This study aimed to investigate how Japanese learners of English as a foreign language, whose first language does not have obligatory morphological number marking, process conceptual plurality. The targeted structure was reciprocal verbs, which require conceptual plurality to interpret their meanings correctly. The results of a sentence completion task confirmed that participants could use reciprocal verbs reciprocally in English. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read sentences with reciprocal verbs and those with optionally transitive verbs (e.g., while the king and the queen kissed/left the baby read the book in the bed). There was no reading time delay for reciprocal verbs but a delay for optionally transitive verbs. Therefore, the participants succeeded in processing second language conceptual plurality in the online sentence comprehension task.

This paper examines various rendering techniques and emphasizes the unique contribution that computer technology offers to transcription. First, the basic manual transcription procedure and its grounds are discussed. Next, three methods of generating transcripts are considered separately: (a) completely manual preparation; (b) a combination of manual and computer procedures; and (c) the on-line processing/monitoring by computer. Finally, the relative advantages and limitations of these techniques are discussed in terms of a trade-off between several factors which include initial investment in equipment, person hours, cost of copying and modifying transcripts, and reduction of errors in transcribing data.

Listeners are better at remembering voices speaking in familiar languages and accents, and this finding is often dubbed the language-familiarity effect (LFE). A potential mechanism behind the LFE relates to a combination of listeners’ implicit knowledge about lower level phonetic cues and higher level linguistic processes. While previous work has established that listeners’ social expectations influence various aspects of linguistic processing and speech perception, it remains unknown how such expectations might affect talker recognition. To this end, Mandarin-accented English voices and locally accented English voices were used in a talker recognition paradigm in conditions which paired voices with stereotypically congruent names (Mandarin-accented English voice as Chen and locally accented English voice as Connor) and stereotypically incongruent names (vice versa). Across two experiments, listeners showed greater recall for the familiar, local voices than the Mandarin-accented ones, confirming the basic premise of the LFE. Further, incongruent accent/name pairings negatively affected listeners’ performance, although listeners with experience speaking Mandarin were less influenced by the incongruent accent/name pairings. These results indicate that the LFE, while relying largely on listeners’ ability to parse linguistic information, is also affected by nonlinguistic information about a talker’s social identity.

Children who are refugees become bilingual in circumstances that are often challenging and that can vary across national contexts. We investigated the second language (L2) syntactic skills of Syrian children aged 6-12 living in Canada (n = 56) and the Netherlands (n = 47). Our goal was to establish the impact of the first language (L1 = Syrian Arabic) skills on L2 (English, Dutch) outcomes and whether L1–L2 interdependence is influenced by the length of L2 exposure. To measure L1 and L2 syntactic skills, cross-linguistic Litmus Sentence Repetition Tasks (Litmus-SRTs) were used. Results showed evidence of L1–L2 interdependence, but interdependence may only surface after sufficient L2 exposure. Maternal education level and refugee camp experiences differed between the two samples. Both variables impacted L2 outcomes in the Canadian but not in the Dutch sample, demonstrating the importance to examine refugee children’s bilingual language development in different national contexts.

The contribution of vocabulary to academic achievements in general and to reading comprehension (RC) in particular has led to the development of various tools for vocabulary assessment. However, existing assessments do not distinguish between word types, and specifically, they do not target emotion vocabulary, despite growing recognition of the importance of emotional processing to RC ability. In this study, we first describe the development of a novel vocabulary assessment in Hebrew – Herut – and examine its validity and sensitivity. This assessment includes both emotion words and nonemotion words, and is based on curriculum. Next, we studied the contribution of the emotion and nonemotion words subscales of the Herut to RC in a sample of 1,333 Hebrew-speaking fourth- and fifth-grade students. Both types of vocabulary knowledge made significant independent contributions to RC, and the contribution of emotion words was slightly larger than that of nonemotion words. Finally, the Herut measure was found to be more predictive of RC than a general vocabulary measure in Hebrew.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show heterogeneous language profiles beyond early language delays. Understanding the second language profiles of bilingual children with ASD is important for clinical practice in diverse societies. Accordingly, we examined the narrative abilities of bilinguals with ASD, with developmental language disorder (DLD), and with typical development (TD) to determine which narrative components best differentiate bilinguals with ASD from the other groups. Participants were 29 bilingual children with ASD, DLD, and TD who were matched for age (mean = 6;8), nonverbal intelligence, and receptive vocabulary. Narratives were coded for macrostructure (story grammar (SG) scores, number of individual SG components) and microstructure (syntactic complexity, mean length of utterance, lexical diversity, and story length). The TD group had superior SG scores, included more SG components, and used longer utterances and more complex syntax than the ASD group, whereas no differences were found between the clinical groups. For SG components requiring perspective-taking abilities, the ASD group had worse performance than the TD and DLD groups. Our results suggest that bilingual children with ASD show weaknesses in both macrostructure and microstructure, which can overlap with children with DLD. The linguistic profiles of bilingual children with ASD and DLD are thus both overlapping and distinct.

