This mixed-methods study investigated the impact of musical lyrics and working memory capacities on second language (L2) English reading comprehension among adult Chinese native speakers. Participants were 57 adult ESL learners with advanced L2 proficiency, divided into high and low working memory capacity groups based on a pre-test. They…

This study first validates a survey on self-regulated vocabulary learning strategies. It then examines the effects on the acquisition of new second language (L2) words from a reading text of three word-focused exercise conditions: reading + marginal glosses, reading + gap-fill and reading + sentence writing. It also evaluates the extent to which…

Cognitive control is a mental construct thought to be important in most cognitive tasks, including second language learning. Its functions are believed by many scholars to be mainly domain-general, with some transferability across linguistic and non-linguistic domains. Our study aims to investigate to what extent the domain-generality claim of…

Relatively late mastery of scalar implicatures has been suggested to correlate with children's immature processing capacities, such as their limited working memory. Yet, many studies that tested for a link between children's working memory and their computation of scalar implicatures have failed to find any correlation. One possible reason is that…

Recent studies highlight the important contribution of phonological working memory (PM) in the early stages of both native and foreign language development. However, research on the effects of PM training on language development is very limited. This study aimed at assessing the effectiveness of a PM training educational intervention as a means of…

The research on interpreting aptitude has focused on the abilities, skills and personal traits of individuals in order to predict their future interpreting performance. However, an important variable between the personal characteristics and success of trainee interpreters in interpreter training, which is instructional practices, is overlooked.…

This study aimed to investigate the effect of visual input enhancement (VIE) on the comprehension of reading texts and the learning of two grammatical forms: English relative clauses and articles. Individual learners' working memory (WM) capacity was also tested to explore its impact on the effectiveness of VIE. A total of 48 Korean college…

Purpose: Background noise and voice problems among teachers can degrade listening conditions in classrooms. The aim of this literature review is to understand how these acoustic degradations affect spoken language processing in 6- to 18-year-old children. Method: In a narrative report and meta-analysis, we systematically review studies that…

Purpose: Better auditory prostheses and earlier interventions have led to remarkable improvements in spoken language abilities for children with hearing loss (HL), but these children often still struggle academically. This study tested a hypothesis for why this may be, proposing that the language of school becomes increasingly disconnected from…

There have been many studies exploring the advantages that bilingualism confers to individuals' working memory and metacognition (see Ransdell, 2006; Del Missier et al., 2010). The hypothesis of language critical period states that if no language learning and teaching happen during the critical period, an individual will never be able to fully…

This study investigated the differential effects of implicit and explicit instruction of refusal strategies in English and whether and how the impacts of instruction methods interact with learners' working memory capacity (WMC). 78 learners of English were assigned to three groups (explicit, implicit, and control). Implicit instruction was…

The present study explored the association between working memory capacity (WMC) and second language reading performance as measured with three types of comprehension tasks: free written recall, sentence completion, and multiple-choice. It also examined the contribution of WMC to the frequency and variety of strategy use, as well as the…

Though research has shown that rhythmic training is beneficial for phonological speech processing, little empirical work has been carried out to assess whether rhythmic training in the classroom can help to improve pronunciation in a second language. This study tests the potential benefits of hand-clapping to the rhythm of newly learned French…

In second language (L2) academic writing, being able to think in the L2 as opposed to thinking in the L1 and then translating into an L2 utterance may contribute to greater success in foreign-language writing. It reduces cognitive load, frees up more time and cognitive capacity to focus on syntactic structures in the target language and achieve…

In everyday life, humans rely on working memory (WM) processes to make sense of relationships between linguistic elements that are not linearly adjacent. For example, to understand the sentence "The dog that the cat chased is cute," we encode the referent "the dog" into WM, maintain and retrieve it after reading the verb…