Prior research with adult participants reported a rightward bias in the reading version of the flankers task. Here, we investigated how this bias evolves as a function of reading expertise. We tested two groups of French primary school children from Cycle 2 (grades 1 and 2) and Cycle 3 (grades 4 and 5) and one group of adult participants. In the related flanker conditions, the central target word was flanked by the same word either on the left (park park ####), the right (#### park park), or on both sides (park park park). In the unrelated conditions, the repeated flanker words were replaced by a different unrelated word. In the analysis of standardized reaction times (RTs), there was a three-way interaction between the three groups of participants and the impact of flanker relatedness as a function of the position of the related flankers. This three-way interaction reflected the significantly greater increase in effects of flanker relatedness between Cycle 2 and Cycle 3 for the bilateral flanker and the right flanker conditions compared with the left flanker condition. This suggests that the rightward bias is driven by attentional asymmetries that develop during the process of learning to read.

The dual language development of dual language immersion (DLI) students, although often examined at the domain level (e.g., listening or reading), remains understudied for more specific skills (e.g., word, sentence, or discourse). This study examines the eleven-month progression of oral language skills in a picture description task in two languages (French and English) for early-elementary (Transitional Kindergarten through first grade) DLI students (N = 42). Using Bayesian methods, which estimate parameters using both the data and prior information, we describe French and English growth patterns as measured by learning progressions whose focus is on language features at the word, sentence, and discourse levels. For French oral language, we found evidence of meaningful positive linear growth for all language features, whereas for English oral language, meaningful linear positive growth was only detected for sophistication of topic vocabulary. Overall, coming from a French-speaking household was associated with steeper French oral language trajectories, but coming from an English-only household did not specifically impact English oral language trajectories. In both languages, grade level influenced the trajectories of some—but not all—features. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications, advocating for a language progression approach in instruction and research on bilingualism.

Studies on the role of speech production on learning have found a memory benefit from production labeled the “Production Effect.” While research with adults has generally shown a robust memory advantage for produced words, children show more mixed results, and the advantage is affected by age, cognitive, and linguistic factors. With adults, the Production Effect is not restricted to the immediate context but is also found after a delay. So far, no studies have investigated the effect of delayed recall on the Production Effect with children. Children aged 5 and 6 years old (n = 60) participated in two sessions. Children were trained on familiar words and images, which were heard (Listen) or produced aloud (Say). Children then performed a free recall task. One week later, children repeated the recall task and an additional recognition task. At immediate testing, there was a recency effect on words recalled from the different training conditions and a recall advantage for words produced over words heard; however, this no longer held after a 1-week delay in either the recall or recognition task. Exploratory analysis showed that vocabulary did not predict the Production Effect. Findings indicate that unlike adults, the Production Effect is not as robust in children after a delay.

This study used the visual world paradigm to investigate novel word learning in adults from different language backgrounds and the effects of phonology, homophony, and rest on the outcome. We created Mandarin novel words varied by types of phonological contrasts and homophone status. During the experiment, native (n = 34) and non-native speakers (English; n = 30) learned pairs of novel words and were tested twice with a 15-minute break in between, which was spent either resting or gaming. In the post-break test of novel word recognition, an interaction appeared between language backgrounds, phonology, and homophony: non-native speakers performed less accurately than native speakers only on non-homophones learned in pairs with tone contrasts. Eye movement data indicated that non-native speakers’ processing of tones may be more effortful than their processing of segments while learning homophones, as demonstrated by the time course. Interestingly, no significant effects of rest were observed across language groups; yet after gaming, native speakers achieved higher accuracy than non-native speakers. Overall, this study suggests that Mandarin novel word learning can be affected by participants’ language backgrounds and phonological and homophonous features of words. However, the role of short periods of rest in novel word learning requires further investigation.

