Verbal working memory resources may impact syntax comprehension. Thirteen Italian children with cochlear implants (CIs) were assessed in relative clause (RC) comprehension, digit span and nonword repetition and compared to 13 chronological age peers (CA) and 13 younger controls (LA) with normal hearing (NH). The RC comprehension task tested…

Given that words from the academic layer of English typically carry bound roots ("min" in "diminish") rather than free-standing base words ("small" in "smaller"), there is a need to understand the factors that make bound roots more or less accessible for morphological problem-solving unfamiliar words. We…

Purpose: We investigated four theoretically based latent variable models of word learning in young school-age children. Method: One hundred sixty-seven English-speaking second graders with typical development from three U.S. states participated. They completed five different tasks designed to assess children's creation, storage, retrieval, and…

This paper investigates the effect of sentence complexity, specifically lexical and syntactic surprisal, on L2 listening difficulty. Psycholinguistic studies revealed that surprisal cases correlate with textual comprehension difficulty. Based on surprisal theory, these cases are less probable or expected, considering the precedent context, thus…

Two eye-tracking experiments tested (a) whether L2 learners benefit from the consistency of input modality (auditory instead of written processing instruction [PI] training) and (b) whether they benefit from training using the same voice as the test voice. Results confirmed a robust effect of PI training on picture-selection accuracy, yet the…

We used multidimensional item response theory to test the internal structure of the Phonological Awareness Literacy Screening in Spanish for Preschool and test for item parameter drift. The measure is aligned with the simple view of reading, which defines reading as consisting of two equally important dimensions: decoding and language…

Purpose: Retrieval practice has been found to be a powerful strategy to enhance long-term retention of new information; however, the utility of retrieval practice when teaching young children new words is largely unknown, and even less is known for young children with language impairments. The current study examined the effect of 2 different…

Recent ERP research with adults has shown that the online processing of subject-verb (S-V) agreement violations is mediated by the relative perceptual salience of the violation (Dube et al. 2016). These findings corroborate infant perception research, which has also shown that perceptual salience influences infants' sensitivity to grammatical…

Several theoretical proposals tried to account for the meaning open-endedness of metaphors in literature and for the effortful process they trigger in readers. However, very few experiments have tackled the neurophysiological underpinnings of literary metaphor. Here we used Event-Related brain Potentials (ERPs) to explore the temporal dynamics of…

Cognitive factors have been recognised as important in the interpreting process, but whether they could serve as valid components of interpreting aptitude still awaits further investigation. This study explores the predictive value of cognitive fluency in the simultaneous interpreting (SI) performance of trainee interpreters. Cognitive fluency…

Purpose: To assess strengths and weaknesses of the reading level (RL) match approach and its potential to generate insights regarding the cognitive foundations of reading ability and disability. Method: We applied RL-match design to a sample of 2nd-6th graders reading a consistent orthography, Russian, using an "extreme phenotype"…

Purpose: From a psycholinguistic perspective, the quality of the stored word form in the phonological input lexicon, as well as its effective retrieval from the phonological output lexicon, is of great importance in lexical processing. This study aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of (a)typical word form processing in primary school children.…

Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task,…

When young children interpret novel nouns, they tend to be very much affected by the perceptual features of the referent objects, especially shape. This article investigates whether children might inhibit a prepotent tendency to base novel nouns on the shape of referent objects in order to base them on conceptual features (i.e. taxonomic object…

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children's own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb and Abrahamson in J Child Lang 3(3):349-367, 1976); Clark and Sengul in J Child…