This study compared patterns of nonselective cross-language activation in L1 and L2 visual word recognition with different-script bilinguals. The aim was to determine (1) whether lexical processing is nonselective in the L1 (as in L2), and (2) if the same cross-linguistic factors affected processing similarly in each language. To examine the time course of activation, eye movements were tracked during lexical decision. Thirty-two Japanese–English bilinguals responded to 250 target words in Japanese and in English. The same participants and items (i.e., cognate translation equivalents) were used to directly compare L1 and L2 processing. Response latencies as well as eye movements representing early and late processing were analyzed using mixed-effects regression modeling. Similar cross-linguistic effects, namely cognate word frequency, phonological similarity, and semantic similarity, were found in both languages. These factors affected processing to different degrees in each language, however. While cognate frequency was significant as early as the first fixation, effects of cross-linguistic phonological and semantic similarity arose later in time. Increased phonological similarity slowed responses in L2 but speeded them in L1, while greater semantic overlap was facilitatory in both languages. Results are discussed from the perspective of the BIA+ model of visual word recognition.

Vygotsky's social psycholinguist approach is not incompatible with computational approaches to the study of mind. In this way William Frawley sets the stage for a Vygoskyan cognitive science. Socioculturalists' theorizing on the work of the human mind has long maintained boundaries against cognitive science's information processing approaches and language, and vice versa. Frawley argues that no such division is entirely necessary and offers powerful ways of linking the two ways of thinking. Frawley's background in both Vygotskyan and other sociocultural theories, as well as in cognitive science and computational theories, places him in an important position to make these links.

Text messages often contain abbreviations allowing for an efficient manner to quickly convey content. Although text abbreviations typically contain fewer letters than words, research has demonstrated that they are processed more slowly. Text abbreviations are lexically unique compared to their fully spelled counterparts. This study examined the nature of episodic memory representations for text abbreviations and how top-down contextual information influences the encoding of text abbreviations. In this experiment, participants studied sentences that contained different types of abbreviations: deletions (e.g., tmrw), substitutions (e.g., 2mrw) or “pseudo” abbreviations (e.g., toorow). The sentences were presented within a conversational context or without context. In a recognition memory test, participants saw sentences from the study task that contained either the same abbreviation or a different type of abbreviation. Results revealed that conversational context increased both hits and false recognition rates in the memory test. False recognition rates were generally higher for abbreviation types that shared more surface feature overlap and lower for those that shared less surface feature overlap. The findings suggest text abbreviations have distinct episodic memory representations that incorporate their unique surface feature information and are closely associated to fully spelled lexical memory representations.

This Special Issue of Applied Psycholinguistics raises not only several issues about the human brain's behavior as manifest in the processing of language, but it is also intended to elicit scientific dialogue.

There were several errors in Table 1 in the original version of this article (Yoshimura & MacWhinney, 2010), which are corrected here. We sincerely regret these errors and any problems they may have caused.

Ever since the derivational theory of complexity (DTC) apparently bit the dust in the late 1960s, experimental psycholinguistics have been afflicted by a dualism at least as troublesome as the mind/brain dichotomy, namely, the grammar/parser distinction. The idea that mentally represented grammar is something fully dissociated from the human language processor is less than compelling, yet it has implicitly informed much of the last half century's psycholinguistics practice on both sides of the formalist–functionalist divide.

The proposal by Clahsen and Felser (CF) has the potential of marking a turning point in second language (L2) acquisition research. Contrary to much L2 research to date, it suggests that some of the differences between native and (advanced) nonnative speakers may be at the level of grammatical processing, rather than grammatical representations. Accounting for L2 speakers' divergent behavior does therefore not necessarily involve positing “representational deficits”: L2 speakers can, and indeed do, attain target representations of the L2, but may compute incomplete (“shallow”) syntactic parses in comprehension. Such shallow processing is often accompanied by reliance (or overreliance) on lexical, semantic, and pragmatic information, which can lead to seemingly trouble-free comprehension in ordinary communication. It is only when speakers are faced with sentence ambiguities, which impose a greater than normal processing load, that the differences between adult L2 language acquirers and child first language (L1) acquirers become apparent: both child and adult language learners have difficulty in integrating structural and nonstructural information in on-line comprehension, but although children prioritize structural information, adult learners privilege nonstructural lexical–semantic information. CF's proposal opens up new perspectives on the nature of ultimate attainment in adult L2 acquisition; at the same time it raises some questions that, in my view, are of crucial importance for future research.

This study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]–14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used cohesive devices in narratives similarly to mentally matched children, but their performance differed from the chronologically matched children only for referential cohesion. WS children's grammatical error rates were similar to both the mentally and chronologically matched children. Implications for the characterization of the language profile of individuals with WS and considerations for the focus of future narrative research are discussed.

Younger readers, mean age 6;11, and older readers, mean age 8;7, matched on IQ and SES, read 18 consonant phonemes embedded in nonsense CVCs. Results indicated that (a) within groups, younger readers made significantly more errors on digraphs than graphs; (b) younger readers made significantly more errors on graphs in the final position; (c) there was no position effect for either group in reading digraphs. Analysis of errors based on the number of distinctive features shared within stimulus-response pairs revealed that (a) on graphs, both groups made significantly more errors that shared two distinctive features; (b) on digraphs, the majority of errors for younger readers shared one distinctive feature; (c) the predominant strategy on digraphs for both groups was to read one letter. These findings demonstrate that most oral reading errors produced by beginning readers are not random, but rather are systematically related to the stimulus.

Grammatical error detection and correction are often used to test explicit language knowledge. This study investigated effects of token frequency and error type in error detection, correction, and repetition, and performance on the three tasks were compared and related to models of metalinguistic awareness and development. Thirty Swedish-speaking 10-year-olds with typical language development participated in the study, which focused on four morphosyntactic errors: the infinitive instead of past tense for regular and irregular verbs, and the omission of the obligatory indefinite article in common and neuter gender noun phrases. Target verbs and nouns were of high or low frequency. Results showed significant effects of verb frequency in all tasks, and effects of noun gender for error detection, but not for correction and repetition. Children detected significantly more past-tense errors than they accurately corrected, but the opposite result was seen for noun phrase errors. The patterns of results both within and across tasks imply that implicit language knowledge affects performance, and that lexical frequency, even of familiar words, needs to be controlled when designing tasks for measuring grammatical knowledge. The particular challenge of the Swedish neuter noun phrase in language development and language processing needs to be further investigated.