A well-known challenge for language learners is that the input is typically produced by a variety of speakers, each with distinct vocal characteristics (Liberman, Harris, Hoffman, & Griffith, 1957). Accordingly, many studies have indicated that talker variability leads to processing costs for learners across the lifespan (Jusczyk & Pisoni,…

Aging is accompanied by declines in both working memory and long-term episodic memory processes. Specifically, important age-related memory deficits are characterized by performance impairments exhibited by older relative to younger adults when binding distinct components into a single integrated representation, despite relatively intact memory…

This study investigated the effects of auditory and audiovisual text presentation on the three levels of mental representations assumed in theories of discourse processing. A sample of 106 children aged 7, 9, and 11 years listened to 16 short narrative texts, 8 of which were accompanied by a series of pictures illustrating the content.…

Embodied theories of language comprehension propose that readers construct a mental simulation of described objects that contains perceptual characteristics of their real-world referents. The present study is the first to investigate directly whether implied object size is mentally simulated during sentence comprehension and to study the potential…

Morphophonological alternations can make target-like production of grammatical morphemes challenging due to changes in form depending on the phonological environment. This article explores the acquisition of morphophonological alternations involving the interacting patterns of vowel deletion and stress shift in Russian-speaking children (aged…

Investigating the impact of linguistic characteristics on visual word recognition in children, we studied whether differences in native (L1) and second language (L2) processing already emerge at the beginning of reading development. German elementary school students in grades 2 to 6 completed a battery of standardized tests and a lexical decision…

Despite calls for engaging assessments targeting young language learners (YLLs) between 8 and 13 years old, what makes assessment tasks engaging and how such task characteristics affect measurement quality have not been well studied empirically. Furthermore, there has been a dearth of validity research about technology-enhanced speaking tests for…

Three experiments examined children's and adults' abilities to use statistical and temporal information to distinguish between common cause and causal chain structures. In Experiment 1, participants were provided with conditional probability information and/or temporal information and asked to infer the causal structure of a 3-variable mechanical…

Structural priming is a useful laboratory-based technique for investigating how children respond to temporary changes in the distribution of structures in their input. In the current study we investigated whether increasing the number of object relative clauses (RCs) in German-speaking children's input changes their processing preferences for…

The present study explored the temporal allocation of attention in groups of 8-year-old children, 10-year-old children, and adults performing a rapid serial visual presentation task. In a dual-condition task, participants had to detect a briefly presented target (T2) after identifying an initial target (T1) embedded in a random series of…

This study investigates the development of plural morphology in Jordanian Arab children, and explores the role of the predictability, transparency, productivity, and frequency of different plural forms in determining the trajectory that children follow in acquiring this complex inflectional system. The study also re-examines the development of the…

The present study investigates English-learning infants' early understanding of the link between the grammatical category "verb" and the conceptual category "event," and their ability to recruit morphosyntactic information online to learn novel verb meanings. We report two experiments using an infant-controlled…

Learning to behave in socially competent ways is an essential component of children's development. This study examined the relations between children's social, communicative, and cognitive skills and their behaviours during a cooperative task, as well as how these relationships change at different ages. Early school-age (5-8 years old) and middle…

This study asks whether children accept both interpretations of ambiguous sentences with contexts supporting each option. Twenty-six 3- to 5-year-old English-speaking children and a control group of 30 English-speaking adults participated in a truth value judgment task. As a step towards evaluating the complexity of syntactic ambiguity, the…

Weak performance in short-term memory (STM) in children with cochlear implants (CI) may have an impact on vocabulary development. Vocabulary, phonological STM (non-word repetition), phonological/verbal STM (digit span) and rapid naming measures were administered to 15 Greek-speaking children with CI (ages 4;6-8;6) and to chronological age (CA) and…