This study investigates whether L2 learners develop and share an abstract syntactic representation between an L1 and L2 with different word orders and, if so, whether one language’s unique syntactic features affect the shared representation. Korean (SOV) and English (SVO) have equivalent dative alternations; however, because Korean allows word-order scrambling, several dative structures are available in Korean that do not have English counterparts. In this study’s cross-linguistic syntactic priming experiment, intermediate and advanced Korean learners of English described pictures in English after reading various types of Korean dative sentences. The study found evidence of cross-linguistic syntactic priming between Korean and English, regardless of L2 proficiency, but only when prime and target structures shared identical functional assignments, information structures, and order of thematic roles. These results suggest that, within limits created by language-specific features, L2 learners can develop and share abstract representations between two languages with different word orders.

In two semantic priming experiments, this study examined how southern French speakers process the standard French [o] variant in closed syllables in comparison to their own variant [ɔ]. In Experiment 1, southern French speakers showed facilitation in the processing of the associated target word VIOLET whether the word prime mauve was pronounced by a standard French speaker ([mov]) or a southern French speaker ([mɔv]). More importantly, Experiment 1 has also revealed that words of type mauve, which are subject to dialectal variation, behave exactly in the same way as words of type gomme, which are pronounced with [ɔ] by both southern and standard French speakers, and for which we also found no modulation in the magnitude of the priming effect as a function of the dialect of the speaker. Experiment 2 replicated the priming effect found with the standard French variant [mov], and failed to show a priming effect with nonwords such as [mœv] that also differ from the southern French variant [mɔv] by only one phonetic feature. Our study thus provides further evidence for efficient processing of dialectal variants during spoken word recognition, even if these variants are not part of the speaker’s own productions.

Research on multilingual speakers is often compared to monolingual baselines which are commonly treated as if they were homogeneous across speakers. Despite recent research showing that this homogeneity does not hold, these practices reproduce native-speakerism and monolingualism. Heritage language research, which established itself in the past two decades, is no exemption. Focusing on three predefined linguistic groups, namely Turkish speakers which are framed as monolingual in Turkey as well as two heritage bilingually framed groups in Germany and the USA, we ask: (1) Do heritage speakers of Turkish produce more discourse and fluency markers (FMs) than monolingual speakers? (2) Are the groups homogeneous, or is there wide variation between speakers across groups? We focus on the variation between and within groups using Bayesian Linear Regression with a multilevel model for speakers and heritage groups. Our findings confirm that the use of discourse and FMs is largely defined through individual variation, and not through the belonging to a certain speaker group. By focusing on variation across groups rather than between groups, our study design supports the growing body of literature that questions common heritage language research practices of today and shows alternative paths to understanding heritage grammars.

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the better recall of emotional words applies to both native and later-learned languages. In a mixed design, 41 native Finnish speakers, who were substantially less proficient in their later-learned languages, which were English (second language) and Swedish (third language), were shown negative/taboo, positive, and neutral words in the three languages. Their memory for the words was assessed in an unexpected free recall test preceded by a depth of processing task (deep or shallow). The results revealed that an emotion-word advantage was visible for negatively valenced words (negative/taboo) in the native language, Finnish, and the second language, English. However, the nature of the processing task had no significant effect on recall. Additional self-report measures indicated that English was perceived as more emotional and more frequently used than Swedish. These results suggest that the amount and frequency of everyday exposure to a particular language are two critical factors in determining the degree of emotionality of that language for the speaker.

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show heterogeneous language profiles beyond early language delays. Understanding the second language profiles of bilingual children with ASD is important for clinical practice in diverse societies. Accordingly, we examined the narrative abilities of bilinguals with ASD, with developmental language disorder (DLD), and with typical development (TD) to determine which narrative components best differentiate bilinguals with ASD from the other groups. Participants were 29 bilingual children with ASD, DLD, and TD who were matched for age (mean = 6;8), nonverbal intelligence, and receptive vocabulary. Narratives were coded for macrostructure (story grammar (SG) scores, number of individual SG components) and microstructure (syntactic complexity, mean length of utterance, lexical diversity, and story length). The TD group had superior SG scores, included more SG components, and used longer utterances and more complex syntax than the ASD group, whereas no differences were found between the clinical groups. For SG components requiring perspective-taking abilities, the ASD group had worse performance than the TD and DLD groups. Our results suggest that bilingual children with ASD show weaknesses in both macrostructure and microstructure, which can overlap with children with DLD. The linguistic profiles of bilingual children with ASD and DLD are thus both overlapping and distinct.