Most studies on the acquisition of postverbal subjects (VS) in L2 Italian focus on a limited number of linguistic factors that tend to be associated with the production of VS in L1 (e.g., verb class and subject discourse status). Moreover, they analyze homogeneous groups of learners in terms of proficiency, mostly through controlled experiments. In this paper, we present a cross-sectional corpus study based on a multifactorial analysis of the L2 use of VS structures in semi-spontaneous speech. We analyze the production of VSs by learners of different levels of proficiency (A1-C2), considering linguistic factors that trigger the production of VS in L1, but have been unaccounted for in L2 studies (e.g., agentivity of the subject, syntactic configuration of the sentence, contrastive focus). We use a cumulative link mixed model to show how the features of verbs and subjects in VS structures change across proficiency levels. The results indicate learners’ progressive mastery of the mechanisms of assignment of the subject function to the postverbal constituent and increasing sensitivity to contrastive focus as a feature relevant for the use of VS. Furthermore, we observe that psychological verbs associated with the use of VS are produced from the earliest stages of L2 acquisition.

Grammatical gender form influences readers’ mental gender representations. Previous research demonstrates that the generic masculine form leads to male-biased representations, while some alternative forms lead to female-biased representations. The present research examines the recently introduced glottal stop form in spoken language in German, where a glottal stop (similar to a short pause), meant to represent all gender identities, is inserted before the gender-specific ending. In two experiments (total N = 1188), participants listened to sentences in the glottal stop, the generic masculine, or the generic feminine form and classified whether a second sentence about women or men was a sensible continuation. The generic feminine and the glottal stop led to female biases (fewer errors in sentences about women vs. men) and the generic masculine led to a male bias. The biases were smaller for the glottal stop and the generic masculine than for the generic feminine, indicating that the former two are more readily understood as representing both women and men.

Inverse probability adaptation effects (the finding that encountering a verb in an unexpected structure increases long-term priming for that structure) have been observed in both L1 and L2 speakers. However, participants in these studies all had established representations of the syntactic structures to be primed. It therefore remains an open question whether inverse probability adaptation effects could take place with newly encountered L2 structures. In a pre-registered experiment, we exposed participants (n = 84) to an artificial language with active and passive constructions. Training on Day 1 established expectations for specific co-occurrence patterns between verbs and structures. On Day 2, established patterns were violated for the surprisal group (n = 42), but not for the control group (n = 42). We observed no immediate priming effects from exposure to high-surprisal items. On Day 3, however, we observed an effect of input variation on comprehension of verb meaning in an auditory grammaticality judgment task. The surprisal group showed higher accuracy for passive structures in both tasks, suggesting that experiencing variation during learning had promoted the recognition of optionality in the target language.

Differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) comprehension have been debated. This study explores whether a source of potential L1/L2 differences lies in susceptibility to memory-based interference during dependency formation. Interference effects are known to occur in sentences like The key to the cabinets were rusty, where ungrammaticality results from a number mismatch between the sentence subject and verb. Such sentences are sometimes misperceived as grammatical due to the presence of a number-matching “distractor” (“the cabinets”). Interference has been well-examined in a number agreement. However, whether and how forming thematic relations is susceptible to interference remains underexplored in L1 and L2 language comprehension. In six preregistered experiments, we investigated semantic interference in language comprehension and explored whether potential L1/L2 differences can be attributed to different degrees of susceptibility to interference. The results did not show that L2 speakers are more susceptible to interference than L1 speakers. Also, the observed interference patterns were only partially consistent with existing theories of memory retrieval during comprehension. We discuss how these theories may be reconciled with our findings and argue our results suggest that similar processes are involved in L1 and L2 subject-verb dependency formation.

Silent pauses are a natural part of speech production and have consequences for speech perception. However, studies have shown mixed results regarding whether listeners process pauses in native and non-native speech similarly or differently. A possible explanation for these mixed results is that perceptual consequences of pauses differ depending on the type of processing that listeners engage in: a focus on the content/meaning of the speech versus style/form of the speech. Thus, the present study examines the effect of silent pauses of listeners’ perception of native and non-native speech in two different tasks: the perceived credibility and the perceived fluency of the speech. Specifically, we ask whether characteristics of silent pauses influence listeners’ perception differently for native versus non-native speech, and whether this pattern differs when listeners are rating the credibility versus the fluency of the speech. We find that while native speakers are rated as more fluent than non-native speakers, there is no evidence that native speakers are rated as more credible. Our findings suggest that the way a non-native accent and disfluency together impact speech perception differs depending on the type of processing that listeners are engaged in when listening to the speech.

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.

