How could individual differences in processing non-speech acoustic signals influence their cue weighting strategies for L2 speech contrasts? The present study investigated this question by testing forty L1 Chinese-L2 English listeners with two tasks: one for testing the listeners' sensitivity to pitch and temporal information of non-speech…

Are oral sentences accompanied by pictures easier to understand than written sentences accompanied by the same pictures? This question--intensely discussed for more than two decades in educational, psychological, and psycholinguistic research in terms of "modality effect in multimedia learning," "split-attention effect," or…

Although there is a broad consensus that both the procedural and declarative memory systems play a crucial role in language learning, use, and knowledge, the mapping between linguistic types and memory structures remains underspecified: by default, a dual-route mapping of language systems to memory systems is assumed, with declarative memory…

This study examines whether second language (L2) learners predict upcoming language prior to the verb in Japanese. Taking the dependency involving negative polarity adverbs -- "zenzen" 'at all' and "amari" '(not) very' -- as a test case, this study examined whether Japanese native speakers and L2 learners of Japanese, aided by…

This study investigates the processing of "wh"-dependencies in English by native speakers and advanced Mandarin Chinese-speaking learners. We examined processing at a filled gap site that was in a licit position (non-island) or located inside an island, a grammatically unlicensed position. Natives showed N400 in the non-island condition,…

This study presents a reanalysis of existing data to investigate whether a relationship between perception and production abilities regarding a challenging second-language (L2) phonological contrast is observable (a) when both modalities must rely on accessing stored lexical representations and (b) when there is an asymmetry in task focus between…

This study examines the knowledge representation of Japanese university students assessed using grammaticality judgement tests (GJTs) and a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT). The study also investigates the role of automatised and non-automatised explicit knowledge in general L2 language proficiency. Participants were 87 late learners of English…

Purpose: Background noise has been categorized as energetic masking due to spectrotemporal overlap of the target and masker on the auditory periphery or informational masking due to cognitive-level interference from relevant content such as speech. The effects of masking on cortical and sensory auditory processing can be objectively studied with…

Attraction effects arise when a comprehender erroneously retrieves a distractor instead of a target item during memory retrieval operations. In Korean, considerable processing difficulties occur in the agreement relation checking between a subject and an honorific-marked predicate when an intervening distractor carries a non-honorific feature. We…

In conversation, production and comprehension processes may overlap, causing interference. In 3 experiments, we investigated whether repetition priming can work as a supporting device, reducing costs associated with linguistic dual-tasking. Experiment 1 established the rate of decay of repetition priming from spoken words to picture naming for…

In blinds, the tactile sensations play a crucial role for various daily activities, in the all sense modalities tactile sensation is considered as major sense of perception. This study is conducted to investigate the tactile sensations in relation to Bilingual and Monolingual blinds using experimental comparative study design, divided into two…

While past research has demonstrated a link between the subjective "Aha" experience of insight and verbal insight problem solution activation in the right hemisphere (RH), no one has yet linked insight to long term semantic priming. We propose that through a shared process of semantic integration both of these concepts are linked and…

Formulaic expressions (FEs), such as conventional collocations (e.g., fresh air) and phrases (e.g., take a break), constitute a significant part of language use in our daily lives (Erman & Warren, 2000). FEs are defined as multiword units that holistically represent a single meaning, and they are likely stored and retrieved as unanalyzed…

Orthography-phonology mapping in world languages exhibits variations. Extensive research has investigated whether orthographic-phonological consistency impacts the cognitive processing of written words. A major body of work has focused on the recognition of phonographic first language (L1) written words. Results show that the more transparent the…

Recent studies have accumulated to suggest that children, akin to adults, exhibit a processing advantage for formulaic language (e.g. "save energy") over novel language (e.g. "sell energy"), as well as sensitivity to phrase frequencies. The majority of these studies are based on formulaic sequences in their canonical form. In…