Adults have an interconnected lexicon in which two words are related because their referents belong to the same semantic category, because they occur in the same context, or both. This interconnection has been explored by means of the priming effect, in which people respond more rapidly to related than to unrelated words and benefit from the lexical boost when the two types of interconnections are combined. Although substantial research has reported on the memory problems of people diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), it remains unknown whether they experience problems with related words at these levels of comprehension. This study analyzed the lexical networks of older adults with AD and typically aging (TA) adults to understand their semantic memory related to word associations. We tested combined taxonomic-thematic, purely taxonomic, and purely thematic relationships using an eye tracker to analyze fixations to a named target picture preceded by a related or unrelated prime word. Participants with TA showed a priming effect in all three types of relationships, but those with AD showed this effect only with purely thematic pairs. Words that share more than one level of relationship seem to create competition, revealing a deficit in the lexical networks of people with AD.

A good knowledge of connectives like moreover and therefore is crucial for reading comprehension and academic success, yet not all connectives, especially infrequent connectives mostly used in writing, are well mastered even by adults. The main goal of this paper is to assess the possibility to improve the ability to use connectives in discourse during the transitional teenage years. To do so, we examined whether 228 native French-speaking teenagers and 60 adults improved their performance with eight infrequent (prototypical and non-prototypical) connectives in a sentence-completion task after active or passive training. The results revealed that training had only a limited effect on the ability to use both types of connectives, while the degree of exposure to print was an important predictor of individual variations. These findings suggest that connectives’ mastery depends more on exposure to extensive written input that allows to internalize their procedural meaning over time rather than on one-time explicit activation of the mapping between their form and function.

This research aims to identify a reliable method for measuring working memory (WM) within the context of second language learning. The goal of the study is to address the persistent problem of determining the most appropriate method for measuring WM. To achieve this objective, various WM measurement tasks, including the Digit Span Task, Listening Span Task, Sentence Recall Task (SRT) (both written and spoken), and Sentence Recognition Task, were administered to 39 participants. The experiments were conducted twice to assess the consistency and reliability of these measurement methods.

Through statistical analyses of results, this study endeavors to elucidate the relationship between diverse WM measurement tasks and English listening proficiency. The results of the test-retest correlation, Cronbach’s alpha coefficient, and Rasch reliability indicate that SRT (written mode) exhibited the highest reliability while other measurements also demonstrated decent reliability. Additionally, the SRT showed the strongest correlation with the TOEIC Listening Test, administered to test criterion-related validity. This research has the potential to provide valuable insights into the role of WM in second language acquisition and may serve as a methodological guide for future studies in this field.

This paper examined the interaction between narrative performance, language exposure, and standardized measures of morphosyntax and semantics, in bilingual children tested two times, 1 year apart. We aimed to 1) identify the factor structure of oral narrative measures, and 2) examine the direction and strength of the effects of (i) language exposure and (ii) the relationship between language domains and narrative production. A total of 143 Spanish (L1)-English (L2) bilingual children completed a battery of oral narrative and oral language proficiency assessments in Spanish and English at two time points (kindergarten and Grade 1). Factor analyses yielded an identical two-factor structure of bilingual oral narrative measurements, namely productivity (word production) and complexity (sentence structure), in both Spanish and English across the two time points. Cross-lagged analysis showed that narrative production predicted semantics and morphosyntax performance in Spanish and English one year later. Cross-language transfer from L1 to L2 on the complexity of narrative was noted. Language exposure predicted only Spanish narrative production, but not English. These results suggest within- and cross-language transfer, highlighting the importance of L1 language development. In addition, current findings highlight the importance of language exposure for L1 in early school-age children.

The current study examined speakers’ performance in identifying syntactic and pragmatic violations of definiteness use across four types of tasks: (1) a reading acceptability judgment task, (2) an auditory acceptability judgment task, (3) an online self-paced reading task, and (4) an online self-paced listening task. This investigation aimed to clarify how methodological differences and similarities within psycholinguistic research might influence linguistic performance in adult speakers. The four experiments focused on pragmatic and syntactic violations of definiteness in Hebrew in both subject and object positions. Overall, participants detected definiteness violations across different modalities and tasks, but notable differences emerged among the tasks. For instance, in the self-paced listening task, sentences with no violations and those with pragmatic violations were indistinguishable, while slower response times were observed exclusively for syntactic violations in the object position. These performance variations may stem from the phonological reduction of the definite article in spoken Hebrew, coupled with online measurement methods that may have led to shallower processing and an increased likelihood of violation overlooking. Alternatively, participants in the online self-paced reading task exhibited the strongest effects in identifying both syntactic and pragmatic violations, indicating that task type and stimulus representation can significantly influence linguistic performance.

Subject pronoun interpretation in native Spanish has generally been approached under the Position of Antecedent Strategy, a parsing strategy which claims that null pronouns bias toward subject antecedents and overt pronouns toward object antecedents. While some studies align with the predicted patterns, others present mixed evidence. To further clarify this, our study tests the offline interpretation of null and overt subject pronouns in 55 native Peninsular Spanish speakers. We additionally tested the role played by different temporal subordinating conjunctions (mientras “while” vs. cuando “when”) in modulating subject pronoun interpretation preferences. Our findings reveal that overt pronouns bias toward object antecedents independently from the subordinating conjunction. Conversely, null pronouns bias toward subject antecedents, but their interpretation is influenced by the type of subordinating conjunction, with higher rates of subject interpretations in the mientras “while” condition. These results lend support to theoretical accounts such as the Form-Specific Multiple-Constraints approach, which asserts that referring expressions are subject to different constraints and to varying degrees. These findings thus extend beyond purely structural accounts and underscore the complexity of subject pronoun interpretation in Spanish.

