Emotional prototypicality (EmoPro) refers to the degree of emotional representativeness of a word and influences emotional content extraction at the lexical level. However, its effect on more complex semantic structures, such as sentences, remains unclear. This study employed eye-tracking to examine the EmoPro effect during Chinese sentence reading. EmoPro (high vs. low) was manipulated in two experiments, with sentences containing either a positive or negative valence target word. The lexical frequency of these target words was also manipulated to assess its influence on emotional semantics activation during reading. The results show that high EmoPro words consistently evoke greater engagement during both early and late word processing, demonstrating a significant advantage in emotional information retrieval. Word frequency influenced this processing advantage differently for words with a positive or negative valence. For positive valence, high-frequency words facilitated emotional extraction for high EmoPro words; for negative valence, low-frequency words enhanced their salience, leading to faster emotional retrieval. These findings provide the first evidence that EmoPro significantly impacts the processing of words in natural reading. The findings also highlight a complex interplay between affective and linguistic information in emotional semantics embodiment, with word frequency playing a pivotal role in shaping its depth during reading.

Research on the associations between refugee children’s socioemotional development and bilingual outcomes is limited, although this population has unique migration experiences that could affect such development. This study examined Syrian refugee children’s socioemotional development, including well-being difficulties and acculturation, 4.5 years after their resettlement in Canada (N = 112; mean age = 11.97). It also investigated how socioemotional development was associated with refugee children’s bilingual outcomes in English and Arabic. The findings suggested that, although the children were developing an integration orientation of acculturation, a large proportion of them reported well-being difficulties. Socioemotional development had both direct and mediated associations with bilingual outcomes: children’s identification with Syrian culture influenced English outcomes positively, and their enjoyment of Arabic language activities influenced Arabic outcomes positively. Children’s enjoyment of Arabic language activities was related to less sibling interaction in English, which, in turn, was negatively associated with English outcomes. Somewhat similarly, identification with Canadian culture was related to less parent interaction in Arabic, which was negatively associated with Arabic outcomes. Well-being difficulties were negatively associated with outcomes in both languages. We conclude that refugee children are faced with unique challenges in their socioemotional development, which in turn influences their bilingual outcomes.

Research on the effects of textually enhanced (TE) subtitles on vocabulary acquisition through audiovisual input has yielded mixed results, primarily focusing on short viewing interventions. This study investigates the impact of TE on vocabulary meaning recall among 22 international students with limited knowledge of L3 Dutch. Participants watched an entire season of a comedy TV series in L2 English, accompanied by L3 Dutch subtitles as it would be broadcast on television. Using a within-subjects design, we assessed learning outcomes for 16 enhanced target words, 16 unenhanced target words, and 16 filler words absent from the subtitles. Two eye-tracking sessions were employed to measure participants’ attention to both enhanced and unenhanced target words during the first and last episodes, addressing the limitations of previous studies that only included a single eye-tracking session and could not capture shifts in processing at pre- and posttest. The findings reveal that TE significantly increases fixations on enhanced words compared to unenhanced ones, with this difference remaining significant over the duration of the intervention, resulting in greater learning gains. Overall, the results highlight the potential of TE to facilitate vocabulary acquisition through subtitled audiovisual input.

In the current study, Hebrew norms were collected for a set of 320 colored realistic pictures. Interestingly, participants were adult speakers of Hebrew as a first-language (L1) or as a second-language (L2, native Arabic speakers). Thus, both L1 and L2 norming were compiled. For each picture, participants typed its name, and then rated its visual complexity, familiarity, and typicality on scales of 1–7. To establish the predictive utility of the norms, we examined timed picture-naming performance on a subset of 135 items of the normed pictures. Two groups of participants with Hebrew as an L1 (native Hebrew speakers) or as an L2 (native Arabic speakers), were asked to name each picture as quickly and accurately as possible and their reaction times (RT) and accuracy were recorded. Results showed that norms collected from L1 speakers significantly predicted L1 participants’ picture naming RT and accuracy while controlling for objective lexical characteristics (frequency and length), validating the usefulness of the norms. Critically, these same norms were inefficient in predicting L2 picture naming performance. However, norms collected from L2 speakers were significant predictors of L2 picture naming performance. The study, therefore, carries important general implications for L2 production research based on picture naming tasks.

