The present experimental studies shed light on effects of implicit prosodic cues on anaphora resolution as well as on how these differ both within and between L1 and L2 speaker groups. In two self-paced reading studies, L1 and L2 participants read poem-like texts that contained anaphoric ambiguity. These stimuli were designed to include a rhyming scheme and meter that were either regular or disrupted. We expected a rhyme cue on a nonsubject pronoun antecedent (in the regularly metered and rhyming version of the texts) to induce competition effects in L1 speakers and cause them to adapt their interpretative preferences and processing strategies; yet, for L2 speakers we hypothesized that effects would either not be observed or that they would be attenuated. Additionally, we examined whether comprehender-dependent factors would modulate effects in each group. We tested both L1 and L2 participants on memory-related tasks. We also measured L1 speakers’ print exposure and L2ers’ proficiency in English. Results revealed L1–L2 dissimilarities in interpretative preferences and reading behavior, as L2 speakers were not equally sensitive to the prosodic cues introduced. The examination of memory-related measures provided evidence of within-group differences and between-group parallels: higher working memory in both groups modulated anaphora resolution, although for L2 speakers there was no additional influence of context.

How do children with developmental dyslexia process unattested or ill-formed phonological sequences in their native language? This question warrants attention because these children are primarily characterized by a phonological deficit. In this study, we support the hypothesis that intact phonological grammar allows segmenting and recognizing (pseudo)words through sensitivity to sonority markedness constraints. We administered a lexical decision task in silent reading to 21 French children with developmental dyslexia, comparing them with 21 chronological age-matched and 21 reading level-matched peers. Children were presented with words and pseudowords that either respected or transgressed syllable boundaries (⟨ar*gent⟩, money vs. ⟨a*rgent⟩ vs. ⟨arg*ent⟩). For pseudowords, we manipulated the sonority profiles of unattested intervocalic ⟨C1C2⟩ clusters from unmarked, well-formed (⟨rj⟩ in ⟨yrjyde⟩; high-fall) to marked, ill-formed clusters (⟨vl⟩ in ⟨uvlyde⟩; high-rise). Results confirmed preferences for syllable segmentation in words (⟨ar*gent⟩ is preferred to ⟨a*rgent⟩ or ⟨arg*ent⟩) regardless of distributional properties. We found a sonority projection effect that illustrated a gradient-based preference for sonority markedness constraints with pseudowords. However, pseudowords conforming to expected sonority-based segmentation (⟨yr*jyde⟩ or ⟨u*vlyde⟩) were more difficult to reject, possibly due to interferences from lexical attestedness. We discuss a phonological deficit that does not stem from degraded language-specific or universal phonological representations.

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.

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 present study delves into the structure and lexical organization of L1 and L2 mental lexicons. Indirect access to the mental lexicon is provided by semantic fluency tasks, which inform researchers about how the words are organized in the mental lexicon and retrieved when necessary. Here, two groups of participants were asked to retrieve as many words of the category fruits and vegetables as possible in two minutes. The first group is made up of native speakers of Spanish who responded in Spanish L1, whereas the second group is made up of native speakers of Greek who are learning Spanish foreign language (SFL) who responded first in Spanish FL and later in Greek L1. The three sets of responses were scrutinized and compared for similarities and differences. Results point to a retrieval mechanism based on L1-mediated access for SFL learners and slightly different structures of the mental lexicon. Even in very advanced learners, lexical organization and word retrieval in the FL resembles L1 organization.

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.”

