Several studies have signaled grammatical difficulties in individuals with developmental dyslexia. These difficulties may stem from a phonological deficit, but may alternatively be explained through a domain-general deficit in statistical learning. This study investigates grammar in children with and without dyslexia, and whether phonological memory and/or statistical learning ability contribute to individual differences in grammatical performance. We administered the CELF “word structure” and “recalling sentences” subtests and measures of phonological memory (digit span, nonword repetition) and statistical learning (serial reaction time, nonadjacent dependency learning) among 8- to 11-year-old children with and without dyslexia (N = 50 per group). Consistent with previous findings, our results show subtle difficulties in grammar, as children with dyslexia achieved lower scores on the CELF (word structure: p = .0027, recalling sentences: p = .053). While the two phonological memory measures were found to contribute to individual differences in grammatical performance, no evidence for a relationship with statistical learning was found. An error analysis revealed errors in irregular morphology (e.g., plural and past tense), suggesting problems with lexical retrieval. These findings are discussed in light of theoretical accounts of the underlying deficit in dyslexia.

The readback/hearback loop is a communicative protocol used in many high-risk environments to ensure that a verbal instruction has been heard correctly by a receiver. However, it does not necessarily ensure that an instruction has been understood. Using an international sample of hydroelectric power generation controllers, this study examined whether particular linguistic (complete and partial readbacks) and prosodic (final intonation, filler, and interturn delay) cues contained within a readback response could signal to listeners the extent to which speakers had understood an instruction. The results indicated that different prosodic cues are used to detect nonunderstandings, depending upon the linguistic content of the readback. The results have implications for training and system design in distributed environments.

Clahsen and Felser (CF) have written a beautiful and important paper. I applaud their integrative empirical approach, and believe that their theoretical account is largely correct, if not in some of its specific claims, at least in its broader assumptions. CF directly compare their shallow structure hypothesis (SSH) with a model that my colleagues and I have proposed for aspects of the neurocognition of first and second language: the “declarative/procedural” (DP) model. Although some of CF's discussion accurately depicts the DP model and its relation to the data, they also make a few critical errors.Here, I first summarize the DP model in both first language (L1) and adult-learned second language (L2), in order to be able to contrast it with the SSH, and then address the relevant problems in CF. For further details on the DP model and L1, see Ullman (2001a, 2001c, 2004) and Ullman et al. (1997). For the model as it applies to L2, see Ullman (2001b, 2005).

The present study focuses on the effect of an important methodological choice in word association studies in children: the elicitation of single versus multiple responses. This choice has been shown to affect the numbers and types of associations adults produce, however, little is known about how it affects children’s word associations. A total of 11,725 associations to 80 nouns from 207 monolingual and bilingual minority children were classified according to a detailed coding system, and differences between the semantic characteristics of first, second, and third responses were examined. We show that in children as well, the multiple association task elicits more and qualitatively different responses, resulting in more diversified semantic networks surrounding the stimulus nouns. On the speaker level, reading comprehension scores were related differently to initial and later responses, suggesting a more complex measure of semantic knowledge emerges from the multiple word association task. No differences were found between monolingual and bilingual children’s associative preferences. We argue that the multiple association task produces more detailed data on language users’ semantic networks than the single association task, and suggest a number of ways in which this task could be employed in future research.

This study investigated whether adult and 3- to 6-year-old native speakers of Russian can use gender-marked adjectives to predict the upcoming noun during sentence comprehension. In a visual world paradigm, participants heard questions (e.g., Где хороший синий ёжик? Gde horošij sinij ëžik? “Where is the nicemasc bluemasc hedgehogmasc?”) including two gender-marked adjectives and a noun while seeing pictures of a target and a distractor of either the same (e.g., ёжик ëžik “hedgehogmasc,” мишка miška “bearmasc”) or different gender (e.g., ёжик ëžik “hedgehogmasc,” собачка sobačka “dogfem”) on the screen. We examined whether participants could use gender-marking anticipatorily (i.e., before the onset of the noun). Mixed-effects logistic regression analyses revealed that both adults and children anticipated the upcoming noun before its onset. The magnitude of the anticipation effect was stronger for adults than children. Subsequent analyses on the child data did not show evidence that age modulated their anticipation ability. The results of this study extend and improve knowledge regarding the role of adjectives that carry a grammatical gender cue in online sentence processing.

