Research on the phonetic consistency effect in Chinese began in the 1980s. For nearly forty years, the consistency effect, as well as its implications for Chinese character recognition, has been frequently examined. This article presents the debate over the consistency effect in Chinese character recognition. While some research supported the…

Lexical ambiguity--the phenomenon of a single word having multiple, distinguishable senses--is pervasive in language. Both the degree of ambiguity of a word (roughly, its number of senses) and the relatedness of those senses have been found to have widespread effects on language acquisition and processing. Recently, distributional approaches to…

In the property listing task (PLT), participants are asked to list properties for a concept (e.g., for the concept "dog," "barks," and "is a pet" may be produced). In conceptual property norming (CPNs) studies, participants are asked to list properties for large sets of concepts. Here, we use a mathematical model of…

Psycholinguistic research over the past decade has suggested that children's linguistic knowledge includes dedicated representations for frequently-encountered multiword sequences. Important evidence for this comes from studies of children's production: it has been repeatedly demonstrated that children's rate of speech errors is greater for word…

Although computational models can simulate aspects of human sentence processing, research on this topic has remained almost exclusively limited to the single language case. The current review presents an overview of the state of the art in computational cognitive models of sentence processing, and discusses how recent sentence-processing models…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. But how do they learn which contexts are linked to which semantic features in the first place? We investigate if 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 60) can learn about a syntactic context from tracking its use with only a few familiar words. After…

Understanding language requires readers and listeners to cull meaning from fast-unfolding messages that often contain conflicting cues pointing to incompatible ways of interpreting the input (e.g., "The cat was chased by the mouse"). This article reviews mounting evidence from multiple methods demonstrating that cognitive control plays…

This study explores prototypical word associations in EFL learners' mental lexicon to determine how they categorize the words retrieved in response to prompts in a lexical availability task. We compare two groups of Spanish EFL learners: sixty children in the sixth grade of primary education and sixty adolescents in the ten grade of secondary…

The processing of morphologically complex words has been studied in many languages, leading to a variety of theoretical accounts. Prime type, individual differences, and cross-linguistic effects have emerged as potential factors in morphological processing, but the findings so far have been inconclusive, especially for young children. This study…

We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb--Object--Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information…

First (L1) and second (L2) language speakers process information differently. The current study explores whether L1 and L2 English language speakers process the emotional connotations of high and low-frequency words using the emotional Stroop task. With this task, we measure the reaction time required to name the color of words with positive,…

Purpose: This study investigates whether crosslinguistic effects on auditory word recognition are modulated by the quality of the auditory signal (clear and noisy). Method: In an online experiment, a group of Spanish--English bilingual listeners performed an auditory lexical decision task, in their second language, English. Words and pseudowords…

The aim of the present study was to investigate the acquisition of ditransitive structures beyond production. We conducted an elicitation task (production) and a picture-sentence matching task measuring accuracy and response times (comprehension). We examined German five-to seven-year-old typically developing children and an adult control group.…

Previous work on individual differences has revealed limitations in the ability of existing measures (e.g., working memory) to predict language processing. Recent evidence suggests that an individual's sensitivity to detect the statistical regularities present in language (i.e., "chunk sensitivity") may significantly modulate online…

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) regularly use the bare form of verbs (e.g., dance) instead of inflected forms (e.g., danced). We propose an account of this behavior in which processing difficulties of children with DLD disproportionally affect processing novel inflected verbs in their input. Limited experience with inflection…