Children are adept at learning their language's speech-sound categories, but just how these categories function in their developing lexicon has not been mapped out in detail. Here, we addressed whether, in a language-guided looking procedure, 2-year-olds would respond to a mispronunciation of the voicing of the initial consonant of a newly learned…

This study addresses whether there is anything special about learning a third language, as compared to learning a second language, that results solely from the order of acquisition. We use a computational model based on the mathematical framework of Linear Discriminative Learning to explore this question for the acquisition of a small trilingual…

Many students learn Turkish as a second language in Turkey. These students, whose first language is Kurdish, learn Turkish at a certain level before starting school. As a result, these students become emergent bilinguals along with school life. On the other hand, some of these students almost do not use Kurdish in their lives and wholly turn to…

In four experiments, we investigated the impact of letter case (lower case vs. UPPER CASE) on the processing of sequences of written words. Experiment 1 used the rapid parallel visual presentation (RPVP) paradigm with postcued identification of one word in a five-word sequence. The sequence could be grammatically correct (e.g., "the boy likes…

This paper reports an experiment that investigates interpretive distinctions between two different expressions of generalization in Spanish. In particular, our aim was to find out when the distinction between generic statements (GS) such as "Tigers have stripes" and universally quantified statements (UQS) such as "All tigers have…

Successful word recognition requires that listeners attend to differences that are phonemic in the language while also remaining flexible to the variation introduced by different voices and accents. Previous work has demonstrated that American-English-learning 19-month-olds are able to balance these demands: although one-off one-feature…

While research has repeatedly found evidence that readers infer characters' emotions, we investigate three outstanding questions about the content and time course of such inferences. We ask whether even simple narratives give rise to emotion inferences, in what form such inferences are encoded into long-term memory, and whether they are uniquely…

The present study examines the effectiveness of incorporating worked examples with prompts for self-explanation into a middle school math textbook. Algebra 1 students (N = 75) completed an equation-solving unit with textbooks either containing the original practice problems or in which a portion of those problems were converted into a combination…

R and Python are commonly used software languages for data analytics. Using these languages as the course software for the introductory course gives students practical skills for applying statistical concepts to data analysis. However, the reliance upon the command line is perceived by the typical nontechnical introductory student as sufficiently…

Purpose: The purpose of the study is to investigate how emotional arousal and valence affect confrontational naming accuracy and response time (RT) in people with mild-to-moderate aphasia compared with adults without aphasia. We hypothesized that negative and positive emotions would facilitate naming for people with aphasia (PWA) but lead to…

Mass adoption of neural machine translation (NMT) tools in the translation workflow has exerted a significant impact on the language services industry over the last decade. There are claims that with the advent of NMT, automated translation has reached human parity for translating news (see, e.g. Popel et al. 2020). Moreover, some machine…

Three experiments using a spelling error detection task investigated the extent to which morphemes and pseudomorphemes affect word processing. We compared the processing of transparent compound words (e.g., doorbell), pseudocompound words (e.g., carpet), and matched control words (e.g., tomato). In half of the compound and pseudocompound words,…

Background: Acquired apraxia of speech (AOS) involves speech-production deficits on both the segmental and suprasegmental levels. Recent research has identified a non-linear interaction between the metrical structure of bisyllabic words and word-production accuracy in German speakers with AOS, with trochaic words (strong-weak stress) being…

In 2 ERP experiments participants read 4-word sequences presented for 200 ms (RPVP paradigm) and were required to decide whether the word sequences were grammatical or not. In Experiment 1, the word sequence consisted of either a grammatically correct sentence (e.g., "she can sing now") or an ungrammatical scrambled sequence (e.g.,…

We present computational modeling results based on a self-paced reading study investigating number attraction effects in Eastern Armenian. We implement three novel computational models of agreement attraction in a Bayesian framework and compare their predictive fit to the data using k-fold cross-validation. We find that our data are better…