The effect of visual salience on speakers’ choices is investigated by contrasting the effects of both visual and linguistic manipulations on picture descriptions and eye movements. Two-character pictures were used, which can be described in one of two complementary ways (e.g., a cop chasing a robber can be described either from a chasing or from a fleeing perspective), and using simple actives or other alternative syntactic structures (e.g., “a robber is being chased by a cop”). The pictures were preceded by a verb priming one of the two perspectives and/or a preview of one of the two characters. The results show that the visual manipulation affects looks to the characters regardless of which perspective had been linguistically primed, but it only affects verbal descriptions in the absence of a linguistic prime. Linguistically priming one of the perspectives, in contrast, has a reliable effect on both looks to the characters and verbal descriptions. These results suggest that visual salience does not influence linguistic choices directly.

Recent studies have shown that children as well as adults can detect mispronounced words presented in running speech contexts. Listeners' detections are influenced by both phonological and lexical characteristics of the mispronounced words. The present study compared the performance of normal-speaking children, misarticulating children, and adults on a task which required the detection of mispronounced words. Phonological shifts presented in the stimuli represented both developmental and nondevelopmental patterns. Analysis of errors in detecting these mispronunciations indicated that adults were significantly more accurate than either group of children. In contrast, the performance of the two groups of children was relatively similar. Both children and adults more readily detected mispronunciations patterned after developmental errors than those mispronunciations manifesting more unusual, nondevelopmental sound shifts. Individual mispronounced words varied widely in their detectability. Nevertheless, those words which children found most difficult were also those on which adults most often erred. Parallels observed between the performance of the misarticulating children and their normally developing peers indicate that both younger groups use linguistic knowledge in a similar way in the perception of others' fluent speech.

Languages show typological variation in the expression of manner versus path of motion. However, studies examining the effects of these differences on cognitive representations of motion have led to inconclusive results. To elucidate this prior work, the present study examines word-learning outcomes for adult English speakers who were exposed to new motion words paired with animations that depict either different manners or different paths of motion. The results indicate better learning of words that represent path rather than manner of motion. The outcomes were similar for training with and without accompanying gestures. These findings support the centrality of path in the cognitive representation of motion events and may have important implications for language typology and understanding interactions between language and cognition.

Two experiments were conducted to explore processing of relative clause structures by normal elderly adults. Four groups of subjects (aged 20–29 years, 60–69 years, 70–79 years, and 80–89 years) participated in a lexical decision task and a sentence repetition task. Results of the lexical decision task revealed longer reaction times and somewhat different patterns of performance for the older subjects as compared to the young subjects; on the repetition task, the oldest subjects performed more poorly overall. Findings are suggestive of a reduction in computational capacity in the elderly subjects, which may account for observed decrements in syntactic processing as compared to young adults.

This inquiry examined strategies used by young children when receiver feedback indicated that their gestural communicative attempts were not understood. The children were grouped according to their vocabulary sizes and number of coding rules for two-word utterances. The results indicated that the children, although capable of semantically equivalent verbal behavior, tended to persist in the use of a gesture when experiencing communicative failure. The gestural persistance was not found to be related to the children's lexical or syntactic abilities. It was concluded that the children may not have realized that a verbal behavior can serve as a replacement or an adjunct to a gestural communication.

This study examined whether the context immediately succeeding a heterophonic-homographic word (ht-homographic) plays a role in ambiguity resolution during voiced reading of Hebrew. A pretest was designed to find the preferred alternatives of 12 ht-homographic words: 20 adult subjects completed truncated sentences, each ending with a homographic word, preceded by a context allowing for both of its alternatives to be read. Following the pretest, each word was embedded in four research conditions determined by post-homographic context (keeping preceding context constant): two adjacent revealing contexts, one supporting the preferred alternative and the other the un-preferred alternative; and two distant revealing contexts, one supporting the preferred alternative and the other the un-preferred alternative. Four lists of 12 sentences, each including the four conditions, were then read aloud by four groups of 20 adults. Results from a generalized linear mixed-model analysis showed that the immediately succeeding context affected the deciphering of un-preferred alternatives in voiced reading. An item analysis further showed that highly preferred alternatives were less prone to the immediately succeeding context effect than slightly preferred alternatives. We conclude that the context immediately succeeding a ht-homographic word plays a role in ambiguity resolution during voiced reading, through interactions with the word’s lexical and syntactic characteristics.

