There are grounds for believing that prompting language learners to infer the meaning of new lexical items is beneficial because inferring the meaning of lexical items and verifying one's inferences invites more cognitive investment than simply being presented with the meanings. However, concerns have been raised over the risk that wrong…

Counterfactuals describe imagined alternatives to reality that people know to be false. Successful counterfactual comprehension therefore requires people to keep in mind both an imagined hypothetical world and the presupposed real world. "Counterfactual transparency," that is, the degree to which a context makes it easy to determine…

Background: Pragmatic language impairment has recently been the subject of a number of studies that attempted to illuminate classification and diagnostic issues, and identify the profile of children with pragmatic language difficulties. Although much progress has been made, the nature of pragmatic difficulties remains unclear. Aims: To contrast…