This study examines how input mode – whether written or auditory – interacts with orthography in the production of North American English (NAE) schwar (/ɝ/, found in fur, heard, bird) by native Spanish speakers. Greater orthographic interference was predicted for written input, given the obligatory activation of orthographic representations in the execution of the task. Participants were L1 Mexican Spanish/L2 English speakers (L2, n = 15) and NAE (n = 15, rhotic dialect speakers). The target items were 10 schwar words and 10 words matched in graphemes to the onset and nucleus of the schwar words (e.g., bird was matched with big), for a total of 20 items. The degree of overlap between schwar productions across group and input mode (L2 only) was analyzed, followed by a generalized additive mixed model analysis of F3, one of the acoustic cues to rhotacization. Results showed that L2 schwar productions were different from the NAE productions in both the overlap and F3 measures, and the written input mode showed greater L1 orthographic interference than the auditory input mode, supporting the hypothesis that L1 orthography–phonology correspondences affect L2 productions of English schwar words.

The aim of this study was to examine the acquisition and processing of multiple who- and which-questions in Romanian that display ordering constraints and involve exhaustivity. Toward that aim, typically developing Romanian children (mean age 8.3) and adults participated in a self-paced listening experiment that simultaneously investigated online processing and offline comprehension of multiple wh-questions. The study manipulated the type of wh-phrase (who/which) and the order in which these elements appear (subject–object [SO]/object–subject [OS]). The response to the comprehension question could address the issue of exhaustivity because we measured whether participants used an exhaustive or a non-exhaustive response. Our findings reveal that both children and adults slow down when processing who- as compared to which-phrases, but only adults show an online sensitivity to ordering constraints in who-questions. Accuracy is higher with multiple who- than which-questions. The latter pose more difficulties for comprehension, particularly in the OS order. We relate this to intervention effects similar to those proposed for single which-questions. The lack of intervention effects in terms of reaction times indicates that these effects occur at a later stage, after participants have heard the whole sentence and when they interpret its meaning.

This paper examines whether second language (L2)-English learners whose native languages (L1; Korean and Mandarin) lack obligatory plural marking transfer the properties of plural marking from their L1s, and whether transfer is manifested both offline (in a grammaticality judgment task) and online (in a self-paced reading task). The online task tests the predictions of the morphological congruency hypothesis (Jiang 2007), according to which L2 learners have particular difficulty automatically activating the meaning of L2 morphemes that are incongruent with their L1. Experiment 1 tests L2 learners’ sensitivity to errors of –s oversuppliance with mass nouns, while Experiment 2 tests their sensitivity to errors of –s omission with count nouns. The findings show that (a) L2 learners detect errors with nonatomic mass nouns (sunlights) but not atomic ones (furnitures), both offline and online; and (b) L1-Korean L2-English learners are more successful than L1-Mandarin L2-English learners in detecting missing –s with definite plurals (these boat), while the two groups behave similarly with indefinite plurals (many boat). Given that definite plurals require plural marking in Korean but not in Mandarin, the second finding is consistent with L1-transfer. Overall, the findings show that learners are able to overcome morphological incongruency and acquire novel uses of L2 morphemes.

The inhibitory effect of positional syllable frequency is a well-known phenomenon in visual word recognition: words with high-frequency syllables require extra time for deactivating the lexical syllabic neighbors. The inhibitory effect implies that a connection exists between graphemes, phonemes, the first syllable, and the phonological lexicon. However, experimental results of the first developmental stages of occurrence are scarce and inconclusive. A second- and fourth-grade sample of typical school readers participated in a lexical decision task containing high/low frequency words and high/low syllable frequency words. Our primary hypothesis was that the inhibitory effect would be found on both school grade groups. We did not predict significant differences in magnitude of effect between second- and fourth-grade participants. A general inhibitory effect was found, and separate analyses by school grade groups also indicated significant inhibitory effects. Furthermore, second- and fourth-grade children showed small sizes of the inhibitory effect, resembling the sizes found in adult normal readers. Our results suggest that Spanish readers reach a functional connection between syllables and words at an early stage. The straightforward theoretical implication is that the inhibitory effect relies heavily on the structural properties of the lexical access system that are acquired at an early age.

