Despite the empirical evidence for the power of the cognitive capacity of implicit learning of structures and regularities in several modalities and materials, it remains controversial whether implicit learning extends to the learning of temporal structures and regularities. We investigated whether (a) an artificial grammar can be learned equally…

In individuals with Down syndrome (DS) deficits in verbal short-term memory (VSTM) and deficits in sentence comprehension co-occur, suggesting that deficits in VSTM might be causal for the deficits in sentence comprehension. The present study aims to explore the presumed relationship between VSTM and sentence comprehension in individuals with DS…

Language use is intrinsically variable, such that the words we use vary widely across speakers and communicative situations. For instance, we can call the same entity "refrigerator" or "fridge." However, attempts to understand individual differences in how we process language have made surprisingly little progress, perhaps…

The current study aims to investigate how Field independent (FI) and Field-dependent (FD) cognitive styles modulate bilingual language control during a joint language switching task. The cognitive styles were measured by the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT). The FI group with a preference for autonomous information processing was sensitive to…

Studies on agreement production consistently report an increase in production errors in the presence of an attractor mismatching the agreement feature of the target. In contrast, results from comprehension studies are mixed, ranging from lack of effect to facilitation. We report 2 forced-choice experiments and 2 self-paced reading experiments on…

A phonological priming experiment reports inhibition for Russian prime-target pairs with onset overlap in native speakers. When preceded by the phonological prime /[image omitted]/, the target /kabak/ ("[image omitted]" -- "[image omitted]," "mare" -- PUB) takes longer to respond than the same target preceded by a…

Bilingual infants from 6- to 24-months of age are more likely to generalize, flexibly reproducing actions on novel objects significantly more often than age-matched monolingual infants are. In the current study, we examine whether the addition of novel verbal labels enhances memory generalization in a perceptually complex imitation task. We…

English-speaking children use plural morphology from around the age of 2, yet often omit the syllabic plural allomorph /-[schwa]z/ until age 5 (e.g., "bus(es)"). It is not clear if this protracted acquisition is due to articulatory difficulties, low input frequency, or fricative-final words (e.g., "bus," "nose") being…

Open-ended comprehension questions are a common type of assessment used to evaluate how well students understand one of multiple documents. Our aim is to use natural language processing (NLP) to infer the level and type of inferencing within readers' answers to comprehension questions using linguistic and semantic features within their responses.…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

This study investigated bilingualism effects on the production of focus in 5- to 9-year-old Cantonese-English bilingual autistic children's L1 Cantonese, compared to their monolingual autistic peers as well as monolingual and bilingual typically developing children matched in nonverbal IQ, working memory, receptive vocabulary and maternal…

Children seem to be relatively delayed in their comprehension of the verbal "be"-passive in English, compared to their acquisition of other constructions of object-movement such as "wh"-questions and unaccusatives. Prior work has found that children's performance on these passives can be affected by the verb's lexical…

Grammar has always been considered by language learners as well as by those engaged in language education as an essential component of language, and their expectations from and planning for any language education programs have been conditioned accordingly. The definitions of the term grammar and its categories in all languages go back to…

Collaborative dialogue is rich in conscious and subconscious coordination behaviours between participants. This work explores collaborative learner dialogue through theories of alignment, analysing inter-partner movement and language use with respect to our hypotheses: that they interrelate, and that they form predictors of collaboration quality…

Afrikaans is a West Germanic language that originated in South Africa as a descendent of Dutch. It displays discontinuous sentential negation (SN), where negation is expressed by two phonologically identical negative particles that appear in two different positions in the sentence. The negation system is argued to be an innovation that came about…