English monolinguals (Experiment 1) and first language (L1)-dominant, Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilinguals (Experiment 2), who differed in L1 orthographic depth (shallow: Spanish; deep: Chinese) and second language (L2–English) proficiency, decided whether visually presented letter strings were English words, while behavioral and EEG measures were recorded. The spelling-sound regularity and consistency of stimuli were covaried such that words had either regular/consistent (e.g., GATE) or irregular/inconsistent mappings (e.g., PINT). Irregular/inconsistent words elicited more positive P200 and less negative N400 amplitudes than regular/consistent words in monolinguals, yet only a P200 response in bilinguals. English proficiency modulated L2 reading strategies, such that bilinguals employed distinct reading unit sizes in the L2 than the L1 when L2 proficiency was low, but transferred L1 reading units to the L2 when L2 proficiency was high. ERP results suggest that high L2 proficiency may be a prerequisite to the cross-linguistic transfer of reading strategies.

The work of Susan Gathercole and others on nonword repetition has increased general interest in the relationship between memory and language, and has provided a fertile theoretical framework for researchers to explore how the language system makes use of the phonological loop, a component in Baddeley's (1986) working memory model. Gathercole (2006) integrated a number of findings from a variety of research methodologies and populations to support this theoretical framework. She also discussed how this framework might be applied to increase our understanding of language disorders characterized by word learning problems. Synthesizing the findings from many and diverse areas of study to formulate a coherent theory is a challenge, but this challenge must be undertaken if we hope to significantly advance our understanding of human behavior, including the differences in processing that are found across the lifespan and across individuals. I admire Gathercole for undertaking this challenge (and the additional challenge of applying the theory to language disorders) in the area of word learning.

The present study focuses on the production of predicates by Korean agrammatic aphasic patients with respect to the argument structure distribution of the predicates. We analyzed narrative production data and picture/scene description data elicited from three Broca's aphasic patients in comparison with matched controls. In particular, we examined whether our subjects have the same kind of difficulties that Kegl's English agrammatic patient exhibited in the production of noncopular unaccusative constructions. The results show that our Korean aphasics do not exhibit any dramatic discrepancy from the control group in the pattern of argument structure distribution of the predicates produced. Regarding methodology, our studies reveal that the picture/scene description measures the subjects' competence more effectively than the narrative production task. We propose that the difference found between our agrammatic patients and Kegl's agrammatic subject may be due to the differences in the syntactic processes for deriving unaccusative constructions in the two languages.

Hearing impaired adolescents from three schools were asked to produce sentences expressing simple locative state relations. Subjects varied on three hearing levels, two ages, and the use or nonuse of sign language. All subjects wrote English sentences to describe pictures; signers also described pictures in sign. Data were analyzed using chi-square procedures. Errors of noun reversal and pragmatic focus were apparent in 7% of the signed responses and 15% of the written responses. Errors were produced by subjects at each age and hearing level, and by signers and nonsigners as well. Most errors were produced by profoundly hearing impaired signers attending public day school (as compared to residential school). Implications for instruction and for further research are discussed.

This study explores the metalinguistic abilities of prelingually deaf children aged 4–7, who are users of Signed English, with regard to their explicit segmentation of Signed English sentences into words. Subjects exhibited varying metalinguistic abilities that generally increased with age and that were similar to the developmental pattern found in hearing populations. Based upon performance with respect to four factors (i.e., explicit segmentation, omissions of function words, content words, and inflectional morphemes), subjects were grouped into four classes. In Class 1, sentences or groups of words were not segmented. in Class 2, major constituents of the sentences were segmented. In Class 3, major constituents and some function words were segmented. In Class 4, the entire sentence was segmented. Patterns of omissions found throughout the classes for function words and inflectional morphemes are discussed. Also addressed are implicit segmentation skills found to develop prior to the development of explicit abilities.

This “visual-world” eye-tracking study investigated the processing of focus in English sentences with preverbal only by L2 learners whose L1 was either Cantonese or Dutch, compared to native speakers of English. Participants heard only-sentences with prosodic prominence either on the object or on the verb and viewed pictures containing an object-focus alternative and a verb-focus alternative. We found that both L2 groups showed delayed eye movements to the alternative of focus, which was different from the native speakers of English. Moreover, Dutch learners of English were even slower than Cantonese learners of English in directing fixations to the alternative of focus. We interpreted the delayed fixation patterns in both L2 groups as evidence of difficulties in integrating multiple interfaces in real time. Furthermore, the similarity between English and Dutch in the use of prosody to mark focus hindered Dutch learners’ L2 processing of focus, whereas the difference between English and Cantonese in the realization of focus facilitated Cantonese learners’ processing of focus in English.