Second language (L2) listening requires efficient processing of continuing incoming information (Vandergrift & Goh, 2012). Even so, research into individual differences in L2 listening has mostly shed light on the role of linguistic knowledge measured without time pressure (e.g., Mecarty, 2000; Wang & Treffers-Daller, 2017; cf. Vafaee & Suzuki, 2020), leaving the role of processing speed and automaticity largely unexplored. To close this gap, we explored the determinants of successful listening using three processing tasks at lexical, syntactic, and propositional levels. Participants were 44 Chinese learners of English. Response accuracy afforded measures of vocabulary size, syntactic parsing skills, and formulation of propositional meaning. Reaction times and the coefficient of variation (Segalowitz & Segalowitz, 1993) afforded processing speed and automaticity measures at each level. We found a hierarchical relationship between different levels of processing, whereby lower-level, lexical effects cascade up and are mediated by propositional comprehension in accounting for listening comprehension. The results highlight the importance of considering processing accuracy and speed at different levels of the linguistic hierarchy to explain variability among L2 listeners. Different from most previous studies, we argue for a need to consider the temporal aspects of processing, along with linguistic knowledge, in modeling L2 listening.

In the vast body of research on language learning, there is still surprisingly little work on the attrition or retention of second/foreign languages, particularly in multilinguals, once learning and/or use of these languages ceases. The present study focuses on foreign language attrition and examines lexical diversity and (dis)fluency in the oral productions of 114 multilingual young adults, first language German speakers who learned English as their first (FL1) and French or Italian as their second foreign language (FL2), shortly before and approximately 16 months after graduation from upper secondary school. The level of foreign language use after graduation was found to have a noticeable impact on the measured change in output quality in the FL2, but only little in the FL1, where participants’ initial proficiency was considerably higher. The amount of use in the FL1 had no visible connection with attrition/maintenance in a rarely used FL2. Those participants who felt their speaking skills in one of their foreign languages had improved were correct in their self-assessment, but the degree to which the remaining subjects felt their speaking skills had deteriorated was not reflected in their productions.

Bilingual children typically perform more poorly than monolingual children on linguistic tasks but better than monolingual children on cognitive tasks requiring executive function. The present study examined performance on complex linguistic tasks that also required executive functioning for their solution. One hundred 4-year-olds from linguistically diverse backgrounds (36 monolinguals, 64 bilinguals) performed two linguistic tasks in which misleading information needed to be ignored to select the correct answer. Data were analyzed both categorically by comparing the performance of children assigned to monolingual and bilingual groups and continuously in terms of degree of bilingual experience across the entire sample. In the categorical analyses, bilingual children were more accurate than monolingual children in understanding the meaning of spoken sentences in the presence of distraction in both tasks, and continuous analyses showed that performance was calibrated to degree of bilingualism in one of the tasks, with higher levels of bilingualism being associated with better performance. The interpretation is that attentional control built up through bilingual experience compensates for lower levels of language proficiency in performing these complex linguistic tasks. The study also endorses the use of continuous assessments of bilingualism rather than categorical assignment to groups to obtain more nuanced results.

Research in sentence processing has increasingly examined the role of individual differences in language comprehension. In work on native and nonnative sentence processing, examining individual differences can contribute crucial insight into theoretical debates about the extent to which nativelike processing is possible in a nonnative language. Despite this increased interest in individual differences, whether commonly used psycholinguistic tasks can reliably measure individual differences between participants has not been systematically examined. As a preliminary examination of this issue in nonnative processing, we report a self-paced reading experiment on garden-path sentences in native and nonnative comprehension. At the group level we replicated previously observed findings in native and nonnative speakers. However, while we found that our self-paced reading experiment was a reliable way of assessing individual differences in overall reading speed and comprehension accuracy, it did not consistently measure individual differences in the size of garden-path effects in our sample (N = 64 native and 64 nonnative participants, and 24 experimental items). These results suggest that before individual differences in sentence processing can be meaningfully assessed, the question of whether commonly used tasks can consistently measure individual differences requires systematic examination.

Second language (L2) researchers have long acknowledged that affective variables (e.g., anxiety, motivation, positive emotions) are essential in understanding L2 learner psychology and behavior, both of which influence communication and have implications for language learning. However, there is little research investigating affective variables during L2 interaction, particularly from a dynamic rather than a static, trait-oriented perspective. Therefore, this study examined 60 L2 English speakers’ affective responses in real time during a paired discussion task using galvanic skin response sensors to capture speakers’ anxiety. Analyses focused on speakers’ speech, their behavioral reactions, and the content of their discussion while experiencing anxiety episodes (high vs. low arousals). Findings revealed that speakers glanced away, blinked, and used self-adaption gestures (touching face, hair-twisting) significantly more frequently during high arousals than low arousals, whereas head nods were found to occur significantly more often during low arousals. In comparison to low arousals, a larger proportion of high arousals occurred while discussing personal topics. Implications are discussed in terms of the role of affective variables in communication processes.

