One barrier to patients’ compliance in following instructions to take prescription medication is their memory of those instructions. Effective communication can be challenging with older adults, since people can use ineffective strategies to compensate for older adults’ presumed communication difficulties. The purpose of this study was to test whether older adults would benefit from gestures and/or props in hearing explanations of the appropriate use of prescription medication. Participants were 181 adults 65 years or older. They evaluated pharmacy students on their communication. Each participant watched video clips of pharmacy students explaining how to use fictional medications in three conditions: (1) speech only, (2) speech and gestures, and (3) speech and props. Participants were tested on their memory and rated the effectiveness of the communication of each pharmacy student. Participants showed no differences in memory across conditions. These findings do not support the use of gestures and/or props in effective communication with older adults.

This study tested whether native Chinese (L1) readers whose second language (L2) was English could activate L2 translations of L1 words during L1 sentence reading. Chinese–English bilinguals read Chinese sentences silently, each containing a target word whose parafoveal preview was manipulated. To test cross-language semantic activation, each target word was paired with an identical, an unrelated and a translation-related preview that shared an L2 translation (e.g., 政黨, party as a political group) with the target word (e.g., 派對, party as a social gathering). Compared to the unrelated previews, the translation-related previews induced shorter target-word viewing times, despite no phonological/orthographic overlap. Furthermore, the highly proficient L2 readers showed earlier priming effects than did the average readers. Our results suggest that bilinguals activate lexical representations in both languages automatically and non-selectively, even when the task requires activation of one language only, and that the L2 lexical activation is modulated by L2 proficiency.

Language-switching sometimes causes delayed responses, especially when switching from the later-acquired languages (here, L2) to the dominant native language (L1). It is well-established that language proficiency plays a role in production, but what about language context (i.e., the ratio of L1 and L2)? We investigated language context within two language production processes: “top-down” (naming pictures) and “bottom-up” (reading words aloud). We suggest that switch cost asymmetry was not only affected by language context, but also by production modality. In picture naming, the degree of inhibition relies largely on the activation level of the predominant language in the language context, whereby affects the asymmetry. However, the asymmetry disappears when language processing only requires reading aloud words with orthographically unique and constrained to one language. We provide evidence with dynamics of inhibition in different language contexts, suggesting that future study should continue to explore the flexibility of production processes in bilingual speakers.

The questions of whether first language (L1) speakers and second language (L2) learners can both predict what follows based on given linguistic cues and what factors may influence this predictive processing are still underexplored. Prior research has focused on the success or failure of predictions in real-time processing, paying relatively less attention to the speed of prediction. This study addresses these gaps by investigating the role of word co-occurrence frequency and proficiency in L1 and L2 predictive processing, using the Korean classifier system. In a webcam-based visual-world eye-tracking experiment, both L1-Korean speakers and L2-Korean learners showed sound predictive processing, with the frequency of co-occurrence between classifiers and nouns playing a crucial role. Higher co-occurrence frequency expedited predictive processing for L1-Korean speakers and boosted the ability to make online predictions for L2-Korean learners. The study also revealed a proficiency effect, where more advanced L2-Korean learners made predictions regardless of co-occurrence frequency, unlike their less advanced counterparts. Our findings suggest that predictive mechanisms in L1 and L2 operate in a qualitatively similar way. In addition, the use of webcam eye-tracking is expected to create a more inclusive and equitable research environment for (applied) psycholinguistics.

It has been established that bilinguals activate both languages even when only one language is being used. However, little is known about how the two languages are co-activated during simultaneous interpreting (SI), a demanding task involving intensive code-switching. This study investigated (1) the effect of task on cross-language co-activation and (2) the time course of co-activations triggered by form and meaning. Thirty-one professional interpreters were recruited to complete a cross-language task (English-to-Chinese SI) and a within-language task (English-to-English shadowing) with their eye movements tracked. Participants heard English passages which contained critical spoken words, each paired with a visual display of four Chinese words. One of the words was a competitor that resembled the translation equivalent of the spoken word in either form or meaning, and the other three were unrelated distractors. We found that participants directed more visual attention to both types of competitors at an early stage in shadowing, while the word-form competitor effect occurred during SI preceded that of the semantic competitor. Our findings support the parallel account of SI processing, with implications provided for the relationship between cross-language interactions and the time lag between input and output during interpreting.

This study aimed to explore the effect of various feedback types on word learning in preschool children, with consideration of the word’s morpho-phonological structure. Sixty-three five-year-old children participated in three sessions of learning artificial words derived from pseudo-roots in Hebrew, with half constructed using established morpho-phonological patterns. Participants received either no feedback, verification feedback, corrective feedback, or verification plus corrective feedback. The training encompassed word identification and production. Accuracy and reaction time (RT) were measured. The results indicated that corrective feedback produced the highest accuracy and fastest RTs. Providing verification feedback led to improved performance compared to no feedback. While words with existing morpho-phonological patterns were learned more efficiently, the positive impact of corrective feedback remained consistent across both word types. These findings offer practical implications for optimizing word learning conditions, highlighting the importance of corrective feedback in word learning, and more broadly, aligning the feedback type to the learning task.

