Examining how topicality impacts pronoun resolution in second language processing.

In research on second language (L2) processing, the processing of reference has been highlighted as a domain of particular difficulty, but the source of the difficulty is not well understood. The present study examines whether differences in the pronominal systems of the first language (L1) and L2 impact processing. We take a novel approach, testing a group of intermediate-advanced L2 learners in both their L1 (Mandarin Chinese) and L2 (English), allowing us to directly examine whether L2 learners show similar or different patterns when processing the L1 and L2.

Comprehension and processing of the universal quantifier in children, adolescents and adults.

Quantifier spreading (Q-spreading), children's incorrect falsification of a universally-quantified sentence based on an 'extra-object' picture, may persist beyond childhood, and children adhere to Q-spreading without changing responses throughout testing. We examined the error patterns across wider age groups (aged 4-79) with a picture-sentence verification eye-tracking task. We also examined whether prosodic emphasis affects their comprehension and processing of universally-quantified sentences.

Context-Sensitivity and Individual Differences in the Derivation of Scalar Implicature.

The derivation of scalar implicatures for the quantifier has been widely studied to investigate the computation of pragmatically enriched meanings. For example, the sentence "I found some books" carries the semantic interpretation that at least one book was found, but its interpretation is often enriched to include the implicature that not all the books were found. The implicature is argued to be more likely to arise when it is relevant for addressing a question under discussion (QUD) in the context, e.

The Influence of Misarticulations on Children's Word Identification and Processing.

Purpose: The purpose of the present studies was to determine how children's identification and processing of misarticulated words was influenced by substitution commonness.

Method: Sixty-one typically developing preschoolers across 3 experiments heard accurate productions of words (e.g.

Children's Demonstrative Comprehension and the Role of Non-linguistic Cognitive Abilities: A Cross-Linguistic Study.

Previous studies have shown that young children often fail to comprehend demonstratives correctly when they are uttered by a speaker whose perspective is different from children's own, and instead tend to interpret them with respect to their own perspective (e.g., Webb and Abrahamson in J Child Lang 3(3):349-367, 1976); Clark and Sengul in J Child Lang 5(3):457-475, 1978).

Fetal rhythm-based language discrimination: a biomagnetometry study.

Using fetal biomagnetometry, this study measured changes in fetal heart rate to assess discrimination of two rhythmically different languages (English and Japanese). Two-minute passages in English and Japanese were read by the same female bilingual speaker. Twenty-four mother-fetus pairs (mean gestational age=35.

Morphological Decomposition in Japanese De-adjectival Nominals: Masked and Overt Priming Evidence.

Whether morpheme-based processing extends to relatively unproductive derived words remains a matter of debate. Although whole-word storage and access has been proposed for some derived words, such as Japanese de-adjectival nominals with the unproductive (-mi) suffix (e.g.

Acquisition and use of linguistic knowledge: scrambling in child Japanese as a test case.

The current study investigates preschool-age children's comprehension of scrambled sentences in Japanese. While scrambling has been known to be challenging for children, biasing them to exhibit non-adult-like interpretations (e.g.

Pragmatic inferences modulate N400 during sentence comprehension: evidence from picture-sentence verification.

The present study examines the online realization of pragmatic meaning using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants read sentences including the English quantifier some, which has both a semantic meaning (at least one) and a pragmatic meaning (not all). Unlike previous ERP studies of this phenomenon, sentences in the current study were evaluated not in terms of their truth with respect to the real world, but in terms of their consistency with a picture presented before the sentence.

What hinders child semantic computation: children's universal quantification and the development of cognitive control.

Recent studies on the acquisition of semantics have argued that knowledge of the universal quantifier is adult-like throughout development. However, there are domains where children still exhibit non-adult-like universal quantification, and arguments for the early mastery of relevant semantic knowledge do not explain what causes such non-adult-like interpretations. The present study investigates Japanese four- and five-year-old children's atypical universal quantification in light of the development of cognitive control.