Journal articles on the topic 'Semantics. Language acquisition. Psycholinguistics'

AbstractAcross languages, age of acquisition (AoA) is a critical psycholinguistic factor in lexical processing, reflecting the influence of learning experience. Early-acquired words tend to be processed more quickly and accurately than late-acquired words. Recently, an integrated view proposed that both the mappings between representations and the construction of semantic representations contribute to AoA effects, thus, predicting larger AoA effects for words with arbitrary mappings between representations as well as for tasks requiring greater semantic processing. We investigated how these predictions generalize to the Chinese language system that differs from alphabetic languages regarding the ease of mappings and semantic involvement in lexical processing. A cross-task investigation of differential psycholinguistic effects was conducted with large character naming and lexical decision datasets to establish the extent to which semantics is involved in the two tasks. We focused on examining the effect sizes of lexical-semantic variables and AoA, and the interaction between AoA and consistency. The results demonstrated that semantics influenced Chinese character naming more than lexical decision, which is in contrast with the findings related to English language, though, critically, AoA effects were more pronounced for character naming than for lexical decision. Additionally, an interaction between AoA and consistency was found in character naming. Our findings provide cross-linguistic evidence supporting the view of multiple origins of AoA effects in the language-processing system.

This paper utilised bibliometric and scientometric indicators to assess the current state of research in psycholinguistics. A total of 32,586 documents in psycholinguistics were included from Scopus, WOS, and Lens between 1946 and 2022. The collected data were analysed using CiteSpace 5.8.R3 and VOSviewer 1.6.18. The results included tabulation, visualisation, and mapping for the past, present, and future directions of the field of psycholinguistics. We identified key authors, works, journals, and concepts in the existing evidence concerning (children’s) language acquisition, production, comprehension, and dissolution. The study contributes to the systematic study of existing scholarship in the field of psycholinguistics by documenting the progress of the field and informing relevant researchers about the current state of the field of psycholinguistics. Having grouped the 32,586 documents in psycholinguistics, 12 clusters were identified. These include (1) examining individual difference in affective norm and familiarity account; (2) examining refractory effect in the role of Broca’s area in sentence processing; (3) using eye movement to study bilingual language control and familiarity account; (4) exploring familiarity account through relative clauses; (5) the study of formulaic language and language persistence; (6) examining affective norm and sub-lexical effect in Spanish words; (7) examining lexical persistence in multiplex lexical networks; (8) the study of persistence through cortical dynamics; (9) the study of context effect in language learning and language processing; (10) the study of neurophysiological correlates in semantic context integration; (11) examining persistence as an acquisition norm through naming latencies; and (12) following a cross-linguistic perspective to study aphasic speakers.

This research focuses on the semantics acquisition of a child with language delay diagnosed as autistic spectrum disorder (ASD). The research problem is on how the child acquired the ability to comprehend meaning. It aims at answering the questions on how the child identified lexical meanings and how he labeled targeted lexicons of his first language. The approach employed in this research is descriptive qualitative to get adequate explanation on a specific language phenomenon, namely semantics acquisition. Its design is case study with the type neo-ethnographic. As the data collection method, it uses participant observation of longitudinal study considering that the research subject has familial relation with the researcher. The data analysis shows that the semantic acquisition of the research subject has complexity in vocabulary enrichment. The research subject often performs echolalic speech when he is asked to identify or label certain object given. The typical idiosyncratic speech is shown by the unique feature of limited syllable and prosody. In general, his ability to identify lexical meanings is far exceeding his ability to label objects. He also has sensitivity to perceive the non-verbal symbol performed by the people he knows well. The use of verbal language supported by non-verbal language facilitates his perception. He finds it difficult to comprehend the lexicons having similar sound as he assumes that one lexicon represents one object which typically belongs to concrete object. In addition, the ability of the research subject in labeling objects cannot be developed easily because of his difficulty in expressing ideas through words. To pronounce the words correctly, he shows high anxiety by lowering down his speech. In selecting the lexicon he also finds it hard to use pronoun, to label homonyms and to apply both polysemy and hyponym. Accordingly, he tends to communicate only to fulfill his needs by asking things, asking the listeners to do or not to do something, and protesting something as shown in the contexts. Further, he is likely to label objects by the lexicons got from the immediate exposure.keywords; Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD); Language Acquisition; Psycholinguistics

