Trilinguals’ three languages can be activated simultaneously, but the patterns of co-activation in the language network remain unclear. Our study examines language processing and co-activation in trilingual speakers of Russian, Hebrew, and English. Participants completed a visual search eye-tracking experiment in three languages with cross-linguistic competitors from either one or two languages present in the visual display, as well as vocabulary assessments indexing proficiency and a Flanker task indexing cognitive control. When competitors were present from only one non-target language, higher proficiency in the non-target language increased co-activation, while higher proficiency in the target language decreased co-activation or showed no effects. When competitors were present from two non-target languages, higher proficiency decreased co-activation of one competing language and had a variable effect on the second. Decreased co-activation of more-dominant languages and increased co-activation of less-dominant languages was associated with stronger cognitive control. We conclude that trilinguals co-activate languages similarly to bilinguals when competitors from only one language are present but show different patterns when competitors are present from two languages, with individual differences in language proficiency, dominance, and cognitive control shaping levels of co-activation of each language in the trilingual cognitive system.

Children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) often experience difficulties with morphosyntax and discourse processing, which hinder their ability to establish referential coherence. While pronoun resolution has been extensively studied in typically developing (TD) children, little is known about how children with DLD process pronouns in real time, especially in Spanish—a language with rich morphology and flexible word order. This study investigated how Spanish-speaking children with DLD interpret third-person subject pronouns during sentence comprehension, examining their use of semantic and syntactic cues in reference resolution. Across three eye-tracking experiments, we tested children’s reliance on semantic gender cues in overt pronouns (Experiment 1), on syntactic cues such as grammatical role and order of mention in overt pronouns (Experiment 2), and on these same cues in null pronouns (Experiment 3). Participants were 48 Spanish–Catalan bilingual children: 16 with DLD, 16 age-matched TD peers, and 16 younger TD children matched by mean length of utterance. Eye movements during a visual world task were analyzed using growth curve and mixed-effects models. Results showed that children with DLD used semantic gender cues when available and relied on first-mentioned or subject referents when such cues were absent, suggesting compensatory use of structural heuristics in pronoun resolution.

When hearing a label for a visible object, toddlers are also exposed to the visual context surrounding it. Our study investigates the role of the variability of this context during fast mapping in young children. Specifically, we compare word learning in French-learning fourteen- and nineteen-month-olds (N = 41) using visually distinct and identical object pictures in a fast mapping eye-tracking paradigm. The results show a learning effect only in the visually distinct condition. This suggests that toddlers benefit from a variability in visual context during word learning in this crucial developmental period of early lexical acquisition.

Listeners flexibly adapt utterance interpretation based on speaker characteristics, but less is known about how this works in multiparty conversations, particularly for pragmatic inferences like Mutual Exclusivity (MEI) – the tendency to map novel terms onto unnamed referents. MEI may reflect a flexible, speaker-sensitive process or a rigid default. This study tested whether listeners modulate MEI based on speaker-specific referential consistency in multiparty conversations. Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted (Exp 1: N = 32, English; Exp 2: N = 44, Spanish), where participants followed instructions from two speakers. In experimental conditions, one speaker was consistent (reused labels), while the other was inconsistent (sometimes relabeled objects). Control conditions featured two consistent speakers. Results showed robust and early MEI across conditions. No speaker-specific adaptation occurred, but Experiment 1 showed context-general adaptation: exposure to an inconsistent speaker within a conversation reduced MEI overall. Findings suggest that in high-demand communicative contexts, MEI operates as a strong default heuristic, largely resistant to speaker-level inconsistency. Evidence for sensitivity to broader contextual reliability was observed in Experiment 1 but did not replicate in Experiment 2, leaving open whether MEI exhibits limited contextual flexibility or whether the initial finding reflected design-specific factors.

This study investigates how reading proficiency in an orthographically opaque foreign language (L2 English) modulates word recognition and decoding strategies of Italian adolescents with and without developmental dyslexia (DD), whose native language orthography is highly transparent. The size of the visual and phonological units that are processed while reading is modulated by the orthographic depth of the language being read. In the case of early biliterate readers, reading strategies are characterized by cross-linguistic transfer. It is an open question whether this is also the case for late biliterate bilinguals, and whether such cross-linguistic modulations are also discernible in the presence of dyslexia-related impairments, such as phonological and visual attentional span deficits. By means of eye-tracking, this study shows that cross-linguistic interactions in the reading system also emerge in late biliterates, though this effect is limited in individuals with DD.