Exposure to multiple languages may support the development of Theory of Mind (ToM) in neurotypical (NT) and autistic children. However, previous research mainly applied group comparisons between monolingual and bilingual children, and the underlying mechanism of the observed difference remains unclear. The present study, therefore, sheds light on the effect of bilingualism on ToM in both NT and autistic children by measuring language experiences with a continuous operationalization. We measure ToM with a behavioral, linguistically simple tablet-based task, allowing inclusive assessment in autistic children. Analyses revealed no difference between monolingual and bilingual NT and autistic children. However, more balanced exposure to different languages within contexts positively predicted first-order false belief understanding in NT children but not autistic children. Mediation analysis showed that the impact in NT children was a direct effect and not mediated via other cognitive skills.

Recent research has shown that 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with -s, like babs, that are embedded in passages, with just the stem bab, demonstrating an early sensitivity to morphological relatedness. This study builds on these findings by investigating the role of allomorphy in early morphological acquisition. We tested whether infants relate novel words suffixed with [-z] and [-s] allomorphs of the -s suffix and their stems. We find that English-learning 6-month-olds relate novel words suffixed with the [-z], but not [-s], allomorph with stems, providing evidence for an acquisition trajectory where infants discover morphemes one allomorph at a time.

Recent studies showed contradictory results with regard to the implementation of proactive language control during bilingual sentence production. To add novel evidence to this debate, the current study investigated the blocked language order effect, a measure of proactive language control that has previously only been examined in single-word production. More specifically, bilingual participants completed a network description task, using their L1 in Blocks 1 and 3 and their L2 in Block 2. Results showed increased language intrusions in Block 3 compared to Block 1. This pattern indicates that proactive language control can be implemented during bilingual sentence production.

Early language development has rarely been studied in hearing children with deaf parents who are exposed to both a spoken and a signed language (bimodal bilinguals). This study presents longitudinal data of early communication and vocabulary development in a group of 31 hearing infants exposed to British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English, at 6 months, 15 months, 24 months and 7 years, in comparison with monolinguals (exposed to English) and unimodal bilinguals (exposed to two spoken languages). No differences were observed in early communication or vocabulary development between bimodal bilinguals and monolinguals, but greater early communicative skills in infancy were found in bimodal bilinguals compared to unimodal bilinguals. Within the bimodal bilingual group, BSL and English vocabulary sizes were positively related. These data provide a healthy picture of early language acquisition in those learning a spoken and signed language simultaneously from birth.

Word age of acquisition (AoA) influences many aspects of language processing, including reading. However, reading studies of word AoA effects have almost exclusively focused on monolingual young adults, leaving their influence in other age and language groups little understood. Here, we investigated how age (childhood, young adulthood) and language background (monolingual, bilingual) influence word AoA effects during first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) reading. Using eye-tracking, we observed larger L1 word AoA effects in children versus adults (across both language backgrounds). Moreover, we observed larger L2 versus L1 word AoA effects in bilinguals (across both ages), with some evidence of heightened effects in bilingual adults (for late-stage reading only). Taken together, our findings suggest that word AoA exerts a stronger influence on reading during conditions of reduced lexical entrenchment, offering critical insights into how both developing and bilingual readers acquire and maintain word representations across their known languages.

How does the bilingual experience affect online processing? The distribution of lexical items shared between monolinguals and bilinguals can differ greatly. One critical difference is how code-switching allows more variability in the relative co-occurrence of words. The current study uses a visual world paradigm to test whether the relative distribution between Spanish gender-marked determiners (“el,” “la”) and the non-marked English determiner (“the”) predict the Spanish–English bilingual’s ability to predict and/or integrate an incoming noun. While we replicate a previously observed asymmetry among Spanish–English bilinguals between the masculine “el” and feminine “la,” our cluster permutation test results reveal differences in how bilinguals predict and integrate nouns when preceded by “el” versus “la” or “the.” Comparing our results to existing corpus data, we argue that bilinguals rely on the distributional norms they experience across both single-language and code-switched contexts to facilitate online processing.

We present a simulation study based on a cognitive architecture that unifies various early language acquisition phenomena in laboratory and naturalistic settings. The model adaptively learns procedures through trial-and-error using general-purpose operators, guided by learned contextual associations to optimise future performance. For laboratory-based studies, simulated preferential focusing explains the delayed behavioural onset of statistical learning and the possible age-related decrease in algebraic processing. These findings suggest a link to continuous, implicit learning rather than explicit strategy acquisition. Moreover, procedures are not static but can evolve over time, and multiple plausible procedures may emerge for a given task. Besides, the same model provides a proof-of-concept for word-level phonological learning from naturalistic infant-directed speech, demonstrating how age-related processing efficiency may influence learning trajectories implicated in typical and atypical early language development. Furthermore, the artile discusses the broader implications for modelling other aspects of real-world language acquisition.