Mental state verbs (MSVs) describe people’s knowledge, thoughts, feelings and desires, and develop through early childhood. This study used a cross-sectional design and a parental questionnaire to describe the developmental process of MSV use by exploring different trajectories of semantic categories within MSVs. One-hundred-fourteen typically developing, Hebrew-speaking children, ages 1;6–10;0 participated in the study. Their parents completed a questionnaire developed for the current study, which contains MSVs from five semantic categories: desire, emotion, cognition, perception, and psychological, plus physical verbs as a control category. Among them, 58 children (ages 3;2–10;0 years) participated in a narrative task that prompted production of MSVs. Results showed scores increased with age from early childhood to elementary school, demonstrating prolonged development of using MSVs. A minor advantage for girls was found in the younger ages compared with boys. Both, boys and girls had different developmental trajectories for physical, physiological, and desire verbs compared with cognition and emotion verbs. The correlation found between the questionnaire scores and the narrative task supports the validity of the questionnaire for assessing MSV use in children. The results are explained by the complex syntactic structure and abstract meaning of MSVs.

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.

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.

While universal linguistic theories advocate linear processing of words across languages, psycholinguistic research of Semitic templatic words supports the nonlinear processing into the root and template, mainly due to semantic specifications related to the root and the morphological awareness needed in the tasks. The present study examined whether the root and template affect the word processing of Hebrew native speakers due to metalinguistic awareness regardless of semantics. We designed an auditory rhyme judgment task, a phonological awareness test that requires linear processing and reduces semantics. The task included Hebrew CVCVC templatic word pairs comprising varying root and template phonemes, transposed-phoneme roots emphasizing phonological cooccurrence restrictions, and identical phoneme roots accentuating lexical-syntactic information pronounced in the vocalic melody templates. Findings revealed low accuracy rates in rhyming pairs, particularly those with accentuated linguistic information, indicating distraction from linear processing. However, the accuracy distributions among participants and between and within the stimulus types showed that linear processing also occurred. These results suggest that both linear and nonlinear processing modes are accessible to native Hebrew speakers. The study aligns with models of the mental lexicon proposing dynamic language processing influenced by both linguistic and non-linguistic factors, highlighting the idiosyncratic nature of word processing strategies.

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 task of interpreting requires managing multiple tasks simultaneously, but how this practice of multitasking may contribute to the nonverbal domain of executive functioning has been explored in only a few studies, and little is known about the Event-related Potentials (ERP) neural correlates of this potential advantage. To fill this gap, we conducted an ERP study asking consecutive interpreting students and bilingual controls to perform a psychological refractory period (PRP) dual-task, comprising an auditory (Task 1) and a visual (Task 2) discrimination task. They were performed separately or together, the performance differences between which, i.e., dual-task costs, served as indices of coordination. Smaller costs for interpreting students in either or both tasks are considered an interpreter advantage in coordination, and those confined to Task 2 further indicate an advantage in bottleneck switching. The latter was exactly observed in stimulus-locked lateralized readiness potential (LRP) onset latency, suggesting such an advantage was probably due to efficient switching from the response selection of one task to that of the other at the bottleneck stage of dual-task processing. Smaller dual-task costs of stimulus-locked LRP onset latency thus constitute the neural correlates of the interpreter advantage in coordination.

It is believed that the attentional engagement of language learners may reinforce deeper neuronal processing and promote later retrieval. To address language learners’ needs and facilitate language learning, we used audio-visual entertainment (AVE) and cranio-electro stimulation (CES), in addition to multisensory-based instruction, to modify attention and retention processes. Thus, we taught a set of words with the common procedure of audio-visual instruction to 32 English language learners in the control group, CES, and AVE sessions. However, they received five sensory involvements (i.e., auditory, visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory) for the target words in the multisensory session. Following each instruction, a pragmatic-Stroop task and a true/false test were conducted to examine the subjects’ attention and retention processes, respectively. Analyzing the response times acquired from the pragmatic-Stroop task, it was found that multisensory-based instruction led to quicker responses in comparison to the audio-visual method preceded by AVE and CES stimulations. The response accuracy results from the retention test also revealed that the subjects provided more accurate responses to the words taught during the multisensory session. The implication is that the enriched multisensory inputs can improve L2 learners’ mental agility and facilitate successful retention and retrieval of information after a short interval period.

