Word recognition mechanisms constitute an essential contribution to reading achievement in both deaf and hearing children. Little is known about how children with hearing impairment (HI) manage to read aloud words in the vowelled Arabic transparent script which provides full vowel information. This study aimed to compare word and pseudoword reading accuracy and speed between 32 Lebanese children with HI and 32 younger hearing Lebanese children. The two groups were carefully matched for reading comprehension and oral comprehension levels. Length, word frequency, and lexicality effects were assessed to characterize the functioning of the lexical and sublexical reading procedures. Reading errors were also analyzed to document reading difficulties in transparent Arabic orthography in the sublexical route. The results show significant effects of length, word frequency, and lexicality on reading accuracy and speed in both groups. They also indicate underdeveloped sublexical and lexical routes in children with HI who read less accurately and faster than the younger hearing children. Reading errors are numerous in children with HI. The data are discussed in light of the Dual Route Cascaded model. Suggestions are made about how to improve reading processes in children with HI.

This paper investigates the comprehension of long and short passives in 15 Mandarin preschool children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4;2–5;11 years), 15 Typically Developing Age-matched (TDA) (aged 4;3–5;8 years) children, and 15 Typically Developing Younger (TDY) (aged 3;2–4;3 years) children by using the picture-sentence matching task. The results reveal that children with DLD encounter more difficulty comprehending long passives compared with short passive, that they perform worse on the comprehension task than TDA children and TDY children, and that this population is more likely to commit thematic role reversal errors and point to pictures with the incorrect agent (patient) than typically developing children. Given that Mandarin passives are Topic Structures, we maintain that children with DLD are insensitive to the edge feature of the moved element in long passives, leading to Relativized Minimality effect and causing the asymmetry between the comprehension of long and short passives. These results align well with the Edge Feature Underspecification Hypothesis. Errors found in the children with DLD in the comprehension task point toward impaired syntactic knowledge and the lexical semantic deficit.

Silent pauses are a natural part of speech production and have consequences for speech perception. However, studies have shown mixed results regarding whether listeners process pauses in native and non-native speech similarly or differently. A possible explanation for these mixed results is that perceptual consequences of pauses differ depending on the type of processing that listeners engage in: a focus on the content/meaning of the speech versus style/form of the speech. Thus, the present study examines the effect of silent pauses of listeners’ perception of native and non-native speech in two different tasks: the perceived credibility and the perceived fluency of the speech. Specifically, we ask whether characteristics of silent pauses influence listeners’ perception differently for native versus non-native speech, and whether this pattern differs when listeners are rating the credibility versus the fluency of the speech. We find that while native speakers are rated as more fluent than non-native speakers, there is no evidence that native speakers are rated as more credible. Our findings suggest that the way a non-native accent and disfluency together impact speech perception differs depending on the type of processing that listeners are engaged in when listening to the speech.

Differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) comprehension have been debated. This study explores whether a source of potential L1/L2 differences lies in susceptibility to memory-based interference during dependency formation. Interference effects are known to occur in sentences like The key to the cabinets were rusty, where ungrammaticality results from a number mismatch between the sentence subject and verb. Such sentences are sometimes misperceived as grammatical due to the presence of a number-matching “distractor” (“the cabinets”). Interference has been well-examined in a number agreement. However, whether and how forming thematic relations is susceptible to interference remains underexplored in L1 and L2 language comprehension. In six preregistered experiments, we investigated semantic interference in language comprehension and explored whether potential L1/L2 differences can be attributed to different degrees of susceptibility to interference. The results did not show that L2 speakers are more susceptible to interference than L1 speakers. Also, the observed interference patterns were only partially consistent with existing theories of memory retrieval during comprehension. We discuss how these theories may be reconciled with our findings and argue our results suggest that similar processes are involved in L1 and L2 subject-verb dependency formation.

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.

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).

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.

Most studies on the acquisition of postverbal subjects (VS) in L2 Italian focus on a limited number of linguistic factors that tend to be associated with the production of VS in L1 (e.g., verb class and subject discourse status). Moreover, they analyze homogeneous groups of learners in terms of proficiency, mostly through controlled experiments. In this paper, we present a cross-sectional corpus study based on a multifactorial analysis of the L2 use of VS structures in semi-spontaneous speech. We analyze the production of VSs by learners of different levels of proficiency (A1-C2), considering linguistic factors that trigger the production of VS in L1, but have been unaccounted for in L2 studies (e.g., agentivity of the subject, syntactic configuration of the sentence, contrastive focus). We use a cumulative link mixed model to show how the features of verbs and subjects in VS structures change across proficiency levels. The results indicate learners’ progressive mastery of the mechanisms of assignment of the subject function to the postverbal constituent and increasing sensitivity to contrastive focus as a feature relevant for the use of VS. Furthermore, we observe that psychological verbs associated with the use of VS are produced from the earliest stages of L2 acquisition.

This study used the visual world paradigm to investigate novel word learning in adults from different language backgrounds and the effects of phonology, homophony, and rest on the outcome. We created Mandarin novel words varied by types of phonological contrasts and homophone status. During the experiment, native (n = 34) and non-native speakers (English; n = 30) learned pairs of novel words and were tested twice with a 15-minute break in between, which was spent either resting or gaming. In the post-break test of novel word recognition, an interaction appeared between language backgrounds, phonology, and homophony: non-native speakers performed less accurately than native speakers only on non-homophones learned in pairs with tone contrasts. Eye movement data indicated that non-native speakers’ processing of tones may be more effortful than their processing of segments while learning homophones, as demonstrated by the time course. Interestingly, no significant effects of rest were observed across language groups; yet after gaming, native speakers achieved higher accuracy than non-native speakers. Overall, this study suggests that Mandarin novel word learning can be affected by participants’ language backgrounds and phonological and homophonous features of words. However, the role of short periods of rest in novel word learning requires further investigation.