Previous work had shown that multilingual preschool children are better at interpreting deictic gestures than their monolingual peers. The present study examines whether this multilingual effect persists beyond preschool age and whether it extends to iconic (i.e., representing the referent) and conventional (i.e., holding an arbitrary meaning) gestures. A total of N = 105 children (aged 3 to 8), varying in their balance of exposure to more than one language since birth, completed a gamified gesture comprehension task. The three gesture types were presented in four communicative conditions, namely (1) alone, with (2) reinforcing or (3) supplementing speech, compared to (4) speech produced alone. Analyses revealed that children with greater balance in their multilingual exposure understood significantly more speechless iconic gestures than children with less balanced multilingual exposure. Findings align with previous work and theoretical frameworks, indicating that multilingual exposure enhances children’s sensitivity to non-verbal communicative cues.

Research has shown that the mental representations evoked by Dutch masculine pronouns, even when intended as generic, can be male-biased (Redl, 2021). Such bias can perpetuate gender inequalities in society (e.g., Stout & Dasgupta, 2011), prompting language users to seek more inclusive alternatives, such as gender-neutral pronouns. This study investigates the effect of Dutch gender-neutral pronouns as generic referential strategies on perceived text quality, and maps familiarity with and attitudes toward Dutch gender-neutral pronouns. The first experiment was conducted among a representative sample of Belgian participants, while the second experiment involved a mixed sample of Belgian and Dutch participants, thus facilitating a comparison between the two varieties of Dutch. The results show that gender-neutral pronouns do not affect text comprehensibility. However, the pronoun combination die-die-diens (subject-object-possessive) may impair text appreciation, even among young, highly educated participants familiar with gender-neutral pronouns. This study documents increasing familiarity with gender-neutral pronouns in Flanders and is the first to map familiarity in the Netherlands. Taking into account attitude measures, hen in subject position has little potential to be accepted, but the combination die-hen-hun does show potential. Additionally, our study suggests that plural forms are a viable gender-inclusive referential strategy for those who seek to avoid masculine generics.

Research on first language acquisition has shown that children initially approach word recognition analytically and gradually shift to holistic processing as their reading experience increases, as evidenced by a reduction and eventual disappearance of the word length effect in word recognition. The present study aimed to investigate visual word recognition strategies among non-native speakers of English, specifically examining whether these speakers recognize words analytically or holistically and whether their first language influences their recognition strategies. The study tested native and non-native speakers of English with Chinese or Latin-script language backgrounds on 160 English words and 160 nonwords, ranging from 4 to 8 letters in length. The results indicated that Chinese ESL speakers exhibited a positive length effect, showing slower response times to longer words, in contrast to native English speakers, who demonstrated a reversed length effect, and to the Latin-script group, who exhibited no significant length effect. These findings suggest that non-native speakers are more likely to adopt an analytic word recognition strategy when the writing systems of their first and second languages differ. Conversely, same-script second language learners appear able to transfer holistic word recognition strategies from their first language to English.

How do sensory experiences shape the words we learn first? Most studies of language have focused on hearing children learning spoken languages, making it challenging to know how sound and language modality might contribute to language learning. This study investigates how perceptual and semantic features influence early vocabulary acquisition in deaf children learning American Sign Language and hearing children learning spoken English. Using vocabulary data from parent-report inventories, we analyzed 214 nouns common to both languages to compare the types of meanings associated with earlier Age of Acquisition. Results revealed that while children in both groups were earlier to acquire words that were more strongly related to the senses, the specific types of sensory meaning varied by language modality. Hearing children learned words with sound-related features earlier than other words, while deaf children learned words with visual and touch-related features earlier. This suggests that the easiest words to learn are words with meanings that children can experience first-hand, which varies based on children’s own sensory access and experience. Studying the diverse ways children acquire language, in this case deaf children, is key to developing language learning theories that reflect all learners.

