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.

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.

Word recognition mechanisms constitute an essential contribution to reading achievement in both deaf and hearing children. Little is known about how children with hearing impairment (HI) manage to read aloud words in the vowelled Arabic transparent script which provides full vowel information. This study aimed to compare word and pseudoword reading accuracy and speed between 32 Lebanese children with HI and 32 younger hearing Lebanese children. The two groups were carefully matched for reading comprehension and oral comprehension levels. Length, word frequency, and lexicality effects were assessed to characterize the functioning of the lexical and sublexical reading procedures. Reading errors were also analyzed to document reading difficulties in transparent Arabic orthography in the sublexical route. The results show significant effects of length, word frequency, and lexicality on reading accuracy and speed in both groups. They also indicate underdeveloped sublexical and lexical routes in children with HI who read less accurately and faster than the younger hearing children. Reading errors are numerous in children with HI. The data are discussed in light of the Dual Route Cascaded model. Suggestions are made about how to improve reading processes in children with HI.

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.

In the audio-visual Stroop matching task, participants compare one Stroop stimulus dimension (e.g., the color of a written word) to a second stimulus (e.g., a spoken word) and indicate whether these two stimuli match or mismatch. Slower responses on certain trials can be due to conflict which occurs between color representations (semantic conflict) or due to conflict between responses evoked by task comparisons (response conflict). The contribution of these conflicts has been investigated with color word distracters. This is the first study which explores how two types of first- and second-language words affect audio-visual matching. Native French speakers performed a bilingual Stroop matching task with intermixed French (L1) and English (L2) color words (Experiment 1) and color associates (Experiment 2) presented in congruent and incongruent colors simultaneously with spoken French color words. Participants were instructed to indicate whether the spoken word “matches” or “mismatches” the font color, while ignoring written word meaning. Interestingly, the results were similar for the critical “mismatch” trials for both French and English words. The responses were the fastest on trials in which task comparisons activate fewer response alternatives, supporting the assumption of the response conflict account.

This paper investigates the comprehension of long and short passives in 15 Mandarin preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4;2–5;11 years), 15 Typically Developing Age-matched (TDA) (aged 4;3–5;8 years) children, and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) (aged 3;2–4;3 years) children by using the picture-sentence matching task. The results reveal that children with DLD encounter more difficulty comprehending long passives compared with short passive, that they perform worse on the comprehension task than TDA children and TDY children, and that this population is more likely to commit thematic role reversal errors and point to pictures with the incorrect agent (patient) than typically developing children. Given that Mandarin passives are Topic Structures, we maintain that children with DLD are insensitive to the edge feature of the moved element in long passives, leading to Relativized Minimality effect and causing the asymmetry between the comprehension of long and short passives. These results align well with the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis. Errors found in the children with DLD in the comprehension task point toward impaired syntactic knowledge and the lexical semantic deficit.

As children advance through school, derived words become increasingly common in their reading materials. Previous studies have shown that children’s knowledge of derivational morphology develops relatively slowly, but there is more to learn about this development. This study examined differences in knowledge of the form and meaning of suffixes across grade levels (Grades 3, 5, and 8) and different types of derivational suffixes (adjectives and nominals). We assessed 309 English-speaking children on word reading and receptive vocabulary tests and two tasks designed to assess the form (orthographic knowledge) and meaning (semantic knowledge) of 28 derivational suffixes (14 adjectives and 14 nominals). Overall, our findings showed a significant improvement in identifying and understanding derivational suffixes from Grade 3 to Grade 5 and a smaller, but still significant, improvement from Grade 5 to Grade 8. Our findings regarding suffix types were mixed. While written forms of adjectives were identified more accurately than nominals across all grades, this advantage did not extend to the students’ understanding of the meaning of the suffixes. These results highlight the distinction between the identification of suffixes and the understanding of their meaning. We discuss our results in relation to suffix frequency in children’s reading materials.

