Sentence production and comprehension both draw on linguistic knowledge, but current research is unclear on whether these fundamental language tasks involve similar or distinct competitive processes. Previous studies suggest that production and comprehension may involve similar conflict resolution processes, but that production may additionally…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to develop and validate a new corpus of sentences without semantic context to facilitate research aimed at isolating the effects of semantic context in speech perception. Method: The newly developed corpus contains nonsensical sentences but is matched in vocabulary and syntactic structure to the existing Basic…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

Purpose: Processing narrow focus (NF), the stressed word in the sentence, includes both the perceptual ability to identify the stressed word in the sentence and the pragmatic-semantic ability to comprehend the nonexplicit linguistic message. NF and its underlying meaning can be conveyed only via the auditory modality. Therefore, NF can be…

The Four Es (Explain, Engage, Extend, Examine) is a concrete approach to incorporating research-based practice into daily vocabulary instruction by focusing on the pivotal role of teacher and student talk in word learning. Specifically, teachers use language that is understandable to students, identify misunderstandings and correct them within a…

Misinterpretations during language comprehension are common. The ability to recover from processing difficulties is therefore crucial for successful day-to-day communication. Previous research on the recovery from misinterpretations has focused on sentences containing syntactic ambiguities. The present study instead investigated the outcome of…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

Purpose: We employed a time-gated word recognition task to investigate how children who are hard of hearing (CHH) and children with normal hearing (CNH) combine cognitive-linguistic abilities and acoustic--phonetic cues to recognize words in sentence-final position. Method: The current study included 40 CHH and 30 CNH in 1st or 3rd grade.…

According to prediction-based learning theories, erroneous predictions support learning. However, empirical evidence for a relation between prediction error and children's language learning is currently lacking. Here we investigated whether and how prediction errors influence children's learning of novel words. We hypothesized that word learning…

In embodied theories of semantic representation, the processes and mechanisms of modal simulations that are engaged during semantic processing have tended to be underspecified. We investigated the possibility that motor imagery may be a mechanism of simulation, using an individual differences approach. In this preregistered study, we assessed…

The current study investigated whether shared phonology across languages activates cross-language meaning when reading in context. Eighty-five bilinguals read English sentences while their eye movements were tracked. Critical sentences contained English members of English-French interlingual homophone pairs (e.g., "mow"; French homophone…

Semantic transparency effects during compound word recognition provide critical insight into the organization of semantic knowledge and the nature of semantic processing. The past 25 years of psycholinguistic research on compound semantic transparency has produced discrepant effects, leaving the existence and nature of its influence unresolved. In…

Purpose: This study examined the nature of the relation between language-specific vocabulary and conceptual lexical-semantic skills with grammatical abilities within and across languages in preschool Latino dual language learners (DLLs). Method: Sixty-one typically developing, Spanish-English speaking DLLs from preschools serving low-income…

Purpose: This study investigated the early rule-based sentence productions of 3- and 4-year-old children with severe speech disorders who used single-meaning graphic symbols to communicate. Method: Ten 3- and 4-year-olds requiring the use of augmentative and alternative communication, who had largely intact receptive language skills, received…

Lexical ambiguities exist when two different meanings are ascribed to the same word. Such lexical ambiguities can be particularly problematic for learning material with technical words that have everyday meanings that are not the same as the technical meaning. This study reports on lexical ambiguities in six statistical words germane to statistics…