While most English words are multisyllabic, research on literacy acquisition has tended to focus on early acquisition of monosyllabic words. The processes involved in multisyllabic word reading and spelling in middle childhood are likely to differ from those in monosyllabic reading and spelling. The current paper examines the contributions of morphological awareness (MA; awareness of derivational morphemes), prosodic sensitivity (sensitivity to lexical stress), and phonological awareness (PA; awareness of phonemes) for multisyllabic word reading and spelling, after accounting for background variables (age, vocabulary, nonverbal IQ, short-term memory). Seventy 7–10-year-old children completed a battery of tasks. MA and prosodic sensitivity were independent predictors of multisyllabic reading, while MA and PA were independent predictors of multisyllabic spelling. These results contrast with previous research, which instead found that PA plays a more prominent role while prosodic sensitivity appears to demonstrate only an indirect influence. However, those studies largely examined reading of shorter, one to three syllable words. These findings indicate when words are longer and multisyllabic, prosodic sensitivity, PA, and MA have differing direct influences on literacy. MA and prosodic sensitivity relate to word reading, while MA and PA are important for spelling.

Despite the multifactorial space of language experience in which people continuously vary, bilinguals are often dichotomized into ostensibly homogeneous groups. The timing of language exposure (age of acquisition) to a second language (L2) is one well-studied construct that is known to impact language processing, cognitive processing, and brain organization, but recent work shows that current language exposure is also a crucial determinant in these domains. Critically, many indices of bilingual experience are inherently subjective and based on self-report questionnaires. Such measures have been criticized in favor of objective measures of language ability (e.g., naming ability or verbal fluency). Here, we estimate the bilingual experience jointly as a function of multiple continuous aspects of experience, including the timing of language exposure, the amount of L2 exposure across communicative contexts, and language entropy (a flexible measure of language balance) across communicative contexts. The results suggest that current language exposure exhibits distinct but interrelated patterns depending on the socio-experiential context of language usage. They also suggest that, counterintuitively, our sample more accurately self-assesses L2 proficiency than native language proficiency. A precise quantification of the multidimensional nature of bilingualism will enhance the ability of future research to assess language processing, acquisition, and control.

Deaf readers may have larger perceptual spans than ability-matched hearing native English readers, allowing them to read more efficiently (Belanger & Rayner, 2015). To further test the hypothesis that deaf and hearing readers have different perceptual spans, the current study uses eye-movement data from two experiments in which deaf American Sign Language–English bilinguals, hearing native English speakers, and hearing Chinese–English bilinguals read semantically unrelated sentences and answered comprehension questions after a proportion of them. We analyzed skip rates, fixation times, and accuracy on comprehension questions. In addition, we analyzed how lexical properties of words affected skipping behavior and fixation durations. Deaf readers skipped words more often than native English speakers, who skipped words more often than Chinese–English bilinguals. Deaf readers had shorter first-pass fixation times than the other two groups. All groups’ skipping behaviors were affected by lexical frequency. Deaf readers’ comprehension did not differ from hearing Chinese–English bilinguals, despite greater skipping and shorter fixation times. Overall, the eye-tracking findings align with Belanger’s word processing efficiency hypothesis. Effects of lexical frequency on skipping behavior indicated further that eye movements during reading remain under cognitive control in deaf readers.

This study examines the use of discourse-level information to create expectations about reference in real-time processing, testing whether patterns previously observed among native speakers of English generalize to nonnative speakers. Findings from a visual-world eye-tracking experiment show that native (L1; N = 53) but not nonnative (L2; N = 52) listeners’ proactive coreference expectations are modulated by grammatical aspect in transfer-of-possession events. Results from an offline judgment task show these L2 participants did not differ from L1 speakers in their interpretation of aspect marking on transfer-of-possession predicates in English, indicating it is not lack of linguistic knowledge but utilization of this knowledge in real-time processing that distinguishes the groups. English proficiency, although varying substantially within the L2 group, did not modulate L2 listeners’ use of grammatical aspect for reference processing. These findings contribute to the broader endeavor of delineating the role of prediction in human language processing in general, and in the processing of discourse-level information among L2 users in particular.

Previous studies have yielded mixed findings regarding the effect of familiar and novel L2 graphemes on learners’ phonological encoding. The current study investigated this topic by comparing the effect of Pinyin and Chinese characters on English speakers’ Mandarin word learning. Different from previous research, this study examined both segmental and tonal encoding and compared participants from different Mandarin proficiency levels. Seventeen Advanced learners, 29 Intermediate learners, and 21 Naïve English speakers participated in a word-learning experiment in which half of the participants were exposed to the Pinyin spelling of the target words while the other half to characters. After the learning phase, they did a meaning – auditory stimulus matching task. Half of the stimuli were complete matches, while in the other half the stimulus mismatched the target either in segments or tones. The results revealed that at the Advanced level, the Character group was more accurate than the Pinyin group in rejecting tonal mismatches to the target words, while the opposite tendency was observed at the Naïve level. This study suggests that novel graphemes facilitate advanced L2 learners’ tonal encoding more than familiar graphemes, which is probably due to the unique nature of Chinese characters.