Speakers adapt their syntactic preferences based on syntactic experience. However, it is not clear what cognitive mechanism underlies such adaptation. While error-based mechanisms suggest that syntactic adaptation depends only on the relative frequency of syntactic structures, memory-based mechanisms suggest that both frequency and recency of syntactic structures matter in syntactic adaptation. To distinguish between these two mechanisms, I manipulated the order of passive and active primes in two syntactic priming experiments, presenting passive primes either before active primes (active-recent condition) or after them (passive-recent condition), while controlling for frequency. The results showed that the magnitude of priming was numerically greater in the passive-recent condition than in the active-recent condition in Experiment 1, and significantly greater in Experiment 2. These results provide novel evidence that syntactic adaptation involves a memory-based mechanism.

This study examined the interaction of different types of crosslinguistic cues in second language (L2) morphosyntactic processing. Our target constructions, Korean morphological causatives, contain morphosyntactic constraints that present interlingual overlap for Japanese speakers when the construction is derived from an intransitive verb, while constituting interlingual contrast when derived from a transitive verb. For Chinese speakers, these constraints only exist in the L2 and thus constitute L2-unique information. In two self-paced reading experiments involving proficiency-matched Japanese- and Chinese-speaking learners of Korean, we found that Japanese speakers successfully detected morphosyntactic errors only in the intransitive-based construction, which shares overlapping constraints with Japanese, but not in the transitive-based construction whose morphosyntactic constraints contrast with the Japanese counterparts. In contrast, Chinese speakers exhibited sensitivity to the violations in both intransitive- and transitive-based constructions. These findings suggest that crosslinguistic competition causes a major problem in L2 sentence processing.

Previous research has demonstrated that predictable words that are not presented linger in memory and lead to false recognition in subsequent memory tests. However, little is known about these effects among second language learners, a population that is known for engaging less in prediction. Here, we used a self-paced reading and word recognition memory test to examine encoding differences and subsequent memory effects in groups of L1 and L2 speakers of German. For initial reading, results showed no group differences in the size of the predictability effect, possibly because group differences in attention allocation during reading masked predictability effects. For recognition memory, L2 learners showed reduced rates of false remembering for predictable words (after correcting for response bias), and they were also less likely to false-alarm to predictable words with high subjective memory confidence, similar to L1 speakers. In addition, L2 learners showed reduced recognition memory for previously presented words. Taken together, these results are consistent with models arguing that lexical-semantic entries are less firmly represented in the L2 lexicon, which in turn lowers pre-activation of predictable referents during L2 sentence processing and leads to the formation of less distinct memory representations for previously encoded information.

Previous research has shown that second language (L2) learners can learn new words incidentally through contextual clues. However, little is known about whether derivational affixes can be learned in a similar manner. Addressing this gap, the current study examined whether English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners could acquire knowledge of English derivational noun suffixes through contextualized reading. Forty Chinese EFL learners participated in the study, completing offline pre-tests and post-tests to assess improvements in three aspects of suffix knowledge. Participants’ eye movements during reading were also recorded to investigate the relationships between online processing of derived words and suffix learning. The offline test results showed that the learners made significant progress in three aspects of suffix knowledge. Multilevel logistic regression analyses further indicated that improvements in accuracy were significantly predicted by eye fixation measures, learners’ L2 proficiency, and language-level factors. Findings indicate that incidental learning while reading can effectively supplement intentional learning, particularly for English affixes that occur less frequently.

In this study, we present data from two experiments investigating the effect of prosodic focus marking on German L1 and L2 speakers’ interpretation of pronouns. Experiment 1 tested L2 speakers’ interpretation of personal and demonstrative subject pronouns. Experiment 2 examined L1 and L2 speakers’ interpretation of unaccented and accented personal subject and object pronouns. The results of experiment 1 reveal that L2 speakers are sensitive to the different functions of the two subject pronouns. However, grammatical role and focus marking influenced referential choice to similar degrees for both pronouns, suggesting that L2 speakers’ weighting of these linguistic factors differs from that of L1 speakers. Experiment 2 showed L1 and L2 speakers to prefer the subject referent for both subject and object pronouns. Referent preference reversal is only observed with the accented subject pronoun in L1 speakers. Ultimately, this study emphasizes the varying levels of sensitivity to grammatical role and information structure observed not only for the different pronoun types but also among different speaker groups.

