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 longitudinal study used sentence interpretation tasks to consider growth in language processing among school-aged children learning Vietnamese and English. Thirty-two children participated yearly over three time points. Children were asked to identify the agent of sentences that manipulated linguistic cues relevant to Vietnamese (animacy) and English (word order). Hierarchical linear modeling was used to examine change in cue use over time as well as the relation between cue use and proficiency in each language. Findings include exclusive reliance on word order by the end point, nearly identical group-level cue-use patterns across languages with individual variation, and positive relationships between language proficiency and cue use. Findings are discussed within the unified competition model (MacWhinney, 2004) and the literature on sequential bilingualism.

Processes involved in late bilinguals’ production of morphologically complex words were studied using an event-related brain potentials (ERP) paradigm in which EEGs were recorded during participants’ silent productions of English past- and present-tense forms. Twenty-three advanced second language speakers of English (first language [L1] German) were compared to a control group of 19 L1 English speakers from an earlier study. We found a frontocentral negativity for regular relative to irregular past-tense forms (e.g., asked vs. held) during (silent) production, and no difference for the present-tense condition (e.g., asks vs. holds), replicating the ERP effect obtained for the L1 group. This ERP effect suggests that combinatorial processing is involved in producing regular past-tense forms, in both late bilinguals and L1 speakers. We also suggest that this paradigm is a useful tool for future studies of online language production.