Listeners are better at remembering voices speaking in familiar languages and accents, and this finding is often dubbed the language-familiarity effect (LFE). A potential mechanism behind the LFE relates to a combination of listeners’ implicit knowledge about lower level phonetic cues and higher level linguistic processes. While previous work has established that listeners’ social expectations influence various aspects of linguistic processing and speech perception, it remains unknown how such expectations might affect talker recognition. To this end, Mandarin-accented English voices and locally accented English voices were used in a talker recognition paradigm in conditions which paired voices with stereotypically congruent names (Mandarin-accented English voice as Chen and locally accented English voice as Connor) and stereotypically incongruent names (vice versa). Across two experiments, listeners showed greater recall for the familiar, local voices than the Mandarin-accented ones, confirming the basic premise of the LFE. Further, incongruent accent/name pairings negatively affected listeners’ performance, although listeners with experience speaking Mandarin were less influenced by the incongruent accent/name pairings. These results indicate that the LFE, while relying largely on listeners’ ability to parse linguistic information, is also affected by nonlinguistic information about a talker’s social identity.

This paper examines various rendering techniques and emphasizes the unique contribution that computer technology offers to transcription. First, the basic manual transcription procedure and its grounds are discussed. Next, three methods of generating transcripts are considered separately: (a) completely manual preparation; (b) a combination of manual and computer procedures; and (c) the on-line processing/monitoring by computer. Finally, the relative advantages and limitations of these techniques are discussed in terms of a trade-off between several factors which include initial investment in equipment, person hours, cost of copying and modifying transcripts, and reduction of errors in transcribing data.

This article presents a new method that can compare lexical priming (word–word) and sentential priming (sentence–word) directly within a single paradigm. We show that it can be used to address modular theories of word comprehension, which propose that the effects of sentence context occur after lexical access has taken place. Although lexical priming and sentential priming each occur very quickly in time, there should be a brief time window in which the former is present but the latter is absent. Lexical and sentential priming of unambiguous words were evaluated together, in competing and converging combinations, using time windows designed to detect an early stage where lexical priming is observed but sentential priming is not. Related and unrelated word pairs were presented visually, in rapid succession, within auditory sentence contexts that were either compatible or incompatible with the target (the second word in each pair). In lexical decision, the additive effects of lexical priming and sentential priming were present under all temporal conditions, although the latter was always substantially larger. In cross-modal naming, sentential priming was present in all temporal conditions; lexical priming was more fragile, interacting with timing and sentential congruence. No evidence was found for a stage in which lexical priming is present but sentential priming is absent – a finding that is difficult to reconcile with two-stage models of lexical versus sentential priming. We conclude that sentential context operates very early in the process of word recognition, and that it can interact with lexical priming at the earliest time window.

This study aimed to investigate how Japanese learners of English as a foreign language, whose first language does not have obligatory morphological number marking, process conceptual plurality. The targeted structure was reciprocal verbs, which require conceptual plurality to interpret their meanings correctly. The results of a sentence completion task confirmed that participants could use reciprocal verbs reciprocally in English. In a self-paced reading experiment, participants read sentences with reciprocal verbs and those with optionally transitive verbs (e.g., while the king and the queen kissed/left the baby read the book in the bed). There was no reading time delay for reciprocal verbs but a delay for optionally transitive verbs. Therefore, the participants succeeded in processing second language conceptual plurality in the online sentence comprehension task.

Previous studies show that attention plays an important role in second language (L2) phonetic attainment. This study compares the effect of two high variability phonetic training methods (identification (ID) and categorical AX discrimination (DIS)) on specifically targeted sounds and on implicitly exposed but untargeted sounds. Four groups of Spanish/Catalan bilingual learners of English were trained on either a subset of English vowels (/iː ɪ æ ʌ ɜː/) or word-initial and word-final stops. The study also examined if the potential effect of training generalized to new stimuli and persisted two months after training. Results revealed that trainees significantly outperformed the controls in their identification of targeted sounds, and improvement generalized to new stimuli and was maintained after training, showing the efficacy of both training methodologies. However, while all trainees performed similarly with initial stops, ID trainees outperformed DIS trainees in vowel perception. Interestingly, only DIS trainees showed a significant improvement in the perception of untargeted sounds, indicating that this training method (possibly due to the absence of labels and the exposure to two physically present stimuli in each trial) may be more suited to enhance learners’ perception of both targeted and untargeted sounds.