Second language (L2) anxiety has been proposed to play a causal role in L2 achievement. However, most studies have failed to acknowledge confounding variables that may be relevant to the study of anxiety and L2 achievement or to investigate the causal effect of L2 anxiety using longitudinal data. For these reasons, we investigated the effect of L1 reading achievement, L2 aptitude, and L2 anxiety as covariates on the growth of L2 reading achievement across three time points. We used the latent growth curve model (LGCM) to estimate the growth trajectory of US secondary school students’ L2 reading growth in Spanish (N = 307) over three school years. The findings showed that students’ L1 reading achievement and L2 aptitude strongly and significantly predicted L2 reading achievement growth. However, L2 anxiety did not predict L2 reading achievement growth. Findings suggest that growth in L2 reading achievement depends on the language-related skills used for L1 reading and the language skills that comprise L2 aptitude, but not on anxiety. Similar to past cross-sectional studies, L2 anxiety related only to initial levels of L2 reading achievement, suggesting that anxiety reflects students’ initial experience of L2 reading but not their L2 achievement.

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.

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.

The cognate facilitation effect, a classic example of cross-language interaction in the bilingual lexicon, has mostly been studied in adults. We examined the extent to which such effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s word processing, to what extent these were modulated by language dominance, and to what extent this differed between comprehension and production tasks. Simultaneous bilingual Dutch-Greek children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to Greek-dominant, performed auditory lexical decision and picture-naming tasks in an online experiment. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both tasks but manifested themselves differently. In lexical decision, there was an interaction effect with language dominance in accuracy, while in picture naming there was a main effect in reaction times. These findings suggest that, similar to what has been found for adults, simultaneous bilingual children have an integrated lexicon, in which both languages are interactively connected. Effects may differ as a combined result of factors such as comprehension versus production and individual differences in language dominance. Importantly, despite such differences, our results show that cognate effects emerge across tasks and across a range of individual children’s language dominance, indicating that shared representations within the bilingual lexicon are accessed during both word comprehension and production.

The Uniform Information Density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers communicate by transmitting information close to a constant rate. When choosing between two syntactic variants, it claims that speakers prefer the variant distributing information most evenly, avoiding signal peaks and troughs. If speakers prefer transmitting information uniformly, then comprehenders should also prefer a uniform signal, experiencing difficulty whenever confronted with informational peaks. However, the literature investigating this hypothesis has focused mostly on production, with only a few studies considering comprehension. In this study, we investigate comprehension in two eye-tracking experiments. Participants read sentences of two different lengths, reflecting different degrees of density, containing either a dense structure (a nominal compound, NC) or a structure that spreads the information through more words (a noun followed by a prepositional phrase, PP). Favoring the UID hypothesis, participants gazed longer at text segments following the critical structure when it was an NC than when it was a PP. They also regressed more in sentences containing longer structures. However, the pattern of results was not as clear as expected, potentially reflecting participants’ experience with the denser structure or task differences between production and comprehension. These aspects should be taken into account in future research investigating the UID hypothesis for comprehension.

This study investigated the effects of entrenchment, preemption, verb semantics, and morphophonological constraints in Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ retreat from the overgeneralization errors of English dative alternations. Two groups of Chinese EFL learners rated the acceptability of 66 dative verbs in their well and ill forms. The results demonstrated that Chinese EFL learners were simultaneously sensitive to the multiple cues from entrenchment, preemption, semantic, and morphophonological constraints, indicating that Chinese EFL learners restricted the generalization of the dative alternation by utilizing both the statistical verb-bias information and semantic properties of the dative verbs. Moreover, the sensitivity of Chinese EFL learners to these constraints increases with the improvement of their English proficiency. These results validated the usage-based approaches to second language acquisition and provided an answer to the “Baker’s Paradox.”