The problem of building a computer model of a small language was under solution. The relevance of this task is due to the following considerations: the need to eliminate the information inequality between speakers of different languages; the need for new tools for the study of poorly understood languages, as well as innovative approaches to language modeling in the low-resource context; the problem of supporting and developing small languages.There are three main objectives in solving the problem of small natural language processing at the stage of describing the problem situation: to justify the problem of modeling language in the context of resource scarcity as a special task in the field of natural languages processing, to review the literature on the relevant topic, to develop the concept of language acquisition model with a relatively small number of available resources. Computer modeling techniques using neural networks, semi-supervised learning and reinforcement learning were involved.The paper provides a review of the literature on modeling the learning of vocabulary, morphology, and grammar of a child's native language. Based on the current understanding of the language acquisition and existing computer models of this process, the architecture of the system of small language processing, which is taught through modeling of ontogenesis, is proposed. The main components of the system and the principles of their interaction are highlighted. The system is based on a module built on the basis of modern dialogical language models and taught in some rich-resources language (e.g., English). During training, an intermediate layer is used which represents statements in some abstract form, for example, in the symbols of formal semantics. The relationship between the formal recording of utterances and their translation into the target low-resource language is learned by modeling the child's acquisition of vocabulary and grammar of the language. One of components stands for the non-linguistic context in which language learning takes place.This article explores the problem of modeling small languages. A detailed substantiation of the relevance of modeling small languages is given: the social significance of the problem is noted, the benefits for linguistics, ethnography, ethnology and cultural anthropology are shown. The ineffectiveness of approaches applied to large languages in conditions of a lack of resources is noted. A model of language learning by means of ontogenesis simulation is proposed, which is based both on the results obtained in the field of computer modeling and on the data of psycholinguistics.

The paper discusses possibilities and ways of studying concepts in teaching foreign languages to students-interpreters. The author notes that modern didactic research has interdisciplinary nature, analyzes the theory of the concept from the point of view of linguistics, cultural studies and psycholinguistics. The author also notes the fact of creation of linguo-conceptodidactics as a new scientific direction. The paper presents a linguodidactic understanding of the concept, analyzes its structure and semantic content. The author describes in detail the process of foreign language concepts acquisition and presents it as a sequence of several stages. The acquisition of foreign language concepts is associated with the development of concept competence. The paper notes that the acquisition of foreign language concepts should go in parallel with the acquisition of foreign language lexis. In addition, it is necessary to use authentic materials in teaching foreign languages that allows forming a conceptual picture of the world of native speakers. Acquisition of foreign language concepts is especially important for students-interpreters who study several foreign languages and are faced with the problem of translating foreign concepts and phenomena of foreign language reality. The paper presents how conceptuality can be realized in teaching foreign languages. The author gives a practical example of studying the English concept Travel, offers examples of exercises and tasks for mastering it, as well as mnemonic techniques for memorizing lexemes that represent the concept. In the paper is stressed, that the concepts should be included in the content of foreign language teaching to students-interpreters. This contributes to the development of correct ideas about foreign language reality, understanding the facts of the native and foreign language culture, i.e. cultural reflection development.

Early language acquisition is a complex cognitive task. Recent data-informed approaches showed that children do not learn words uniformly at random but rather follow specific strategies based on the associative representation of words in the mental lexicon, a conceptual system enabling human cognitive computing. Building on this evidence, the current investigation introduces a combination of machine learning techniques, psycholinguistic features (i.e., frequency, length, polysemy and class) and multiplex lexical networks, representing the semantics and phonology of the mental lexicon, with the aim of predicting normative acquisition of 529 English words by toddlers between 22 and 26 months. Classifications using logistic regression and based on four psycholinguistic features achieve the best baseline cross-validated accuracy of 61.7% when half of the words have been acquired. Adding network information through multiplex closeness centrality enhances accuracy (up to 67.7%) more than adding multiplex neighbourhood density/degree (62.4%) or multiplex PageRank versatility (63.0%) or the best single-layer network metric, i.e., free association degree (65.2%), instead. Multiplex closeness operationalises the structural relevance of words for semantic and phonological information flow. These results indicate that the whole, global, multi-level flow of information and structure of the mental lexicon influence word acquisition more than single-layer or local network features of words when considered in conjunction with language norms. The highlighted synergy of multiplex lexical structure and psycholinguistic norms opens new ways for understanding human cognition and language processing through powerful and data-parsimonious cognitive computing approaches.