Children typically produce high-frequency phonotactic sequences, such as the /st/ in “toaster,” more accurately than the lower frequency /mk/ in “tomcat.” This high-frequency advantage can be simulated experimentally with a statistical learning paradigm, and when 4-year-old children are familiarized with many examples of a sequence like /mk/, they generally produce it more accurately than if they are exposed to just a few examples. Here, we sought to expand our understanding of the high-frequency advantage, but surprisingly, we instead uncovered an exception. Twenty-nine children between 4 and 5 years of age completed a phonotactic statistical learning experiment, but they also completed a separate experiment focused on statistical learning of prosodic contours. The order of the experiments was randomized, with the phonotactic statistical learning experiment occurring first for half of the children. For the children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment first, the results were consistent with previous research and a high-frequency advantage. However, children who completed the phonotactic learning experiment second produced low-frequency sequences more accurately than high-frequency sequences. There is little precedent for the latter effect, but studies of multistream statistical learning may provide some context for unpacking and extending the result.

In this conceptual replication of Sparks and Dale ([2023]. The prediction from MLAT to L2 achievement is largely due to MLAT asessment of underlying L1 abilities. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 1–25) utilizing a dataset previously reported by Sparks et al. ([2009]. Long-term relationships among early L1 skills, L2 aptitude, L2 affect, and later L2 proficiency. Applied Psycholinguistics, 30, 725–755.), L1 achievement scores over 1st–5th grades and L2 aptitude scores from the Modern Language Aptitude Test (MLAT) in 9th grade were examined as predictors of L2 achievement for U.S. secondary students completing L2 courses in 9th and 10th grades. The study’s focus was on the uniqueness and efficiency of MLAT with respect to measuring L1 achievement in predicting L2 achievement. All L1 measures and MLAT predicted L2 literacy and language, and L1 measures predicted MLAT scores. Word decoding was the strongest overall L1 predictor, though there was variation across the L2 measures. The unique contribution of MLAT was modest, as the majority of total prediction (77–86%) was due to L1 measures. The efficiency of MLAT in capturing predictive variance from L1 abilities was moderately high (median ∼73%) but variable across the L1 and L2 measures. Findings are generally consistent with those of Sparks and Dale (2023) showing that prediction from MLAT to L2 is largely due to MLAT’s assessment of L1 abilities, even though a substantial amount of L2 prediction-relevant L1 variance is missed by MLAT.

In this study, we compared affective ratings of emotional valence and arousal for 882 Serbian words at three points in time: before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic (2018), during the COVID-19 lockdown (2020), and after the government measures were abandoned (2022). We did not observe a significant change in average valence or arousal ratings across time points. A more detailed look into the data revealed the change in arousal that was different across the valence values. An increase in their linear correlations and a decrease in the nonlinearity of the GAMM smooth demonstrated that, upon the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, emotionally negative words elicited higher arousal ratings, whereas emotionally positive words elicited lower arousal ratings. It revealed that our participants became more sensitive to the negative content and less sensitive to the positive content. Our results add to the findings, which showed that the relationship between emotional valence and arousal is a function of contextual factors, which primarily influence the arousal of words.

Previous studies show that even though monolingual children find subject relatives easier than object relatives, their comprehension of object relatives can be facilitated by morphological cues. Given that in heritage contexts functional morphology is a vulnerable domain, a question that needs to be addressed is whether bilingual children, who are heritage speakers of their L1, will also be able to use morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax. To contribute to this line of research, we focused on monolingual (N = 18; Mean Age: 11.43) and bilingual/first generation (N = 108; Mean Age: 11.98), Syrian Arabic-speaking children in Canada, and examined their ability to use gender morphology in their comprehension of relative clauses, while taking into consideration cognitive, environmental, and age-related variables. To this end, we used two offline sentence-picture matching tasks targeting relative clauses and gender (as encoded in SV agreement and object clitics). Results showed that, like monolingual children, first-generation, Arabic-speaking children living in Canada used morphological cues to comprehend complex syntax in their L1. Furthermore, even though there was an association between comprehension of gender agreement and comprehension of relative clauses, performance in gender agreement was higher than performance in relative clauses, suggesting that challenges with complex syntactic structures are not necessarily an epiphenomenon of a morphological deficit.