Prediction underlies many life’s situations including language. Monolinguals and advanced L2 learners use prosodic cues such as stress and tone in a word’s first syllable to predict the word’s suffix. To determine whether the same findings extend to words with non-morphological endings, we investigate whether Spanish monolinguals and advanced learners of Spanish with and without interpreting experience use stress (stressed, unstressed) and syllabic structure (CV, CVC) in a word’s initial syllable to predict its ending. This is crucial to understand whether associations underlying prediction are morphophonolexical associations or purely phonolexical. Interpreters were included due to their extensive experience predicting incoming speech. Participants completed an eye-tracking study where they listened to a sentence while seeing two words and selected the word they heard. Results revealed that monolinguals and interpreters predicted word endings under all conditions, but non-interpreters only predicted in the CVC oxytone condition. These findings are relevant for (1) prediction accounts, showing that phonolexical associations trigger prediction; (2) phonological models, revealing that stress and syllable information in the initial syllable are key for accessing and predicting meaning; and (3) L2 processing models, indicating that L2 learners with interpreting experience use suprasegmental information to access and predict lexical items similar to monolinguals.

This study examines the variable positioning of a finite adverbial subordinate clause and its main clause with the subordinate clause either preceding or following the main clause in native versus nonnative English. Specifically, we contrast causal, concessive, conditional, and temporal adverbial clauses produced by German and Chinese learners of English with those produced by native speakers. We examined 2,362 attestations from the Chinese and German subsections of the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger, Dagneaux, Meunier, & Paquot, 2009) and from the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (Granger, 1998). All instances were annotated for the ordering, the subordinate clause type, the lengths of the main and subordinate clauses, the first language of the speakers, the conjunction used, and the file it originated from (as a proxy for the speaker producing the sentence so as to be able to study individual and lexical variation). The results of a two-step regression modeling protocol suggest that learners behave most nativelike with causal clauses and struggle most with conditional and concessive clauses; in addition, learners make more non-nativelike choices when the main and subordinate clause are of about equal length.

This paper focuses on the relational notion of prominence, in which entities of equal type are ranked according to certain prominence-lending features. In German two demonstrative forms, “der” and “dieser”, can function like personal pronouns in English. It has been proposed that processing “der” involves computing a prominence hierarchy of the prior referents, and excluding the referent with the highest prominence rank. The demonstrative “dieser” has not been extensively tested. In the current study, personal and demonstrative pronominal forms were investigated following ditransitive contexts, where three potential antecedents are available, in two rating experiments. The personal pronoun showed flexibility in that it received equally high ratings for all three antecedents in canonical configurations. The ratings for dieser followed a graded sensitivity to thematic role prominence, with lowest scores when referring to prominent antecedents (agents) and the highest scores for the least prominent antecedents (patients), with scores for the medium prominence candidate (recipients) differing from both. Der followed a similar but not identical pattern, with a less marked difference between lower prominence candidates. Positional information also has a strong influence on demonstratives. In sum, final interpretation is sensitive to fine-grained differences in prominence hierarchies.

Ongoing debate exists regarding the role of production-based versus comprehension-based training for L2 learning. However, recent research suggests an advantage for production training due to benefits stemming from the opportunity to compare generated output with feedback and from the memory mechanisms associated with language production. Based on recent findings with an artificial language paradigm, we investigated the effects of production-based and comprehension-based training for learning grammatical gender among beginning L2 German learners. Participants received production-based or comprehension-based training on grammatical gender assignment and gender agreement between determiners, adjectives, and 15 German nouns, followed by four tasks targeting the comprehension and production of the target nouns and their corresponding gender marking on determiners and adjectives. Both groups were equally accurate in comprehending and producing the nouns. For tasks requiring knowledge of grammatical gender, the production-based group outperformed the comprehension-based group on both comprehension and production tests. These findings demonstrate the importance of language production for creating robust linguistic representations and have important implications for classroom instruction.

This study reports an oral production experiment investigating the expression of existentiality in the Catalan of adult Catalan–Spanish early bilinguals (N = 58) with comparable proficiencies but different language dominance. The results show qualitative differences among the bilinguals in existential predicate selection and in their supply of partitive pronouns, modulated by language dominance. Balanced Bilinguals as well as Spanish-dominant bilinguals significantly produced more estar (in detriment of ser-hi and haver-hi) not only in locative contexts, where Catalan already presents optionality regulated by semantic differences, but also in existential constructions, where this optionality does not exist. We argue for indirect crosslinguistic influence (CLI), when the bilingual perceives certain structural overlap within constructions, mediating the influence from one structure to another one and expanding the limits of CLI. The qualitative differences found among bilinguals challenge the idea of a bilingualism continuum in Catalan–Spanish bilingualism with an identical mental representation.