Written word recognition in Chinese links the perception of individual characters with whole words. With experience in reading, a high-quality word representation can provide top-down influence on the perception of its constituent characters, thus producing a word superiority effect (WSE). In experiments using the Reicher–Wheeler paradigm, we examined the WSE in two-character words for native Chinese readers (Experiment 1) and low-proficiency adult Chinese learners with Thai (Experiment 2a) and Indonesian (Experiment 2b) as native language backgrounds. For native Chinese readers, the WSE was smaller for high-frequency than low-frequency characters, reflecting rapid access to more frequently experienced characters and a consequent reduction of top-down word-level effects. Learners of Chinese, however, showed a strong WSE for both low-frequency and high-frequency characters, reflecting less well-established character representations combined with word-level knowledge sufficient to support character recognition. The results suggest that native Chinese readers develop strong representations at both the character and the word level, while low-proficiency Chinese learners are more dependent on the word level. We discuss the possibility that a word-level emphasis Chinese foreign language instruction is one reason for this pattern.

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.

The present study examines the relative processing efficiency of two typologically diverse configurations of sentential negation: immediately preverbal NEG and unbounded clause-final NEG. In order to effect a head-to-head comparison, the data are drawn from a bilingual speech community in the Afro-Colombian village of San Basilio de Palenque, in which two lexically cognate languages are in contact, differing principally in the placement of the sentential negator: Spanish (preverbal NEG) and the Afro-Hispanic creole language Palenquero (clause-final NEG). The results of a series of experiments suggest that preverbal negation is quite robust, while processing of clause-final negation is degraded under increased cognitive demands. Contextual and pragmatic cues ameliorate the processing of likely negative utterances, while unbounded clause-final negation is more vulnerable in ambiguous utterances. The contrasting behavior of Spanish and Palenquero negation highlights the possible role of processing mechanisms as contributing to typological differences among languages.

Grammatical error detection and correction are often used to test explicit language knowledge. This study investigated effects of token frequency and error type in error detection, correction, and repetition, and performance on the three tasks were compared and related to models of metalinguistic awareness and development. Thirty Swedish-speaking 10-year-olds with typical language development participated in the study, which focused on four morphosyntactic errors: the infinitive instead of past tense for regular and irregular verbs, and the omission of the obligatory indefinite article in common and neuter gender noun phrases. Target verbs and nouns were of high or low frequency. Results showed significant effects of verb frequency in all tasks, and effects of noun gender for error detection, but not for correction and repetition. Children detected significantly more past-tense errors than they accurately corrected, but the opposite result was seen for noun phrase errors. The patterns of results both within and across tasks imply that implicit language knowledge affects performance, and that lexical frequency, even of familiar words, needs to be controlled when designing tasks for measuring grammatical knowledge. The particular challenge of the Swedish neuter noun phrase in language development and language processing needs to be further investigated.

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether the recognition speed of Finnish nominal base forms varies as a function of their paradigmatic complexity (stem allomorphy) or productivity status. Nikolaev et al. (2014) showed that words with greater stem allomorphy from an unproductive inflectional class are recognized faster than words with lower stem allomorphy from a productive inflectional class. Productivity of an inflectional paradigm correlates with the number of stem allomorphs in languages like Finnish in that unproductive inflectional classes tend to have higher stem allomorphy. We wanted to distinguish which of these two characteristics provides the benefit to speed of recognition found by Nikolaev et al. (2014). The current study involved a lexical decision task comparing three categories of words: unproductive with three or more stem allomorphs, unproductive with two stem allomorphs, and productive with two stem allomorphs. We observed a facilitation effect for word recognition only for unproductive words with three or more stem allomorphs, but not for unproductive words with two allomorphs. This effect was observed particularly in words of low to moderate familiarity. The findings suggest that high stem allomorphy, rather than productivity of the inflectional class, is driving the facilitation effect in word recognition.

An individual’s sense of the extent to which her or his body physically interacts with objects in the environment (body–object interaction; BOI) has been empirically shown to modulate lexical and semantic processing of object names. To allow for further exploration of the nature of those effects, BOI ratings for 750 Spanish nouns were obtained from 178 young adult participants. Statistical analyses showed moderate correlations between BOI indicators and some psycholinguistic indexes, such as word imageability and age of acquisition. In addition, an exploration of lexical associative relationships revealed that high-BOI words have a consistent tendency to be associated with words naming parts of the body. The ratings could be useful to researchers who are interested in manipulating or controlling for the effects of BOI in their language-processing studies. The complete norms are available for free downloading at Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/kd5vf/).

Arabic-speaking students learn to read a transparent maʃku:l script, which provides full vowel information using letters to represent long vowels and phonemic diacritics for short vowels. Gradually, they progress to an opaque ɣayr-maʃku:l script, without diacritics. In this script, internal short vowels can be retrieved using morphological information about word patterns. The current study compared the contribution of phonological information to that of morphological information in the reading acquisition process in Arabic. Four Arabic-speaking groups (2nd, 4th, 6th grades, and adults) read three lists of pseudowords aloud. Two lists included the same morphologically based pseudowords (MPW), one maʃku:l and the second ɣayr-maʃku:l. The third list comprised matched maʃku:l nonwords (NW) with no internal morphological structure. All groups read the ɣayr-maʃku:l MPW list faster than the two other maʃku:l lists, and maʃku:l NWs were read the slowest. There was an age by list type accuracy interaction: while ɣayr-maʃku:l MPWs were read more accurately with increasing age, there were no differences between the student groups with respect to either of the other two lists. However, maʃku:l MPWs were read more accurately than maʃku:l NWs. The findings suggest that from very early on, morphology exceeds phonology, playing a crucial role in supplementing missing vowel information.