This study investigates whether the perceptual salience of grammatical morphemes influences the online processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences during adult first-language (L1) comprehension. In a bidirectional self-paced reading task, adult L1 English participants (N = 44) read sentences with time adjuncts that were in a structural position in which they could attach either to the most recent verb phrase (VP) or to a VP in a higher clause. Consistent with previous findings, the reading times on these sentences indicated processing difficulty when this adjunct allowed only for high attachment. Crucially, this effect was modulated by the perceptual salience of the grammatical morphemes used to indicate time reference in these clauses. Specifically, the processing cost for high attachment was larger when time in the lower clause was indicated by the auxiliary verb will compared to when it was indicated by the relatively less salient past -ed morpheme. These findings were taken to indicate that the influence of perceptual salience extends beyond the acquisition of and sensitivity to grammatical morphemes during L1 and L2 development. Rather, the perceptual salience of these forms also appears to affect online structural processing during adult L1 sentence comprehension.

This study investigated the morphosyntax of adjectival concord in case and number and subject-verb person agreement by monolingual and bilingual speakers of Russian. The main focus of the study is on the potential factors that may trigger divergence between Heritage Language (HL) speakers and those speakers who are dominant in that language, be they monolingual or bilingual. We considered the effects of cross-linguistic influence; limited input (as indexed by Age of Onset of Bilingualism, AOB), and working-memory limitations. An auditory offline grammaticality judgment task was performed by 119 adult participants split into four groups: (1) Monolingual Russian-speaking controls (MonoControl), (2) Immigrant Controls, that is, Russian-Hebrew bilinguals with AOB after the age of 13 (IMMControl); (3) bilinguals with AOB between 5–13 (BL-Late); and (4) bilinguals with AOB before the age of 5 (BL-Early). The latter group represents HL speakers. We did not find effects of cross-linguistic influence or extra memory load; at the same time, the effects of AOB were robust. Additionally, HL speakers (BL-Early group) differed from the other groups in poor performance on adjectival concord, but patterned with the others on person agreement, which indicates that the feature [person] is more robust than other agreement/concord features in HL grammars.

The present study investigates the interplay between proficiency and empathy in the development of second language (L2) prosody by analyzing the perception and processing of intonation in questions and statements in L2 Spanish. A total of 225 adult L2 Spanish learners (L1 English) from the Northeastern United States completed a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) task in which they listened to four utterance types and categorized them as either questions or statements. We used Bayesian multilevel regression and drift diffusion modeling to analyze the 2AFC data as a function of proficiency level and empathy scores for each utterance type. We show that learner response accuracy and sensitivity to intonation are positively correlated with proficiency, and this association is affected by individual empathy levels in both response accuracy and sentence processing. Higher empathic individuals, in comparison with lower empathic individuals, appear to be more sensitive to intonation cues in the process of forming sound-meaning associations, though increased sensitivity does not necessarily imply increased processing speed. The results motivate the inclusion of measures of pragmatic skill, such as empathy, to better account for intonational meaning processing and sentence comprehension in second language acquisition.

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.

Non-native speech is difficult for native listeners to understand. While listeners can learn to understand non-native speech after exposure, it is unclear how to optimize this learning. Experimental subjects transcribed non-native speech and were paid either a flat rate or based on their performance. Participants who were paid based on performance demonstrated improved performance overall and faster learning than participants who were paid a flat rate. These results suggest that exposure alone is not sufficient to optimize learning of non-native speech and that current models of this process must be revised to account for the effects of motivation and incentive.

The present study investigated the differential effects of pitched and unpitched musicianship on tone identification and word learning. We recruited 44 Cantonese-pitched musicians, unpitched musicians, and non-musicians. They completed a Thai tone identification task and seven sessions of Thai tone word learning. In the tone identification task, the pitched musicians outperformed the non-musicians but the unpitched musicians did not. In session 1 of the tone word learning task, the three groups showed similar accuracies. In session 7, the pitched musicians outperformed the non-musicians but the unpitched musicians did not. The results indicate that the musical advantage in tone identification and word learning hinges on pitched musicianship. From a theoretical perspective, these findings support the precision element of the OPERA hypothesis. Broadly, they reflect the need to consider the heterogeneity of musicianship when studying music-to-language transfer. Practically, the findings highlight the potential of pitched music training in enhancing tone word learning proficiency. Furthermore, the choice of musical instrument may matter to music-to-language transfer.