Research using single-word paradigms has established that forced language switching incurs processing costs for some bilinguals, yet, less research has addressed this phenomenon at the utterance level or considered real-world applications. The current study examined the impacts of forced language switching on spoken output and stress using a simulated virtual meeting. Twenty Spanish–English heritage bilinguals responded to general work-oriented questions in monolingual English (control) or language-switching (experimental) conditions. Responses were analyzed for mean length of utterance (MLU) and type-token-ratio (TTR). Multilevel modeling revealed an interaction effect of Condition (control vs. experimental) and question order on MLU, such that participants in the experimental condition produced significantly shorter utterances by the end of the task. Participants also had significantly lower lexical variation (TTR) overall in the experimental than the control condition. A 2 × 2 ANOVA revealed a significant effect of Condition and an interaction of Task (pre- vs. posttask) and Condition, such that participants in the control condition reported significantly lower stress after the activity. Results demonstrated the impact of a forced switching condition on production at the utterance level. Findings have implications for theory and scenarios in which heritage bilinguals are asked to use multiple languages in the workplace.

Two eye-tracking experiments examined influences of grammatical and stereotypical gender cues on the assignment of thematic roles in German. Participants (N1 = 32, N2 = 40) read sentences with subject- and object-extracted relative clauses, where thematic agents and patients remained ambiguous until the end of the relative clause. The results reveal a linguistic gender bias: agent roles are assigned more easily to grammatically masculine than feminine role nouns and stereotypically neutral than female ones. The opposite pattern is observed in the assignment of patient roles for stereotypical but not grammatical gender. The findings are discussed within the framework of situation model theories as well as in constraint-based and similarity-based interference accounts, while gender is viewed as a dimension of prominence.

Connectives such as however and since play an important role for marking coherence relations in discourse and therefore are crucial for reading comprehension, which in turn is a strong predictor of academic success. Most research on the acquisition of connectives targeted younger children. Yet there is evidence that connective development extends well into adolescence and even adult speakers have difficulties with some coherence relations when they are conveyed by infrequent connectives bound to the written mode. In this paper, we tested the use of connectives encoding different coherence relations and bound to either the oral or the written modes. We studied the performance of native French-speaking teenagers (N = 154, M age = 14.43, range: 12–19) in a cloze task and also assessed whether teenagers’ vocabulary level and degree of exposure to print predicted the accuracy of connective use. Our findings show that the ability to use connectives appropriately increases with age. However, age played a lesser role compared to vocabulary knowledge and degree of exposure to print, thus indicating that lexicon size and reading habits are important factors explaining individual differences in the acquisition of connectives.

Although the Latin-based orthographies of most Western languages employ vowels with accent marks (e.g., é vs. e), extant models of letter and word recognition are agnostic as to whether these accented letters and their non-accented counterparts are represented by common or separate abstract units. Recent research in French with a masked priming alphabetic decision task was interpreted as favoring the idea that accented and non-accented vowels are represented by separate abstract orthographic units (orthographic account: é↛e and e↛é; Chetail & Boursain, 2019). However, a more parsimonious explanation is that salient (accented) vowels are less perceptually similar to non-salient (non-accented) vowels than vice versa (perceptual account: e→é, but é↛e; Perea et al., 2021a; Tversky, 1977). To adjudicate between the two accounts, we conducted a masked priming alphabetic decision experiment in Catalan, a language with a complex orthography-to-phonology mapping for non-accented vowels (e.g., e→/e/, /ə/, /ε/). Results showed faster responses in the identity than in the visually similar condition for accented targets (é–É < e–É), but not for non-accented targets (e–E = é–E). Neither of the above accounts can fully capture this pattern. We propose an explanation based on the rapid activation of both orthographic and phonological codes.