Chinese characters hold great potential to help inform and enrich psycholinguistic research on lexical ambiguity as a large portion of them are ambiguous in nature with meaning varying from context to context. This report presents a psycholinguistic database that contains over 2000 characters with normative measures for meaning dominance and meaning balance, that is, the relative frequency of each meaning associated with a target character and the degree of balance across the meanings of the character. The measurement process takes advantage of the fact that, in Chinese, generating words containing a target character is the most convenient way to specify and disambiguate character meanings. Character meanings stored in ordinary people’s mental lexicon are identified based on the words, along with a small portion of meaning descriptions, listed by over 900 native speakers. The measures of meaning dominance and meaning balance for the characters are derived from computing the relative frequencies of the meanings. Potential research and practical applications of the database, as a valuable tool, to enhance our understanding of the acquisition, representation, and processing of ambiguous lexical items are discussed.

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.

Previous L2 studies used binary Truth-Value-Judgment (TVJ) tasks to investigate L1–L2 differences in scalar implicature derivation (some X implicates some but not all X). They examined participants’ judgments of sentences with weak scalar expressions (“Timothy ate some of the pretzels”) when stronger ones are true (“Timothy ate all of the pretzels”). Some studies indicate adult L2 learners are less likely than L1 users to accept such statements while others found the opposite, concluding that implicature derivation is “costly” for L2 learners, rendering them less pragmatically competent than L1 users. Importantly, related L1 research suggests that TVJ tasks only capture sensitivity to under-informativeness. This sensitivity might be completely overridden by metalinguistic attitudes in binary tasks, whereas graded tasks reveal nuanced judgment patterns. Exploring L2 response behaviors, we tested English L1 speakers and competent German L2 English learners using binary and graded tasks. In both tasks, we found evidence of pragmatic responding with no evidence of differences between groups. Bayes factor analyses of the graded data favored H0 over the hypotheses that L2 learners provide fewer or more rejections to under-informative input than L1 learners. We explore implications for L2 learners’ pragmatic abilities, differences with previous studies, and the role of TVJ tasks in under-informative contexts.

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.

Encountering new words multiple times in the input is crucial for incidental vocabulary acquisition. While there is extensive research exploring the impact of word frequency on both learning and processing of novel vocabulary during reading, there is a notable gap in studies examining how contextual factors impact these processes, especially when reading texts, rather than short sentences. The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring the effect of contextual diversity or sameness on adult L2 English learners’ processing and incidental learning of novel lexical items through repeated reading of complete texts. Participants (N = 42) read one short story three times as well as three different stories, while their eye movements were recorded. Each contextual condition (Same vs. Different) contained ten pseudowords, repeated six times across the treatment. Participants were tested on both immediate and delayed vocabulary learning via form and meaning recognition tests. Our results indicate that repeated readings of the same text led to faster processing as well as better short-term learning of novel vocabulary, although this advantage was not retained for long-term learning. In contrast, initial encoding and lexical integration took longer in the Different condition, although this was not reflected in higher vocabulary gains either in the short- or the long term.

To determine the semantic importance of certain features has been a topic of interest for many semantic memory models. Diverse measures have been proposed in the last years. Semantic significance, the latest measure proposed by Montefinese and colleagues, is both sophisticated and comprehensive. Given the cultural and linguistic variability of semantic measures, this study presents values of significance and relative weight for the Spanish-speaking population corresponding to 400 concrete concepts. First, we presented data for both young and older adults. Second, we assessed the effect of significance on response times in two speeded feature verification tasks. Third, we compared significance values with the existing Italian significance norms. To evaluate the effect of significance to predict response times, two speeded verification tasks (Experiment 1 and 2) were carried out, selecting a total of a 130 concepts for analysis. In Experiment 1, subjects were presented with a feature followed by a concept, while in Experiment 2, the order of stimulus presentation was reversed (i.e., the concept was presented before the feature). An independent linear mixed model showed that significance was a good predictor of response latencies in Experiments 1 and 2. Moreover, results revealed a strong positive correlation between the Spanish and Italian significance values. Findings are discussed in terms of recent theories of semantic cognition.