contributions to reading comprehension. The novel aspect of this study is that rather than examining…