The readback/hearback loop is a communicative protocol used in many high-risk environments to ensure that a verbal instruction has been heard correctly by a receiver. However, it does not necessarily ensure that an instruction has been understood. Using an international sample of hydroelectric power generation controllers, this study examined whether particular linguistic (complete and partial readbacks) and prosodic (final intonation, filler, and interturn delay) cues contained within a readback response could signal to listeners the extent to which speakers had understood an instruction. The results indicated that different prosodic cues are used to detect nonunderstandings, depending upon the linguistic content of the readback. The results have implications for training and system design in distributed environments.

This study investigates whether second language learners’ processing of stress can be explained by the degree to which suprasegmental cues contribute to lexical identity in the native language. It focuses on Standard Mandarin, Taiwan Mandarin, and American English listeners’ processing of stress in English nonwords. In Mandarin, fundamental frequency contributes to lexical identity by signaling lexical tones, but only in Standard Mandarin does duration distinguish stressed–unstressed and stressed–stressed words. Participants completed sequence-recall tasks containing English disyllabic nonwords contrasting in stress. Experiment 1 used natural stimuli; Experiment 2 used resynthesized stimuli that isolated fundamental frequency and duration cues. Experiment 1 revealed no difference among the groups; in Experiment 2, Standard Mandarin listeners used duration more than Taiwan Mandarin listeners did. These results are interpreted within a cue-weighting theory of speech perception.

Listening comprehension in academic contexts is an important prerequisite for the acquisition of school-related skills. However, the concept of academic language is generally the subject of much debate, and there is no consensus yet on what constitutes academic listening comprehension. To date, it remains unclear whether listening comprehension of academic language may be regarded as a distinct construct. The present study investigates the distinction of academic and everyday listening comprehension in 459 ninth-grade students speaking German as a first language or as a second language. Empirical results provide preliminary evidence that academic listening forms a separate facet of listening comprehension. Contrary to theoretical assumptions, second language students were not particularly disadvantaged in terms of academic listening comprehension.

The effect of visual salience on speakers’ choices is investigated by contrasting the effects of both visual and linguistic manipulations on picture descriptions and eye movements. Two-character pictures were used, which can be described in one of two complementary ways (e.g., a cop chasing a robber can be described either from a chasing or from a fleeing perspective), and using simple actives or other alternative syntactic structures (e.g., “a robber is being chased by a cop”). The pictures were preceded by a verb priming one of the two perspectives and/or a preview of one of the two characters. The results show that the visual manipulation affects looks to the characters regardless of which perspective had been linguistically primed, but it only affects verbal descriptions in the absence of a linguistic prime. Linguistically priming one of the perspectives, in contrast, has a reliable effect on both looks to the characters and verbal descriptions. These results suggest that visual salience does not influence linguistic choices directly.

First language learners can track word-referent co-occurrence information across situations and evaluate co-occurrence probabilities across situations to determine the best-of-fit mappings. However, cross-situational word learning can be difficult to foreign language learners, because in addition to aggregating information across situations, they have to build robust representations for foreign-sounding words. In Experiment 1, third-grade Mandarin-speaking children learned four English word-referent pairs in two conditions, varying in within-trial ambiguity. In one condition, information about word-referent association was determinable across trials but not within a trial. In the other, word-referent association within a trial was inferable. In Experiment 2, participants learned words in a condition where referential ambiguity across trials, though not within a trial, was reduced by successive presentation of certain word-referent pairs. The results revealed that participants learned more word-referent pairs than expected by chance. Reducing ambiguity within a trial facilitated word mapping and word retention (Experiment 1), but reducing ambiguity across trials did not (Experiment 2). Across two experiments, word mapping and retention performance was associated with phonological awareness, whether measured in children's first language or a foreign language, but not with digit span, suggesting that success in cross-situational word learning in a foreign language rests on specification of word forms.

Cross-linguistic priming in comprehension is understudied, and it remains unclear whether bilinguals have shared abstract syntactic representations during sentence comprehension. This article reports a self-paced reading experiment investigating the influence of Chinese passive relative clauses on the interpretation of English sentences that are temporarily ambiguous between an active main clause and a passive reduced relative (dispreferred) structure. The results showed that reading Chinese passive relative primes reduced processing difficulty in English targets at the dispreferred disambiguation. Chinese-to-English priming in comprehension occurred without lexical and word-order equivalence between primes and targets. In addition, translation-equivalent verbs did not boost cross-linguistic structural priming. The findings support an account under which bilingual sentence processing involves abstract, unordered syntactic representations that are integrated between languages.

The article summarizes results from a study investigating the role of aptitude on initial learning of Latin morphosyntax. The study includes two different computerized conditions: with or without metalinguistic information, provided during input-based practice with right/wrong feedback. Four aptitude measures were included: linguistic analytic ability, rote memory, working memory, and phonological short-term memory. The results revealed that linguistic analytic ability gave learners an advantage under the metalinguistic information condition when processing sentences for meaning, although only working memory (and rote memory to a lesser extent) had a role in development of grammatical sensitivity to the form. In contrast, except rote memory in immediate aural interpretation, none of the aptitude measures predicted learning under the nonmetalinguistic information condition.

This paper examines the extent to which second language (L2) speakers of French acquire the semantic and pragmatic (or interpretive) properties associated with the c'est-cleft, specifically the exhaustive inference. This phenomenon is relevant to theories of language acquisition because it is situated at the interface of syntax and pragmatics. The results from a forced-choice task challenge the empirical adequacy of the interface hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012; Sorace & Filiaci, 2006), which claims that external interfaces between a linguistic module and a cognitive module remain problematic even at the highest levels of L2 acquisition. The results from 40 L2 learners at three proficiency levels reveal development from nontargetlike to nativelike behavior. In particular, the high-proficiency group interprets the c'est-cleft, as well as canonical subject–verb–object sentences and sentences with exclusives (i.e., seul(ement) “only”), in a statistically identical way to the French native speaker control group.

Children have been found to use units such as syllables and morphemes in fine-grained reading processes, before they transition to a coarse-grained, holistic route. Which units they prefer at different stages in reading development is unresolved. The present study compares the use of syllables and morphemes. Second graders, fourth graders, and adults performed a lexical decision task on multimorphemic and monomorphemic words and pseudowords that were visually disrupted either syllable-congruent or syllable-incongruent (i.e., morpheme-congruent in multimorphemic items). Syllables turned out to be the preferred unit of fine-grained processing for second graders, while fourth graders also used morphemes when morphemes were emphasized by the presentation format. Moreover, the study supports the assumption that children rely more on fine-grained processing, while adults have more coarse-grained processing.