This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

The public debate on the use of the German nonbinary gender asterisk ("Lehrer*in" 'teacher') is emotionally charged. While it has been adopted by political and educational institutions, opponents argue that it is inappropriate for making persons identifying themselves beyond the male-female-dichotomy more visible. We investigated this…

Grammatically masculine role-nouns (e.g., "Studenten"masc.'students') can refer to men and women but may favor an interpretation where only men are considered the referent. If true, this has implications for a society aiming to achieve equal representation in the workplace since, for example, job adverts use such role descriptions. To…

Previous studies have shown that speakers of languages such as German, Spanish, and French reactivate the syntactic gender of the antecedent of a pronoun to license gender agreement. As syntactic gender is assumed to be stored in the lexicon, this has motivated the claim that pronouns in these languages reactivate the lexical entry of their…

In this paper we aim to model the organization and processing of Bangla polymorphemic words in the mental lexicon. Our objective is to determine whether the mental lexicon accesses a polymorphemic word as a whole or decomposes the word into its constituent morphemes and then recognize them accordingly. To address this issue, we adopted two…

Mobile technologies are increasingly finding their way into classroom practice. While these technologies can create opportunities that may facilitate learning, including the learning of a second or foreign language (L2), the full potential of these new media often remains underexploited. A case in point concerns tablet applications for language…

To assign lexical stress when reading, the Greek reader can potentially rely on lexical information (knowledge of the word), visual-orthographic information (processing of the written diacritic), or a default metrical strategy (penultimate stress pattern). Previous studies with secondary education children have shown strong lexical effects on…

Investigation of Spanish speakers' methods of recognizing written English suggested that speakers of Spanish, which has a highly regular spelling system, may rely on a phonological route because subjects performed quite poorly on exception words. (Author/CB)

Analysis of C-test elicited data from a project monitoring the continuous second-language development of college students indicated that language processing did not depend on native or target language status but on the difficulty of the lexical task, and that there was some measure of interaction between native and target lexical processing. (38…

Notes that English coronal stop deletion is constrained by the preceding segment, so that stops and sibilants favor deletion more than liquids and nonsibilant fricatives. Suggests the existence of an attractive theoretical integration of categorical and variable processes in the grammar to account for the constraint. (26 references) (Author/CK)

In-depth analysis of a large corpus of English and German beginning consonant and syllable stress errors revealed that claims regarding these errors can not be replicated for Spanish, leading to the development of hypotheses focusing on Spanish as a pre-final-stress and syllable-timed language. (38 references) (Author/CB)

Presents an analysis of colloquial-spoken Thai, showing how different tempi can be interrelated. Analysis of language processes, deletion paths, and syllable structure leads to the conclusion that phonological processes found synchronically in related but different rates of delivery should be captured by a universally applicable rule with certain…

Purpose: Recent research suggests that nonword repetition (NWR) and sentence repetition (SR) tasks can be used to discriminate between children with SLI and their typically developing age-matched (TDAM) and younger (TDY) peers. Method: Fourteen Cantonese-speaking children with SLI and 30 of their TDAM and TDY peers were compared on NWR and SR…