In the time since the term “intersectionality” was first introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw, the term has gained a measure of widespread, even viral popularity. Increasingly, psycholinguists are citing this concept to promote work which more fully engages with the consequences of human diversity for language processing. This piece discusses the ways in which “intersectionality” has thus far been engaged by the field of psycholinguistics. I argue that the common usage of the term “intersectionality” is notably out of step with the tradition of Black feminist scholarship from which it derives. Originally defined as an analytical framework for examining the effect of interlocking oppressions in erasing the distinctive experiences of multiply marginalized people, intersectionality should not be invoked without any serious and specific discussion of oppressive systems or erasure. To achieve a more just and equitable applied psycholinguistics and authentically promote intersectional approaches to understanding language behavior, intersectionality must be taken as a framework primarily engaging with effects of structural violence. The article concludes with some guidelines for readers to assist in distinguishing “intersectional” claims which perform erasure from those which reflect the original and intended anti-misogynoir applications of the theory.

An individual’s sense of the extent to which her or his body physically interacts with objects in the environment (body–object interaction; BOI) has been empirically shown to modulate lexical and semantic processing of object names. To allow for further exploration of the nature of those effects, BOI ratings for 750 Spanish nouns were obtained from 178 young adult participants. Statistical analyses showed moderate correlations between BOI indicators and some psycholinguistic indexes, such as word imageability and age of acquisition. In addition, an exploration of lexical associative relationships revealed that high-BOI words have a consistent tendency to be associated with words naming parts of the body. The ratings could be useful to researchers who are interested in manipulating or controlling for the effects of BOI in their language-processing studies. The complete norms are available for free downloading at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/kd5vf/).

We examined the cross-lagged relations between word reading fluency in the two orthographic systems of Japanese: phonetic (syllabic) Hiragana and morphographic Kanji. One hundred forty-two Japanese-speaking children were assessed on word reading fluency twice in Grade 1 (Times 1 and 2) and twice in Grade 2 (Times 3 and 4). Nonverbal IQ, vocabulary, phonological awareness, morphological awareness, and rapid automatized naming were also assessed in Time 1. Results of path analysis revealed that Time 1 Hiragana fluency predicted Time 2 Kanji fluency after controlling for the cognitive skills. Time 2 Hiragana fluency did not predict Time 3 Kanji fluency or vice versa after the autoregressor was controlled, but Hiragana and Kanji fluency were reciprocally related between Times 3 and 4. These findings provide evidence for a cross-script transfer of word reading fluency across the two contrastive orthographic systems, and the first evidence of fluency in a morphographic script predicting fluency development in a phonetic script within the same language.

Relative proficiency in Gaelic varies by age in a Highland Scottish region where Gaelic is spoken by a decreasing number of bilinguals in a steadily aging population segment. Although there is a Gaelic proficiency continuum ranging from full fluency (and Gaelic dominance) to minimal generative skills (and English dominance), there are also deviations at both extremes of skill: Fully fluent speakers show self-conscious difficulty with one morphological and four syntactic structures, while minimally proficient speakers show less difficulty than might be expected in the use of conjunctions. An exceptionally keen though low-proficiency speaker can devise unusual means of compensation in using the language. Neither full fluency nor marked deficiency produces altogether predictable levels of structural conservatism or communicative success.

Previous research investigating the relationship between language proficiency and iconic gesture use has produced inconsistent findings. This study investigated whether a linear relationship was assumed although it is a quadratic relationship. Iconic co-speech gesture use by 4- to 6-year-old French–Japanese bilinguals with two levels of French proficiency (intermediate and low) but similar levels of Japanese proficiency was compared with that of high-proficiency French monolinguals (Study 1) and Japanese monolinguals with similar proficiency to the bilinguals (Study 2). To control the information participants communicated, a dynamic referential communication task was used; a difference between two cartoons had to be communicated to an experimenter. Study 1 showed a significant quadratic relationship between proficiency and iconic gesture use in French; the intermediate-proficiency bilinguals gestured least among the three proficiency groups. The monolingual and bilingual groups with similar Japanese proficiency in Study 2 gestured at similar rates. It is suggested that children gestured for different reasons depending on their language proficiency and the cognitive resources available for the task.