The purpose of this research was to understand better how morphemic units are encoded and auto-organised in memory and how they are accessed during writing. We hypothesised that the activation of morphemic units would not depend on rule-based learning during primary school but would be determined by frequency-based learning, which is a process…

The constructs of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) have been used extensively to investigate learner performance on second language tasks. However, a serious concern is that the variables used to measure these constructs are sometimes used conventionally without any empirical justification. It is crucial for researchers to understand how…

The current study investigated first language (L1) effects on listener judgment of comprehensibility and accentedness in second language (L2) speech. The participants were 45 university-level adult speakers of English from three L1 backgrounds (Chinese, Hindi, Farsi), performing a picture narrative task. Ten native English listeners used…

We ask whether an adult learner's knowledge of their native language impedes statistical learning in a new language beyond just word segmentation (as previously shown). In particular, we examine the impact of native-language word-form phonotactics on learners' ability to segment words into their component morphemes and learn phonologically…

While it is well recognized that students are prone to difficulties when performing linguistic-to-algebra translations, the nature of students' difficulties remain an issue of contention. Moreover, the literature indicates that these difficulties are not easily remediated by domain-specific instruction. Some have opined that this is the case…

Dual route models of reading suggest there are 2 pathways for reading words: an orthographic-lexical pathway, used to read familiar regular words and exception words, and a grapheme-to-phoneme-conversion-(GPC)-sublexical pathway, used to read unfamiliar regular words, pseudohomophones (PHs), and nonwords. It is unclear, however, whether PHs…

The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child…

The act of note-taking offloads cognitive pressure and note-taking applications could be used as an important tool for foreign language acquisition. Its use, importance, and efficacy in a foreign language learning context could be justifiably debated. However, existing computer-assisted language learning literature is almost silent on the topic.…

The present study challenges the validity of elicited imitation (EI) as a measure for implicit knowledge, investigating to what extent online error detection and subsequent sentence repetition draw on implicit knowledge. To assess online detection during listening, a word monitoring component was built into an EI task. Advanced-level Japanese L2…

The present article examines production and on-line processing of definite articles in Turkish-speaking sequential bilingual children acquiring English and Dutch as second languages (L2) in the UK and in the Netherlands, respectively. Thirty-nine 6-8-year-old L2 children and 48 monolingual (L1) age-matched children participated in two separate…

Previous research suggests that multilinguals' languages are constantly co-activated and that experience managing this co-activation changes inhibitory control function. The present study examined language interaction and inhibitory control using a colour-word Stroop task. Multilingual participants were tested in their three most proficient…

Monolingual and bilingual 8-year-olds performed a computerized spatial perspective-taking task. Children were asked to decide how an observer saw a four-block array from one of three different positions (90 degrees, 180 degrees, and 270 degrees counter-clockwise from the child's position) by selecting one of four responses--the correct response,…

Current views of lexical selection in language production differ in whether they assume lexical selection by competition or not. To account for recent data with the picture-word interference (PWI) task, both views need to be supplemented with assumptions about the control processes that block distractor naming. In this paper, we propose that such…

Through analyzing response latencies, errors, and self-repairs in Mandarin, this investigation explores how monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual adults process their speech production differently using cognitive control mechanisms. In this study we conducted two experiments involving speech production in Mandarin. In the two experiments, 81…

Children with autism spectrum disorder present with a variety of social communication deficits such as atypicalities in social gaze and verbal and non-verbal communication delays as well as perceptuo-motor deficits like motor incoordination and dyspraxia. In this study, we had the unique opportunity to study praxis performance in deaf children…