This study investigates how practice conditions—specifically spacing and contextual variation—affect incidental vocabulary learning during second language reading. While repeated encounters with unfamiliar words support lexical acquisition, it remains unclear how the distribution of exposures and consistency of surrounding contexts modulate this process. Ninety-two Catalan/Spanish bilingual learners of English read texts of approximately 900 words containing 20 pseudowords, which served as novel vocabulary items, under two conditions: three readings of the same text or one reading of three different texts. Each target pseudoword appeared six times across the three readings. Repeated reading was either massed (one session) or spaced over three weekly sessions. Eye movements were recorded to assess online processing of target pseudowords. Results showed that spaced and contextually varied conditions elicited more and longer fixations, indicating increased processing demands. These more difficult conditions were not desirable as they did not facilitate recall or recognition of new vocabulary. Instead, immediate vocabulary gains were greater in the massed condition, which was less cognitively demanding during reading, though these gains declined more sharply. The findings suggest that the effectiveness of practice conditions depends on how well they support processing of previously encountered novel words at an optimal level of difficulty.

Listening ability in second language (L2) assessment is elicited through test methods that often require other abilities, which may introduce construct-irrelevant variance and threaten the validity of the test. While previous research has examined the effects of item presentation and item format on test performance, studies on test-takers’ cognitive processing remain exploratory. This study investigates the effects of two test method variables, item presentation (operationalized as while-listening performance [WLP] vs. post-listening performance [PLP]) and item format (operationalized as multiple-choice questions [MCQs] vs. open-ended questions [OEQs]), on test-takers’ cognitive processing, using gaze behaviors as real-time indicators. A Graeco-Latin square design was employed to administer four psychometrically validated short-talk listening testlets across the test conditions. Eye-tracking data were collected while controlling for word count and typing speed as covariates. Linear mixed-effects modeling revealed higher total fixation duration, fixation counts, total visit duration, and visit counts in the WLP condition than in the PLP condition. Interaction effects for all four metrics further indicated that these differences were more pronounced for MCQs than for OEQs. Additionally, typing speed and word count contributed to the variance in eye-tracking measures. The findings contribute to our growing understanding of how test methods shape listening processes and offer implications for the design and interpretation of L2 listening assessments.

Cross-language figurative meaning activation in idiom processing has been observed in primed lexical and semantic decision tasks, but not in text reading. To study first-language figurative idiom meaning activation in second-language reading, we created and tested a novel contextual idiom-priming paradigm and conducted an eye-tracking experiment with Chinese–English immersion and non-immersion bilinguals, and English-speaking controls. Three counterbalanced conditions were created: in English texts, the meaning probe was preceded by a close or paraphrased translation of a related Chinese-only idiom, or an unrelated phrase. The processing of the probe was influenced by figurative meanings of Chinese-only idioms for both groups of bilinguals, but not for monolingual controls, evidencing non-selective language processing beyond single words. There was no difference in the patterns of activation between close and paraphrased translations, suggesting that exact lexical overlap may not be necessary for cross-language activation of idioms. Different processing patterns were observed for immersion and non-immersion bilinguals.

Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal relatives: King & Just 1991, King & Kutas 1995, Traxler et al. 2002). In this article, we report the results of two eye-tracking studies of Korean prenominal relative clauses that confirm a processing advantage for subject relatives both with and without supporting context. These results are shown to be compatible with accounts involving the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), phrase-structural complexity (O'Grady 1997), and probabilistic structural disambiguation (Mitchell et al. 1995, Hale 2006), partially compatible with similarity-based interference (Gordon et al. 2001), but incompatible with linear/temporal analyses of filler-gap dependencies (Gibson 1998, 2000, Lewis & Vasishth 2005, Lewis et al. 2006).

It has been argued that lexical access in bilinguals is language nonselective. However, little is known about how the input modality (spoken or written) affects cross-language activation during listening and reading. The current study characterizes the nature of within- and cross-language competition for spoken and written words in adults who are bilingual and biliterate in Spanish and English. Using a recently developed cross-modality version of the Visual World Paradigm, we found that competition differs for spoken and written words. For spoken words, the auditory stimulus unfolds overtime giving an additional boost to within- and cross-language competition. Conversely, written words can be seen at once, and thus, incremental processing is less of a factor, resulting in less competition within a language and no competition across languages. The findings show that word recognition is fundamentally language nonselective but can behave in selective ways depending on the modality of the input and language experience.

