Predicates like "coloring-the-star" denote events that have a temporal duration and a culmination point ("telos"). When combined with perfective aspect (e.g., "Valeria has colored the star"), a culmination inference arises implying that the action has stopped, and the star is fully colored. While the perfective aspect…

This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

Modals (e.g., "can," "must") vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor…

Investigations of working memory advantages in bilinguals yield inconsistent findings. Even less is known about how the addition of languages beyond two (multilingualism) may affect working memory. Due to their experience with managing multiple languages, it is possible that multilinguals may be more practised in the use of their working memories.…

The present study aimed to develop an analytic assessment rubric for the consecutive interpreting course in the educational setting in the Iranian academic context. To this end, the general procedure of rubric development, including data preparation, selection, and refinement, was applied. The performance criteria were categorized into content,…

Code-switching (switching between languages) is a common linguistic behavior in bilingual speech directed to infants and children. In adult-directed speech (ADS), acoustic-phonetic properties of one language may transfer to the other language close to a code-switch point; for example, English stop consonants may be more Spanish-like near a switch.…

Research has shown that speakers of different languages may differ in their cognitive and perceptual processing of reality. A common denominator of this line of investigation has been its reliance on the sensory domain of vision. The aim of our study was to extend the scope to a new sense-taste. Using as a starting point crosslinguistic…

Analysis of linguistic abilities that are concurrently impaired in individuals with language deficits allows identification of a shared underlying mechanism. If any two linguistic abilities are mediated by the same underlying mechanism, then both abilities will be absent if this mechanism is broken. Clustering techniques automatically arrange…

Novelty seeking has been found to affect creative performance, but its impact on the temporal dynamics of creative information processing remains unclear. Creative information is identified by two key indicators--novelty and appropriateness. To explore the effect of novelty seeking on the temporal processing of novelty and appropriateness, a…

Background and aims: Fascinations for or aversions to particular sounds are a familiar feature of autism, as is an ability to reproduce another person's utterances, precisely copying the other person's prosody as well as their words. Such observations seem to indicate not only that autistic people can pay close attention to what they hear, but…

Embodied cognition holds that one's body, actions, perceptions, and situations are integrated into the cognitive process and emphasizes the fact that sensorimotor systems play a role in language comprehension. Previous studies verified the embodied effect in literal language processing but few of them paid attention to metaphors in embodied…

A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in…

Frequency and proficiency have been found to play an important role in second language (L2) phrasal processing. However, existing research has largely focused on English and other European languages, with other commonly used languages, such as Chinese, being largely disregarded. To fill this gap, we carried out two experiments to investigate how…

Background: Despite increasing knowledge of social communication skills of autistic people, the interrelatedness of different skills such as non-linguistic comprehension, social inference and empathizing skills is not much known about. A better understanding of the complex interplay between different domains of social communication helps us to…

Background: The most common cause of aphasia is a left middle cerebral artery stroke affecting the left perisylvian region of the brain. The perisylvian region is critical for supporting phonological processing, and damage to this region results in difficulty with retrieving and manipulating speech sounds. The impact of weakened phonology has been…