This study examines context effects on lexical processing by low-proficiency Japanese learners of English during sentence comprehension, and the role of individual differences in verbal working memory (WM). Thirty Japanese learners of English as a second language (L2) and 27 speakers of English as a first language (L1) were recruited for a…

Listening has been widely characterised as a multifaceted process encompassing a range of linguistic and psycholinguistic components (see Rubin, 1994). However, for learners at different levels of L2 proficiency, there is uncertainty over the relative importance of the various sub-skills. To address this issue, a number of linguistic and…

In recent years, it has been reported that WM (working memory) is concerned with word generation, but many points regarding the relationship between the individual differences of WM capacity and the patterns of word generation remain unclear. This study is to investigate these unclear points by using three types of word fluency task with different…

This paper experimentally examines the effects of the case-markings and the constraint on the assignments and the receptions of thematic roles in Japanese sentence processing. A self-paced reading experiment was carried out with syntactically well-controlled Japanese sentences including homonyms locally ambiguous between nouns and verbs. The…

This study investigated whether second language (L2) proficiency affects pragmatic comprehension, namely the ability to comprehend implied meaning in spoken dialogues, in terms of accuracy and speed of comprehension. Participants included 46 native English speakers at a U.S. university and 160 Japanese students of English in a college in Japan who…