Psycholinguistic theories are based on a very small set of unrepresentative languages, so it is as yet unclear how typological variation shapes mechanisms supporting language use. In this article we report the first on-line experimental study of sentence production in an Australian free word order language: Murrinhpatha. Forty-six adult native speakers of Murrinhpatha described a series of unrelated transitive scenes that were manipulated for humanness (±human) in the agent and patient roles while their eye movements were recorded. Speakers produced a large range of word orders, consistent with the language having flexible word order, with variation significantly influenced by agent and patient humanness. An analysis of eye movements showed that Murrinhpatha speakers' first fixation on an event character did not alone determine word order; rather, early in speech planning participants rapidly encoded BOTH event characters and their relationship to each other. That is, they engaged in Relational Encoding, laying down a very early conceptual foundation for the word order they eventually produced. These results support a Weakly Hierarchical account of sentence production and show that speakers of a free word order language encode the relationships between event participants during earlier stages of sentence planning than is typically observed for languages with fixed word orders.

This study explored the effects of repeating a video-lecture-based task on second language (L2) learners’ input processing and the relationship between online processing patterns and lecture comprehension. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three groups. The comparison group (n = 30) performed the task once, whereas the repetition group (n = 30) repeated the same task three times, with each group completing a free-recall test after their last performance. The stimulated-recall participants (n = 15) completed the task once, twice, or three times and described their thought processes during their last task performance. The lecture featured an instructor introducing fundamental concepts of neurobiology with labeled diagrams. Participants’ visual attention to the instructor and diagrams was captured using an eye-tracker. Results revealed an increase in learners’ visual attention to the instructor and a decline in their visual attention to the diagrams across repetitions. Additionally, more visual attention to the instructor was related to lower comprehension.

This study investigates whether metaphors and similes are processed the same way or not. Comparison accounts of metaphor claim that metaphors and similes use the same cognitive mechanisms because metaphors are implicit similes, while Categorization accounts claim that the two figures of speech require different cognitive mechanisms. It is unclear which position has the most support. We address this by introducing the distinction between single and extended metaphors to this debate. Several experiments have shown that a metaphor preceded by another metaphor is read faster than a single metaphor. If similes in extended and non-extended contexts display a similar processing difference, this would support views saying that metaphors and similes are processed the same way. If not, it would be more in line with the view that they are processed differently. Using an eye-tracking reading paradigm, we find that the difference between processing single and extended metaphors does not hold in the case of simile comprehension. This is more compatible with Categorization accounts than with Comparison accounts; if the cognitive mechanism behind metaphor and simile processing is the same, we would expect there to be a comparable processing difference between metaphors and similes in the single and extended conditions.

While previous studies highlight the role that children’s interest in natural categories predicts their learning of new label-object associations in these categories, the long-term implications of such a relationship – the extent to which children’s interest shapes lexical development – remain unclear. The current study examines whether children’s interests in different natural object categories predict their subsequent interest and the number of words children know in those categories 6 months later. Using data from 67 children tested at 18 and 24 months of age, we found that parents’ estimates of interest in natural object categories at 18 months predicted their reports of their child’s interests at 24 months. Parent interest reports at 18 months also predicted the number of words that children are reported to know in that category at 24 months. Taken together, this study documents the longitudinal relationship between children’s interests, parents’ awareness of their children’s interests, and later vocabulary development.

Due to the lack of explicit word boundary markers, L2-Chinese learners have shown some difficulties in Chinese word segmentation. This study aimed to tackle the possible reasons of L2-Chinese learners’ difficulties in word segmentation: L1-biased processing strategy or developing mental representations of Chinese compound words, or both. In an eye-tracking experiment, high-frequency two-character Chinese compound words were used as targets. These compound words were embedded in sentences where their first component characters with prior verbs were manipulated to be either plausible or implausible, while the whole compound words were always plausible. Sentences were presented in character-spaced or word-spaced style. High-proficiency L2-Chinese learners and native Chinese speakers participated. Results revealed non-native-like patterns of L2-Chinese learners: they holistically processed compound words only in the word-spaced condition, while native speakers did so regardless how sentences were presented. The findings indicated that high-proficiency L2-Chinese learners’ difficulty in word segmentation is predominantly caused by their L1-biased processing strategy.

We investigate timing and eye-movement behavior during semantic prediction in L1 and L2 speakers of English using the Visual World Paradigm, additionally exploring speech rate. We differentiate first-stage predictions, considered to be automatic and relatively cost-free, from second-stage predictions, which are non-automatic and more cognitively demanding, with differences between L1 and L2 speakers believed to arise in second-stage predictions. We found no differences in the divergence of looks to the target in first- or second-stage predictions across groups. However, speech rate played an important role. Both L1 and L2 speakers showed similar first-stage predictions at slower speech rates, but L1 speakers showed earlier predictions as the speech rate increased. L2 speakers showed reduced and more variable second-stage predictions, suggesting they were impacted during the more demanding second-stage prediction. This may indicate a wait-and-see strategy to help reduce costs associated with second-stage prediction.