The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily entailed learning to use pitch patterns in words. Two major facets of sound-to-word learning were investigated: could native speakers of a nontone language learn the use of pitch patterns for lexical identification, and what effect did more basic auditory ability have on learning success. We found that all subjects improved to a certain degree, although large individual differences were observed. Learning success was found to be associated with the learners' ability to perceive pitch patterns in a nonlexical context and their previous musical experience. These results suggest the importance of a phonetic–phonological–lexical continuity in adult nonnative word learning, including phonological awareness and general auditory ability.

Evidence that the abilities to repeat nonwords and to learn language are very closely related to one another has led to widespread interest in the cognitive processes underlying nonword repetition. One suggestion is that nonword repetition is a relatively pure measure of phonological short-term memory closely associated with other measures of short-term memory such as serial recall. The present study compared serial recall of lists of monosyllabic nonwords and repetition of matched phonological forms presented as a multisyllabic nonword in typically developing school-age children. Results revealed that whereas both serial recall and nonword repetition responses showed classic short-term memory characteristics such as a serial position curve and decreasing accuracy with increasing sequence length, nonword repetition was associated with more accurate repetition overall and errors that were more closely matched to the target. Consonants benefited from nonword repetition to a greater extent than vowels. These findings indicate that factors in addition to short-term memory support retention in nonword repetition. It is suggested that coarticulatory and prosodic cues may play important roles in the recall of multisyllabic phonological forms.

The study tested the effect of three factors on Arab children's (N=256) phoneme isolation: phoneme's linguistic affiliation (standard phonemes vs. spoken phonemes), phoneme position (initial vs. final), and linguistic context (singleton vs. cluster). Two groups of children speaking two different vernaculars were tested. The two vernaculars differed with respect to whether they included four critical Standard Arabic phonemes. Using a repeated-measure design, we tested children's phonemic sensitivity toward these four phonemes versus other phonemes. The results showed that the linguistic affiliation of the phoneme was reliable in explaining phoneme isolation reaffirming, hence the external validity of the linguistic affiliation constraint in explaining phoneme awareness in diglossic Arabic. The results also showed that initial phonemes and initial singleton phonemes were particularly difficult for children to isolate. These findings were discussed in light of a stipulated unique phonological and orthographic cohesion of the consonant–vowel unit in Arabic.

Although the organization of first language (L1) and second language (L2) lexicosemantic information has been extensively studied in the bilingual literature, little evidence exists concerning how syntactic information associated with words is represented across languages. The present study examines the shared or independent nature of the representation of verb argument structure in the bilingual mental lexicon and the contribution of constituent order and thematic role information in these representations. In three production tasks, Greek (L1) advanced learners of English (L2) generated an L1 prime structure (Experiment 1: prepositional object [PO] and double object [DO] structures; Experiment 2: PO, DO, and intransitive structures; Experiment 3: PO, DO, locative, and “provide (someone) with (something)” structures) before completing an L2 target structure (PO or DO only). Experiment 1 showed L1-to-L2 syntactic priming; participants tended to reuse L1 structure when producing L2 utterances. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that this tendency was contingent on the combination of both syntactic structure and thematic roles up to the first postverbal argument. Based on these findings, we outline a model of shared representations of syntactic and thematic information for L1 and L2 verbs in the bilingual lexicon.

We examine the use of film subtitles as an approximation of word frequencies in human interactions. Because subtitle files are widely available on the Internet, they may present a fast and easy way to obtain word frequency measures in language registers other than text writing. We compiled a corpus of 52 million French words, coming from a variety of films. Frequency measures based on this corpus compared well to other spoken and written frequency measures, and explained variance in lexical decision times in addition to what is accounted for by the available French written frequency measures.

Syntactic awareness has been linked to word reading and reading comprehension. The predictive power of two syntactic awareness tasks (grammatical correction, word-order correction) for both aspects of reading was explored in 8- and 10-year-olds. The relative contributions of vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory to each were assessed. After vocabulary, memory explained variance on the word-order correction task; in contrast, grammatical knowledge explained performance on the grammatical correction task. The relation between syntactic awareness and reading comprehension was mediated by vocabulary, grammatical knowledge, and memory; in contrast, word reading and syntactic awareness shared unique variance not explained by these controls. The implications for how we measure syntactic awareness and its relation with reading ability are discussed.

To assign lexical stress when reading, the Greek reader can potentially rely on lexical information (knowledge of the word), visual–orthographic information (processing of the written diacritic), or a default metrical strategy (penultimate stress pattern). Previous studies with secondary education children have shown strong lexical effects on stress assignment and have provided evidence for a default pattern. Here we report two experiments with adult readers, in which we disentangle and quantify the effects of these three potential sources using nonword materials. Stimuli either resembled or did not resemble real words, to manipulate availability of lexical information; and they were presented with or without a diacritic, in a word-congruent or word-incongruent position, to contrast the relative importance of the three sources. Dual-task conditions, in which cognitive load during nonword reading was increased with phonological retention carrying a metrical pattern different from the default, did not support the hypothesis that the default arises from cumulative lexical activation in working memory.

Previous studies have shown inconsistent results concerning bilinguals' use of gestures to compensate for reduced proficiency in their second language (L2). These results could be because of differing task demands. In this study, we asked 16 intermediate English L2 speakers (whose first language [L1] was Chinese) to watch a story and tell it back in both languages. We attempted to link gesture use to proficiency while accounting for task complexity as measured by scenes recalled. The results showed that these L2 speakers told longer stories in their L1 and used more iconic gestures in their L2. There were also trends for the women to tell longer stories and use more gestures in their L2 compared to the men. These results are consistent with the idea that the relationship between gesture use and proficiency is mediated by task complexity. The trends for gender differences, however, point to the possibility that gesture use is also related to expressivity.