Studies on the processing of non-active (NACT) voice have indicated that passive sentences are more difficult to comprehend and require more time to process. Children with Reading Difficulties (RDs) face problems with sentence comprehension, which are often attributed to phonological processing, working memory, syntactic awareness limitations, or a maturation delay. Using an online self-paced reading task, we investigated the effect of voice morphology and argument structure on sentence processing in 3 groups of participants; 30 children RDs, 28 Age-Matched (AM) controls without RDs, and 28 young Beginning Readers (BRs). Our results suggest that although the RDs and BR groups present similar reading times, their reading patterns differ qualitatively. Beginning Readers experienced greater processing delays when processing NACT structures, suggesting that they have not yet fully grasped the properties of the various NACT verbs. However, the RDs group presents effects not found in the BR group; children with RDs were sensitive to the properties of the different types of NACT verbs showing (a) evidence that the language processor successfully engages in predictions based on the morphosyntactic and lexical characteristics of verbs and (b) preference for default/prototypical readings. These results point toward processing limitations that are greatly affected by syntactic complexity.

Hearing impaired adolescents from three schools were asked to produce sentences expressing simple locative state relations. Subjects varied on three hearing levels, two ages, and the use or nonuse of sign language. All subjects wrote English sentences to describe pictures; signers also described pictures in sign. Data were analyzed using chi-square procedures. Errors of noun reversal and pragmatic focus were apparent in 7% of the signed responses and 15% of the written responses. Errors were produced by subjects at each age and hearing level, and by signers and nonsigners as well. Most errors were produced by profoundly hearing impaired signers attending public day school (as compared to residential school). Implications for instruction and for further research are discussed.

Best practice and descriptive research claim that presuppositions, such as the “too” in “#MeToo,” increase the persuasiveness of arguments. Surprisingly, there is hardly any causal evidence for this claim. Therefore, we tested experimentally if advertisements and political statements with presuppositions are more persuasive than equivalent assertions. In 1999, Sbisà already theorized that “persuasive presuppositions” incidentally urge addressees to extend their (ideological) knowledge to make true the unstated assumptions writers have about what their addressee knows, which leads to greater agreement. Following Sbisà, we hypothesized that the persuasiveness depends on the addressee’s need and willingness to accommodate the presupposed content. In three experiments, we manipulated (a) the presupposition trigger using either the German additive particle auch “too,” the iterative particle wieder “again,” or factive verbs compared to assertive equivalents and (b) the preceding discourse context which supported the presupposition or not. Results show that presuppositions are perceived as more persuasive if they convey discourse-new information, largely irrespective of addressees’ ideological involvement. Also considering eye-tracked reading, we suggest that the integrative cognitive process of presupposition accommodation initiates their persuasive edge. The findings imply that persuasive communication benefits from the use of lexically conveyed presuppositions if they are sufficiently informative to trigger accommodation.

This study explores the metalinguistic abilities of prelingually deaf children aged 4–7, who are users of Signed English, with regard to their explicit segmentation of Signed English sentences into words. Subjects exhibited varying metalinguistic abilities that generally increased with age and that were similar to the developmental pattern found in hearing populations. Based upon performance with respect to four factors (i.e., explicit segmentation, omissions of function words, content words, and inflectional morphemes), subjects were grouped into four classes. In Class 1, sentences or groups of words were not segmented. in Class 2, major constituents of the sentences were segmented. In Class 3, major constituents and some function words were segmented. In Class 4, the entire sentence was segmented. Patterns of omissions found throughout the classes for function words and inflectional morphemes are discussed. Also addressed are implicit segmentation skills found to develop prior to the development of explicit abilities.

Syntactic structures and meaning appear to independently contribute to structural priming within English structural alternations. Japanese uses scrambling of case-marked phrases to create syntactic alternations, and it is not clear how meaning impacts scrambling-based structural choices. To examine this issue, meaning overlap with dative targets was manipulated in two structural priming experiments. In Experiment 1, datives primed dative targets, but structurally similar primes with idiomatic meanings did not prime. In Experiment 2, transitive primes that differed from datives in thematic roles showed as much priming as dative primes. The transitive results demonstrate that scrambling-based alternations in Japanese can be primed from structures that differ in role meaning, but the lack of idiom priming means that these structures may be less independent of meaning than those in other languages.

Data from 996 Italian-speaking children were collected and analyzed to assess whether a movement-based notion of grammatical complexity is adequate to capture the developmental trend of clitics and passives in Italian. A second goal of the study was to address the relationship between working memory and syntactic development, exploring the hypothesis that higher digit span values predict better comprehension of complex matrix sentences. The results confirm the validity of a ranking of grammatical structures based on constituent movement, with both clitics and passives developing in parallel and later than canonical SVO sentences. Working memory also shows an effect on sentence comprehension in general, but standard measures (digit span forward/backward) do not show a selective advantage in handling complex constructions such as clitics and passives.