We present experimental results from a web-based study on the speech act of giving advice in French. 86 L1 speakers of French had to continue short and written fictitious interactions we created, in which we manipulated the adviser’s level of experience (explicitly experienced, explicitly inexperienced, or no precision) and the hierarchical relationship between adviser and advisee (top-down, bottom-up, and equals). Participants had to choose between four types of continuations, from indirect strategies to direct prototypical imperative strategies, with variations of the face-threatening value in some continuations, as per Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory. Main results from Bayesian regression analyses indicate an overall preference for indirect strategies in French, but also suggest influences from the level of experience and hierarchical relationship. These results will allow for a better understanding of advice as a speech act and contribute to a growing body of work in experimental pragmatics.

This meta-analysis of 31 studies aimed to determine the effectiveness of perception-based high variability phonetic training (HVPT) for second language (L2) production learning and to identify learner-related and methodological variables that influence production gains. Based on independent effect sizes for 43 within-participant and 17 between-participant designs, small-to-medium effects of post-training improvement were found. The average production gains for trained items and untrained items were 10.50% and 4.50%, respectively. Neither strong support for long-term retention of production learning nor generalization to untrained stimuli was observed, however. Moderator analyses showed that post-training production gains were influenced by a number of factors related to learner profiles (age and learning context), training features (provision of phonetic information, training duration, and training time per session), and features of production tests (elicitation tasks, prompt modality, and outcome measures). The relationship between perception and production gains was negligible at the participant level, but was significant and moderate at the level of individual studies for post-training and retention data. These findings provide partial support for a perception-production link. This study makes several recommendations for future studies investigating the effects of HVPT on L2 speech production learning.

The Basque version of the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (BCDI-1) can be used to evaluate 8–15-month-old children’s receptive and expressive verbal skills, as well as nonverbal gesture production. This paper reports on data of 1002 children of an extended age range obtained with the BCDI-1 as a proxy measure of Basque children’s communicative competence up to 24 months. Statistical analyses revealed a large effect of age on four BCDI-1 scales: phrases understood, production of gestures, receptive vocabulary, and expressive vocabulary, while sex, amount of exposure, educational level, and birth order showed small or no effect. The strong effect of age as well as the high between-scale correlations confirmed the advantage of using the BCDI-1 instrument for the extended age range.

Using an action compatibility task, we investigated whether POWER is embodied in terms of upward and downward movement in two languages (first and dominant language: Chinese; second language: English). Chinese-English bilinguals were asked to quickly and accurately categorize power-related words (e.g., “boss,” “intern”) as “powerful” or “powerless.” The response to indicate that the word was “powerful” required an upward movement in the compatible condition, while the response to indicate “powerless” involved a downward movement. These responses were reversed in the incompatible condition (“powerful”-downward/“powerless”-upward). When the response actions were compatible rather than incompatible, participants were faster to categorize the words. Furthermore, the action compatibility effect was observed in both languages, but surprisingly the action compatibility effect was larger in their L2. The findings support the psychological reality of the “POWER IS UP” conceptual metaphor that is active when participants process language in both their primary and secondary languages.

While universal linguistic theories advocate linear processing of words across languages, psycholinguistic research of Semitic templatic words supports the nonlinear processing into the root and template, mainly due to semantic specifications related to the root and the morphological awareness needed in the tasks. The present study examined whether the root and template affect the word processing of Hebrew native speakers due to metalinguistic awareness regardless of semantics. We designed an auditory rhyme judgment task, a phonological awareness test that requires linear processing and reduces semantics. The task included Hebrew CVCVC templatic word pairs comprising varying root and template phonemes, transposed-phoneme roots emphasizing phonological cooccurrence restrictions, and identical phoneme roots accentuating lexical-syntactic information pronounced in the vocalic melody templates. Findings revealed low accuracy rates in rhyming pairs, particularly those with accentuated linguistic information, indicating distraction from linear processing. However, the accuracy distributions among participants and between and within the stimulus types showed that linear processing also occurred. These results suggest that both linear and nonlinear processing modes are accessible to native Hebrew speakers. The study aligns with models of the mental lexicon proposing dynamic language processing influenced by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors, highlighting the idiosyncratic nature of word processing strategies.

Chinese characters hold great potential to help inform and enrich psycholinguistic research on lexical ambiguity as a large portion of them are ambiguous in nature with meaning varying from context to context. This report presents a psycholinguistic database that contains over 2000 characters with normative measures for meaning dominance and meaning balance, that is, the relative frequency of each meaning associated with a target character and the degree of balance across the meanings of the character. The measurement process takes advantage of the fact that, in Chinese, generating words containing a target character is the most convenient way to specify and disambiguate character meanings. Character meanings stored in ordinary people’s mental lexicon are identified based on the words, along with a small portion of meaning descriptions, listed by over 900 native speakers. The measures of meaning dominance and meaning balance for the characters are derived from computing the relative frequencies of the meanings. Potential research and practical applications of the database, as a valuable tool, to enhance our understanding of the acquisition, representation, and processing of ambiguous lexical items are discussed.

Previous L2 studies used binary Truth-Value-Judgment (TVJ) tasks to investigate L1–L2 differences in scalar implicature derivation (some X implicates some but not all X). They examined participants’ judgments of sentences with weak scalar expressions (“Timothy ate some of the pretzels”) when stronger ones are true (“Timothy ate all of the pretzels”). Some studies indicate adult L2 learners are less likely than L1 users to accept such statements while others found the opposite, concluding that implicature derivation is “costly” for L2 learners, rendering them less pragmatically competent than L1 users. Importantly, related L1 research suggests that TVJ tasks only capture sensitivity to under-informativeness. This sensitivity might be completely overridden by metalinguistic attitudes in binary tasks, whereas graded tasks reveal nuanced judgment patterns. Exploring L2 response behaviors, we tested English L1 speakers and competent German L2 English learners using binary and graded tasks. In both tasks, we found evidence of pragmatic responding with no evidence of differences between groups. Bayes factor analyses of the graded data favored H0 over the hypotheses that L2 learners provide fewer or more rejections to under-informative input than L1 learners. We explore implications for L2 learners’ pragmatic abilities, differences with previous studies, and the role of TVJ tasks in under-informative contexts.

The awareness of words’ morphological structure has been thought to allow generalizing meaning to other, similarly constructed words. Conversely, a large vocabulary is thought to facilitate the recognition of words’ morphological regularities, thereby contributing to morphological awareness. For this reason, morphological awareness and vocabulary have been suggested to be reciprocally associated across development. We followed 242 (girls = 119) Norwegian preschoolers (Mage = 5.5 years) from preschool through Grade 2 and examined the cross-lagged relations between morphological awareness (inflections and derivations) and vocabulary (receptive and expressive). Our results confirm that the traditional cross-lagged panel model shows significant cross-lagged relations between morphological awareness and vocabulary, as previous studies have shown. However, no cross-lagged relations were found when we accounted for longitudinal measured stability through a cross-lagged panel model with lag-2 paths or unmeasured stability through the random intercept cross-lagged panel model. We found that approximately 50% of the variation in morphology and vocabulary was due to highly stable and invariant factors across grades. We discuss how the significant cross-lagged relations found in previous studies could have been due to their not accounting for the right type of stability when using longitudinal panel data.