Lie detection research comparing manual and automated coding of linguistic cues is limited. In Experiment 1, we attempted to extend this line of research by directly comparing the veracity differences in manual coding and two coding software programs (Text Inspector and Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count [LIWC]) on the linguistic cue “total details” across eight published datasets. Mixed model analyses revealed that LIWC showed larger veracity differences in total details than Text Inspector and manual coding. Follow-up classification analyses showed that both automated coding and manual coding could accurately classify honest and false accounts. In Experiment 2, we examined if LIWC’s sensitivity to veracity differences was the result of honest accounts including more redundant (repeated) words than false accounts as LIWC—but not Text Inspector or manual coding—accounts for redundancy. Our prediction was supported, and the most redundant words were function words. The results implicated that automated coding can detect veracity differences in total details and redundancy, but it is not necessarily better than manual coding at accurately classifying honest and false accounts.

Ideally, comprehensible second language (L2) speech would be seen as acceptable speech. However, the association between these dimensions is underexplored. To investigate the relationship between comprehensibility and “academic acceptability,” defined here as how well a speaker could meet the demands of a given role in an academic setting, 204 university stakeholders judged L2 speech samples elicited from a standardized English test used for university admissions. Four tasks from 100 speakers were coded for 13 speech stream characteristics. Judgments for comprehensibility and acceptability correlated strongly (r = .93). Linear mixed-effects models, used to examine judgments across all tasks and separately for each task, indicated that while random intercepts (i.e., speaker ability, listener severity) explained a substantial amount of total variation (32–44%) in listener judgments compared to speech characteristic fixed effects (8–21%), fixed effects did account for variation in speaker random effects (reducing variation compared to intercept-only models by 50–90%). Despite some minimal differences across task types, the influence of speech characteristics across both judgments was mostly similar. While providing evidence that comprehensible speech can indeed be perceived as acceptable, this study also provides evidence that speakers demonstrate both consistent and less consistent performance, in reference to speech stream production, across performances.

The study followed 6-year-old children in Canadian French Immersion for three years to investigate the effect of home language background on acquisition of French, the language of schooling. None of the children knew French before beginning the program. French proficiency was indicated by French vocabulary and verbal fluency tasks. A language background questionnaire was used to (a) assign children to monolingual or bilingual groups and (b) provide a continuous score for degree of bilingual experience. Categorical analyses showed bilingual children had smaller English vocabulary than monolingual children when they entered the program. For French vocabulary, categorical comparisons revealed no language group differences in the first two years but higher French scores for bilingual children in the third year. In contrast, analyses of the continuous scores revealed a relation between more bilingual experience and higher French vocabulary throughout. Similarly, categorical analyses of verbal fluency results indicated no significant language group differences for either semantic or phonological fluency, but continuous analyses of semantic fluency showed an association between more bilingual experience and better outcomes in each year. These results suggest that language experience impacts progress in learning the language of schooling and that different analytic approaches reveal different aspects of the pattern.

The manuscript explores the psycholinguistic processes responsible for cross-linguistic influence in translation. In two experimental studies with professional translators-in-training, we investigate the psycholinguistic foundations of shining-through effects in translated texts, i.e., cases where the grammatical structure of a source sentence leaves traces in the translated sentence. Experiment 1 reports the results from a translation task investigating the influence of the grammatical structure of the source sentence on structural choices for its translation. The results showed a significant influence of source sentence structure, which gradually decreased with increasing translation competence scores. In Experiment 2, we investigated to what extent the effect of source structure influence found in Experiment 1 can be accounted for through cross-linguistic structural priming. In a cross-linguistic priming experiment in which the source sentences from Experiment 1 were used as primes, participants showed no evidence of structural priming. A cross-experiment comparison revealed significant source sentence influence in the translation task, but no such effect in the priming task, for matched sets of sentences. Our results cast doubt on the claim that shining-through effects in translation are caused by cross-linguistic structural priming. We suggest an alternative account which instead explains structural cross-linguistic influence in translation through serial lexical co-activation.