This study investigated the comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) in Chinese children with and without developmental dyslexia (DD). Twenty-two children with DD, 22 chronological age-matched (CA) children, and 22 younger reading-level-matched (RL) children completed an RC comprehension task (measuring both accuracy and response latency), a receptive vocabulary task, and a working memory task. Results show that all three groups comprehended subject RCs more accurately than object RCs, supporting featural Relativized Minimality’s prediction that structural intervention (i.e., syntactic configurations where an intervening element blocks dependency formation) is a crucial factor in children’s RC comprehension. The DD group performed less accurately and more slowly on both structures compared to the CA group, but performed similarly to the RL group. Dyslexic children’s receptive vocabulary knowledge was associated with higher accuracy and shorter response latencies in RC comprehension, and their phonological short-term memory was specifically linked to faster RC processing. These findings confirm the existence of syntactic difficulties in dyslexia and suggest that these difficulties may stem from limited vocabulary knowledge and phonological short-term memory deficits.

While speakers are theorized to ideally not include unnecessary information (redundancy) in their utterances, in reality, they often do so. One potential reason is that linguistic redundancy facilitates language communication, especially when the addressee (interlocutor) is linguistically less competent (e.g., an artificial system). In three experiments, we examined whether linguistic redundancy may arise as a result of people’s tendency to use similar linguistic features as their interlocutor does during communication (i.e., linguistic alignment) and whether redundancy alignment (if any) differs with a human interlocutor versus a computer interlocutor. We also examined whether redundancy alignment is affected by the perceived competency of the interlocutor, participants’ abilities in theory of mind (ToM), and if redundancy alignment varied across time during the experiment. Participants carried out a picture matching and naming task with a human or computer interlocutor who either always or never included redundancies in their utterances. Redundancy alignment was found across all experiments, in that speakers produced more redundancies with a redundant interlocutor compared to a non-redundant one. This alignment was also modulated by the perceived competency of the interlocutor, the time course of the interaction, and ToM abilities, suggesting that redundancy usage is affected by both automatic and strategic mechanisms of linguistic alignment.

Although easier to read than English, French has several inconsistent grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) whose impact on decoding performance has been little studied. In the current pilot study, 27 adult participants were asked to read aloud 60 pseudowords containing the ambiguous adjacent letters “an,” “on,” and “in”; the contextual graphemes “g,” “s,” and “e”; and the final consonants “d,” “p,” “s,” and “t”; as well as 60 matched control pseudowords without these characteristics. Results indicated that the grapheme “e” corresponding to /ə/; the final consonants meant to be silent; the grapheme “s” corresponding to /z/; the graphemes “an,” “on,” and “in” corresponding to/ɑ̃/, /ɔ̃/, and /ϵ̃/; and the grapheme “g” corresponding to /ʒ/ gave rise to more unexpected answers than their respective control pseudowords. The unexpected answers seem to be explained by dominant rules partly moderated by the position of the GPC in the pseudowords. These findings highlight that the difficulty of decoding French should not be underestimated and suggest that such GPCs might be the subject of particular educational attention.

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.

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.

The present study was conducted to test the hypothesis that L2 speakers have fuzzy L2 word orthographic representations and this results in lexical confusions. A medium-term priming lexical decision task was used where orthographic neighbors (e.g., clever-clover) were presented as primes and targets. Form facilitation was predicted to be observed for orthographic neighbor, word prime-target pairs in L2 (but not in L1) because an L2 word prime and target with fuzzy orthographic representations would be processed like a repeated word leading to repetition priming. Contrary to our prediction, the present study, where native speakers of American English and proficient Korean learners of English were recruited, found form facilitation both in L1 and L2. However, the modulating role of word frequency and orthographic precision in form priming was found only in L2. This suggests that the form facilitation in L2 was qualitatively different from that in L1. We propose that the form facilitation in L1 occurred because the sublexical orthographic representations of the target and their association with corresponding phonological components were strengthened by the prime whereas form facilitation in L2 occurred due to form confusion caused by obscure boundaries of the orthographic representations of the L2 word prime and target.