This study investigates the development of narrative skills in Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, a rarely studied combination of languages in a bilingual context where neither language serves as a minority input, meaning both are widely used in the community. Seventy children aged 4 to 7 were assessed in both of their languages using the Multilingual Instrument Assessment of Narratives. The effects of language, age, and exposure on narrative macrostructure and microstructure were examined. Results indicate that both age and language influence these levels, while exposure affects specific microstructural measures (grammaticality, discourse markers, and code-switching). Certain aspects of narrative performance, such as comprehension questions, lexical diversity, MLCU, and subordination, develop in only one language, while others, including all other macrostructural measures, narrative length, MLCUmax, and code-switching, develop in both. Interestingly, children perform better in macrostructural aspects when narrating in Spanish, despite being schooled in Catalan and regardless of language exposure. However, in microstructural aspects, children show a disadvantage in grammatical accuracy in Spanish. These findings highlight the importance of considering age, exposure, and language of production when assessing language in bilinguals. The study contributes information on narrative development in Catalan-Spanish bilingual children, offering insights for assessment practices in bilingual populations.

Changes in narrative skills among Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschoolers with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) were examined following Bilingual Narrative Intervention. Eight children with DLD and nine typically developing children participated in two six-session intervention blocks, first in the home language HL/Russian and then in the societal language SL/Hebrew. Intervention sessions involved retelling single-episode stories accompanied by icons/gestures, repetition, and peer interaction. Narrative skills were assessed at four-time points. Results showed that while typically developing children performed better overall, both groups followed similar trajectories. Children performed better in HL/Russian across all assessments. Macrostructure improved in both groups after HL/Russian intervention, particularly for “Feeling” and “Goal” elements. Bilingual typical language development children showed higher lexical diversity, with significant improvement following HL/Russian intervention. Children with bilingual DLD made more errors in HL/Russian, but similar error rates emerged between groups for SL/Hebrew. Earlier age of onset of bilingualism correlated with better macrostructure in SL/Hebrew but not in HL/Russian. Findings underscore the need for tailored intervention in both languages which considers clinical status and bilingual children’s background.

The understanding of wh-in-situ questions relies naturally on contextual and prosodic information for their early discrimination from declarative sentences. However, there is scarce evidence on the parsing processes involved during the online incremental processing of these questions. In this study, we investigate the incremental reading of wh-in-situ sentences with no prosodic or contextual information available to aid the parser by comparing them to their declarative counterparts. We investigated two wh-in-situ languages: Mandarin Chinese (in-situ only) and French (optionally in situ). This comparison allows us to determine whether wh-in-situ questions are processed similarly across languages and whether the parsing process is related to language-specific question formation strategies. Results of four word-by-word self-paced reading experiments on two types of wh-in-situ phrases (simplex or complex) in Mandarin Chinese and French show an interpretation strategy in which the most frequent structure, declarative, is considered in both languages, independently of the available question formation strategy. Nevertheless, the timing of the online interpretation and the observed effects are affected by the nature of the wh-phrases (simplex or complex) and the definiteness of the noun phrases contained in the declaratives, which confirms that several processes occur concurrently introducing a limit on the capability to extract conclusions on the processes based solely on behavioral measures.

English articles (a[n]/the) are one of the hardest features for second language (L2) learners to acquire. Theories such as the Morphological Congruency Hypothesis (MCH) predict that where articles are a unique-to-L2 feature, they will not be fully acquirable, while the Unified Competition Model (UCM) predicts full article acquisition.

To examine first language (L1) transfer in the article processing/production of L1-Mandarin and L1-Croatian learners of L2-English, we conducted two studies. To shape MCH/UCM predictions, Study 1 used a forced-choice task with 28 L1-Mandarin and 27 L1-Croatian speakers testing L1 preferences for noun premodification with anaphoric definites and referential indefinites. Study 2 tested 24 advanced L1-Mandarin/L2-English and 22 L1-Croatian/L2-English learners and 24 L1-English controls on acceptability judgment, self-paced reading (SPR), and oral production tasks.

Mixed-effects regression showed participants had explicit knowledge of (in)definite English articles, but only the L1-Mandarin/L2-English learners performed similarly to the L1-English on SPR for the indefinite article and had similar production accuracy. By contrast, the L1-Croatian/L2-English learners lacked sensitivity to omission of either article and had lower production accuracy. The L1-Croatian/L2-English results, in particular, support the MCH predictions that unique structures present persistent problems in comprehension and production, even at high proficiency.

To determine the source of transfer in third language acquisition (L3A), we tested the effects of grammatical feature typology and L2 Spanish proficiency on the comprehension and production of grammatical [gender] and [number] in the early stages of L3A of Portuguese. We distinguish between the two features based on their participation in the lexical-conceptual structure of the lemma and its interaction with the morpho-syntactic derivation. L1 English speakers were tested on their knowledge of the features in both their L2 and their L3 through a grammaticality judgment task and an elicited production task. Results show that L3 learners transfer only some features, specifically [gender] rather than [number], suggesting a fine-grained divide in feature compositionality between the structural ([gender]) and semantic ([number]) features. We also found facilitative transfer only after a threshold acquisition in L2, in support of the Threshold Hypothesis. For beneficial transfer of a feature, mere knowledge of the L2 structure was found to be sufficient. However, a higher generalized L2 proficiency threshold was found to predict high L3 accuracy.