Two experiments investigated the effects of case and verb agreement cues on the comprehension and production of which-questions in typically developing German children (aged 7–10) and adults. Our aims were to determine (a) whether they make use of morphosyntactic cues (case marking and verb agreement) for the comprehension of which-questions, (b) how these questions are processed, and (c) whether the presence and position of morphosyntactic cues available for the listener influence the speaker’s production of which-questions. Performance on a picture selection task with eye tracking shows that children with low working memory make less use of morphosyntactic cues than children with high working memory and adults when interpreting object questions. Gaze data of both groups reveal garden-path effects and revisions for object and passive questions, which can be explained by a constraint-based account. Furthermore, children’s difficulties with object questions are related to the type of disambiguation cue. In a question elicitation task with patient-initial items, children overall prefer production of passives, whereas adults’ productions depend on the availability of disambiguation cues for the listener.

Many studies show that it is challenging to encode morphosyntactic information while writing. Spelling plurals is especially demanding in French as these are inaudible. Even by the end of primary school, monolingual French pupils still have difficulties marking plurals of some grammatical categories. We investigate (1) how multilingual pupils learning French as a second written language deal with silent plural markers and (2) the effects of a morphosyntactic training explicitly focussing on grammatical categories and their markers, as well as visualizing the plural agreement. 228 fifth graders were quasi-randomly assigned to an intervention (n = 137) and a control group (n = 91) based on the results of a spelling pre-test. The results of the pre-test show that multilingual learners have similar spelling patterns as French monolinguals. They pluralize nouns more accurately than verbs and perform lowest on adjectives. After the pre-test, both groups were trained over six sessions of 20 minutes. The control group participated in French listening comprehension activities. The post-test shows that the intervention group significantly improved in spelling plurals compared to the control group. A greater focus on morphosyntactic structures is highly effective especially in second language contexts where children might lack broad lexical knowledge.

When people engage in joint activities together, they use dialogue, and more specifically project markers such as yeah, okay, or uh-huh, to coordinate entrances and exits of projects and subprojects. The purpose of the current study was to examine how two features of the dialogue situation, namely, mental load and face visibility, affect project marker production. Pairs of participants performed a collaborative puzzle game together. Mental load was manipulated through time pressure; visibility was manipulated by allowing the participants to see each other’s face during the task, or not. Dialogues were transcribed and coded for project marker production. Project marker production was found to increase under mental load; this also depended on the role of the speaker in the dyad (Director or Matcher) and on face visibility. This sheds light on the idea that dialogue partners may behave more collaboratively when experiencing high levels of mental load, contributing to a better understanding of mental resource allocation in dialogue-based joint activities.

We conducted a web-based study investigating whether the probability of deriving four types of pragmatic inferences depends on the degree to which one has traits associated with the autism spectrum, as measured by the autism spectrum quotient test (Baron-Cohen, Wheelwright, Skinner, Martin, & Clubley, 2001). In line with previous research, we show that, independently of their autism spectrum quotient, participants are likely to derive those pragmatic inferences that can be derived by reasoning solely about alternatives that the speaker could have used. However, if the derivation of the pragmatic inference draws upon more complex counterfactual reasoning about what the speaker could have said, the probability that it is derived decreases significantly with one’s autism quotient. We discuss the consequences for theories of pragmatics in autism and for linguistic theorizing in general.

An experiment and a follow-up study were conducted with Brazilian Portuguese-speaking kindergartners (N =90), mean age 53 months, to examine whether emergent readers benefit more from instruction in orthographic mapping (OM) of phonemes than OM of syllables at the outset of learning to read and write, and whether the addition of articulatory gestures in the OM training of phonemes enhances the benefit. In the experiment, children received instruction in small groups in one of four conditions: OM of phonemes with letters and articulation (OMP+A); OM of phonemes with letters but no articulation (OMP); OM of syllables and their spellings (OMS); and no OM control. Results showed that the OMP+A group outperformed the others in phonemic segmentation, reading, and spelling. On literacy assessments 1.5 years later, only the OMP+A group remembered how to segment words into phonemes. We conclude that despite the greater salience and accessibility of syllables than phonemes in spoken Portuguese, teaching phonemic OM better prepares emergent readers to move into reading and spelling than teaching syllabic OM. Moreover, instruction that includes articulation as well as letters to segment words is especially effective. Results support a graphophonemic connectionist theory of emergent reading and spelling.

When language users predict upcoming speech, they generate pluralistic expectations, weighted by likelihood (Kuperberg & Jaeger, 2016). Many variables influence the prediction of highly likely sentential outcomes, but less is known regarding variables affecting the prediction of less-likely outcomes. Here we explore how English vocabulary size and self-identification as a native speaker (NS) of English modulate adult bi-/multilinguals’ preactivation of less-likely sentential outcomes in two visual-world experiments. Participants heard transitive sentences containing an agent, action, and theme (The pirate chases the ship) while viewing four referents varying in expectancy by relation to the agent and action. In Experiment 1 (N=70), spoken themes referred to highly expected items (e.g., ship). Results indicate lower skill (smaller vocabulary size) and less confident (not identifying as NS) bi-/multilinguals activate less-likely action-related referents more than their higher skill/confidence peers. In Experiment 2 (N=65), themes were one of two less-likely items (The pirate chases the bone/cat). Results approaching significance indicate an opposite but similar size effect: higher skill/confidence listeners activate less-likely action-related (e.g., bone) referents slightly more than lower skill/confidence listeners. Results across experiments suggest higher skill/confidence participants more flexibly modulate their linguistic predictions per the demands of the task, with similar but not identical patterns emerging when bi-/multilinguals are grouped by self-ascribed NS status versus vocabulary size.