This study investigates the interpretation of disjunction words (Italian 'o') in negative sentences by Italian monolingual and bilingual (L1 Italian - L2 English) children and Italian adults. Participants were asked to judge Italian sentences corresponding to the English sentence 'This animal did not eat the carrot or the pepper'. According to the…

Background music with lyrics can be a prevalent distraction in environments where people study or read while music plays. However, such effects on reading comprehension across different language contexts remain insufficiently investigated. Guided by the duplex-mechanism account of auditory distraction and the semantic-interference hypothesis, the…

The meaning of positive polar questions (PPQs) is relatively straightforward, so the truth conditions of PPQs can be decided easily. In contrast, the meaning of negative polar questions (NPQs) may vary, and simple yes-no answers to NPQs have seemingly unpredictable interpretations. For example, a simple yes answer to a PPQ like 'Did you have lunch…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

To pinpoint difficulties in the second language (L2) processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, this study investigates first language (L1) effects and effects of verb bias, i.e. frequency information about preferential verb complements, on semantic persistence effects in L2 sentence comprehension. We tested 32 L1 German and 32 L1 Turkish…

Little is known about the impact of teachers' questions on child bilingual's heritage language reading process and outcomes. This study examined the role of adults' questions in English-Mandarin bilingual preschoolers' Mandarin word learning, story comprehension, and reading engagement. Ninety-nine 4- to 5-year-old preschoolers in Singapore were…

Research on intelligibility in international encounters has long focused on issues of pronunciation to the detriment of factors such as linguistic co-text and extralinguistic context, which are comparatively well-studied variables in intelligibility research concerning L1 listeners. This paper seeks to expand the scope of international…

Linguistic meaning is generated by the mind and can be expressed in multiple languages. One may assume that equivalent texts/utterances in two languages by means of translation generate equivalent meanings in their readers/hearers. This follows if we assume that meaning calculated from the linguistic input is solely objective in nature. However,…

In order to facilitate the instruction and acquisition of EFL writing, this paper compares the uses of the light verb "get" in English writing by Chinese and L1 undergraduates by drawing on insights from the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE). Corpus pattern analysis (CPA) is conducted to analyze the data taken from two comparable…

Previous studies have shown that prior linguistic knowledge affects semantic implicit learning when stimuli are presented in the first language. We report an experiment that investigated whether such crosslinguistic influence from the first language would still emerge in the second language for semantic implicit learning of novel articles and…

This study investigated second language learners' processing of ambiguous words (e.g., "bank": [1] a financial institution, [2] an edge of a river/lake) and whether these learners are able to activate the secondary meaning as quickly as they do with the dominant meaning. English L2 and L1 participants used a window paradigm to perform a…

The mechanisms underlying native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing have been widely debated. One account of potential L1/L2 differences is that L2 sentence processing underuses syntactic information and relies heavily on semantic and surface cues. Recently, an alternative account has been proposed, which argues that the source of L1/L2…

The present study endeavors to investigate the learning of the comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in the expository writing by EFL learners at Albalqa Applied University, Jordan. Moreover, the study attempts to see the role of mother tongue influences in the learning and comprehension of semantic interpretation of metaphor in…

Several previous studies showed that prime-target pairs with orthographical overlap but no semantic or morphological relationship (e.g., freeze-free) produced a masked priming effect in second language (L2) speakers but not in first language (L1) speakers. The present study further explored this intriguing L1-L2 difference by comparing English…

The study aims to investigate whether second language learners perform sentence processing based on syntactic or structure-based parsing strategies during real-time comprehension of constructions with syntactic ambiguities. To this end, the recordings of eye movements from Turkish learners of English and native English speakers as a control group…