Second language (L2) fluency research has suggested that a range of linguistic knowledge and processing speed serve as cognitive fluency (CF) underlying L2 utterance fluency (UF). Building on prior CF-UF link studies, this study explored L2 collocational processing speed and accuracy as underlying CF measures. This study also explored the phrasal frequency effect on the relationship between collocational processing speed and UF to test whether the processing speed of higher-frequency collocations is more strongly related to UF. A total of 108 Japanese university students completed a phrasal acceptability judgment task with adjective–noun collocations pooled from the Academic Collocation List. Speech was elicited in an argumentative speech task, and UF measures were computed based on speed, breakdown, and repair fluency. The results revealed that the collocational processing speed was weakly tied to articulation rate and mid-clause and end-clause silent pause ratio (rho = |.271–.322|), while the collocational processing accuracy was weakly to moderately tied to most UF measures except filled pause ratio (rho = |.281–.368|). The collocation frequency moderated the relationship between the processing speed and UF, suggesting that high-frequency collocations served as a proxy for automaticity in speech production. Implications for CF-UF link research are discussed.

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.

In the present study, we developed affective (valence and arousal) and sensory–motor (concreteness and imageability) norms for 210 English idioms rated by native English speakers (L1) and English second-language speakers (L2). Based on internal consistency analyses, the ratings were found to be highly reliable. Furthermore, we explored various relations within the collected measures (valence, arousal, concreteness, and imageability) and between these measures and some available psycholinguistic norms (familiarity, literal plausibility, and decomposability) for the same set of idioms. The primary findings were that (i) valence and arousal showed the typical U-shape relation, for both L1 and L2 data; (ii) idioms with more negative valence were rated as more arousing; (iii) the majority of idioms were rated as either positive or negative with only 4 being rated as neutral; (iv) familiarity correlated positively with valence and arousal; (v) concreteness and imageability showed a strong positive correlation; and (vi) the ratings of L1 and L2 speakers significantly differed for arousal and concreteness, but not for valence and imageability. We discuss our interpretation of these observations with reference to the literature on figurative language processing (both single words and idioms).

We investigated the retention of surface linguistic information during reading using eye-tracking. Departing from a research tradition that examines differences between meaning retention and verbatim memory, we focused on how different linguistic factors affect the retention of surface linguistic information. We examined three grammatical alternations in German that differed in involvement of changes in morpho-syntax and/or information structure, while their propositional meaning is unaffected: voice (active vs. passive), adverb positioning, different realizations of conditional clauses. Single sentences were presented and repeated, either identical or modified according to the grammatical alternation (with controlled interval between them). Results for native (N = 60) and non-native (N = 58) German participants show longer fixation durations for modified versus unmodified sentences when information structural changes are involved (voice, adverb position). In contrast, mere surface grammatical changes without a functional component (conditional clauses) did not lead to different reading behavior. Sensitivity to the manipulation was not influenced by language (L1, L2) or repetition interval. The study provides novel evidence that linguistic factors affect verbatim retention and highlights the importance of eye-tracking as a sensitive measure of implicit memory.

The manuscript explores the psycholinguistic processes responsible for cross-linguistic influence in translation. In two experimental studies with professional translators-in-training, we investigate the psycholinguistic foundations of shining-through effects in translated texts, i.e., cases where the grammatical structure of a source sentence leaves traces in the translated sentence. Experiment 1 reports the results from a translation task investigating the influence of the grammatical structure of the source sentence on structural choices for its translation. The results showed a significant influence of source sentence structure, which gradually decreased with increasing translation competence scores. In Experiment 2, we investigated to what extent the effect of source structure influence found in Experiment 1 can be accounted for through cross-linguistic structural priming. In a cross-linguistic priming experiment in which the source sentences from Experiment 1 were used as primes, participants showed no evidence of structural priming. A cross-experiment comparison revealed significant source sentence influence in the translation task, but no such effect in the priming task, for matched sets of sentences. Our results cast doubt on the claim that shining-through effects in translation are caused by cross-linguistic structural priming. We suggest an alternative account which instead explains structural cross-linguistic influence in translation through serial lexical co-activation.

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.

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.