Previous research has established that early second language (L2) learners in classroom immersion may not ultimately produce all L2 morphosyntactic features as first language (L1) speakers of the language do, whereas L2 comprehension outcomes are reported to be less divergent from those of L1 speakers. However, immersion learners’ L2 comprehension is typically assessed using tasks of holistic understanding, and therefore, little is known about fine-grained comprehension of specific morphosyntactic constructions. To address this, the present study examined online comprehension of English plural–singular marking by Mandarin-speaking, English-immersion learners in Taiwan. This semantically transparent feature differs from the L1 grammar and is a notable area of difficulty for Mandarin-speaking L2-English learners. The present study assesses middle school-aged immersion learners’ comprehension using a visual-world eye-tracking task combined with a picture decision task, comparing results to age-matched English-monolingual controls. After more than 8 years of L2 exposure, the immersion participants showed similarities and differences to monolinguals in plural–singular marking comprehension as measured by eye-tracking, and were less accurate in their interpretations on the picture decision task. This study shows that comprehension differences for a semantically transparent morphosyntactic construction can be apparent even after many years for learners who started immersion at an early age.

As a reliable and valid measures of perceptual auditory laterality, dichotic listening has been successfully applied in studies in many countries and languages. However, languages differ in the linguistic relevance of change in initial phoneme of words (e.g., for word identification). In the present cross-language study, we examine the effect of these differences on dichotic-listening task performance to establish how characteristics of one's native language affect the perception of nonnative phonological features. We compared 33 native speakers of Norwegian, a language characterized by a clear distinction between voiced and unvoiced initial plosive consonants, with 30 native speakers of Estonian, a language that has exclusively unvoiced initial phonemes. Using a free-report dichotic-listening paradigm utilizing pairs of voiced (/ba/, /da/, /ga/) and unvoiced (/pa/, /ta/, /ka/) stop-consonant vowels as stimulus material, the Norwegian native speakers were found to be more sensitive to the voicing of the initial plosive than the Estonian group. “Voicing” explained 69% and 18% of the variance in the perceptual auditory laterality in the Norwegian and the Estonian sample, respectively. This indicates that experiential differences, likely during acquisition of the mother tongue in early development, permanently shape the sensitivity to the voicing contrast.

Differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) comprehension have been debated. This study explores whether a source of potential L1/L2 differences lies in susceptibility to memory-based interference during dependency formation. Interference effects are known to occur in sentences like The key to the cabinets were rusty, where ungrammaticality results from a number mismatch between the sentence subject and verb. Such sentences are sometimes misperceived as grammatical due to the presence of a number-matching “distractor” (“the cabinets”). Interference has been well-examined in a number agreement. However, whether and how forming thematic relations is susceptible to interference remains underexplored in L1 and L2 language comprehension. In six preregistered experiments, we investigated semantic interference in language comprehension and explored whether potential L1/L2 differences can be attributed to different degrees of susceptibility to interference. The results did not show that L2 speakers are more susceptible to interference than L1 speakers. Also, the observed interference patterns were only partially consistent with existing theories of memory retrieval during comprehension. We discuss how these theories may be reconciled with our findings and argue our results suggest that similar processes are involved in L1 and L2 subject-verb dependency formation.

Multiple studies on bilingualism and emotions have demonstrated that a native language carries greater emotional valence than the second language. This distinction appears to have consequences for other types of behavior, including lying. As bilingual lying has not been explored extensively, the current study investigated the psychophysiological differences between German (native language) and English (second language) in the lying process as well as in the perception of lies. The skin conductance responses of 26 bilinguals were measured during reading aloud true and false statements and listening to recorded correct and wrong assertions. The analysis revealed a lie effect, that is, statistically significant differences between valid and fictitious sentences. In addition, the values in German were higher compared to those in English, in accordance with the blunted emotional response account (Caldwell-Harris & Aycicegi-Dinn, 2009). Finally, the skin conductance responses were lower in the listening condition in comparison to the reading aloud. The results, however, are treated with caution given the fact that skin conductance monitoring does not allow assigning heightened reactivity of the skin to one exclusive cause. The responses may have been equally induced by the content of the statements, which prompted positive or negative associations in the participants’ minds or by the specific task requirements.