MacWhinney, Bates, and colleagues developed the Competition Model in the 1980s as an alternate to Chomskyan models that encapsulate syntax as a special-purpose module. The Competition Model adopted the functional perspective that language serves communicative goals and functions. In contrast to the premise that knowledge of language is innate, the Competition model asserts that language is learned and processed through general cognitive mechanisms that identify and weight phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic cues in the language experiences of the learner. These weighted cues guide the language user in the comprehension and production of language forms. The present article provides background on the Competition Model, describes machine simulations of linguistic competition, and extends the principles of the Competition Model to new machine models and applications through deep learning networks. References Bates, E. & MacWhinney, B. (1982). A functionalist approach to grammar. In E. Wanner & L. Gleitman (Eds.), Language acquisition: the state of the art. New York: Cambridge University Press. Bates, E., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Functionalism and the competition model. In: The Crosslinguistic Study of Sentence Processing, (pp 3-76). B. MacWhinney and E. Bates (Eds.), New York: Cambridge University Press. Devescovi, A., D’Amico, S., Smith, S., Mimica, I., & Bates, E. (1998). The development of sentence comprehension in Italian and Serbo-Croatian: Local versus distributed cues. In: Syntax and Semantics: Vol. 31. Sentence Pocessing: A Cross-Linguistic Perspective, (pp. 345-377). D. Hillert (Ed.), San Diego: Academic Press. Hauser, M. D., Chomsky, N., & Fitch, W. T. (2002). The faculty of language: What it is, who has it, and how did it evolve? Science, 298, 1569-1579. Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1980). A theory of reading: From eye fixations to comprehension. Psychological Review, 87, 329-354. Langacker, R. (1989). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. 2: Applications. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Li, P., & MacWhinney, B. (2013). Competition model. In: The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. C. A. Chapelle (Ed.), Malden, MA: Wiley. MacWhinney, B. (1987). The competition model. In: Mechanisms of Language Acquisition, (pp.249-308). B. MacWhinney (Ed.).Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum. MacWhinney, B. (2001). The competition model: The input, the context, and the brain. In: Cognition and Second Language Instruction, (pp. 69–90). P. Robinson (Ed.), New York: Cambridge University Press. MacWhinney, B. (2008). A Unified Model. In: Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition, (pp. 341-371). P. Robinson & N. Ellis (Eds.). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. MacWhinney B. (2012). The logic of the Unified Model. In: The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, (pp. 211–227). S. Gass and A. Mackey (Eds.). New York: Routledge. MacWhinney, B. (2015). Multidimensional SLA. In: Usage-Based Perspectives on Second Language Learning, (pp. 22-45). S. Eskilde and T. Cadierno (Eds.). New York: Oxford University Press. MacWhinney, B., Bates, E. & Kliegl, R. (1984). Cue validity and sentence interpretation in English, German, and Italian. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 23, 127-150. MacWhinney, B., Leinbach, J., Taraban, R., & McDonald, J. (1989). Language learning: Cues or rules? Journal of Memory and Language, 28, 255-277. McClelland, J. L., & Rumelhart, D. E. (1986). Parallel Distributed Processing. Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition. Volume 2: Psychological and Biological Models. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Presson, N. & MacWhinney, B. (2011). The Competition Model and language disorders. In: Handbook of Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Processes, (pp. 31-48). J. Guendozi, F. Loncke, and M. Williams (Eds.). New York: Psychology Press. Sokolov, J. L. (1988). Cue validity in Hebrew sentence comprehension. Journal of Child Language, 15, 129-156. Taraban, R. (2004). Drawing learners’ attention to syntactic context aids gender-like category induction. Journal of Memory and Language, 51(2), 202-216. Taraban, R. (2017). Hate, white supremacy, PTSD, and metacognition. In: Improve With Metacognition [online]. L. Scharff, A. Richmond, & J. Draeger (Eds.). Retrieved from: www.improvewithmetacognition.com. Taraban, R., & Kempe, V. (1999). Gender processing in native and non-native Russian speakers. Applied Psycholinguistics, 20, 119-148. Taraban, R., McDonald, J., & MacWhinney, B. (1989). Category learning in a connectionist model: Learning to decline the German definite article. In R. Corrigan, F. Eckman, & M. Noonan (Eds.), Linguistic categorization (pp. 163-193). Philadelphia: Benjamins. Taraban, R., & Roark, B. (1996). Competition in learning language-based categories. Applied Psycholinguistics, 17, 125-148.

Most work on acquisition of lexical meaning in developmental psycholinguistics is based on the idea of the relevance of the adult model, which is generally described in relation to certain theoretical semantic analyses. Up to the present, adult behavior itself has not been examined and its validity as a model for children has been taken for granted. This paper analyzes the knowledge of spatial terms, namely dimensional terms, shown by a group of 20 adults. The results show that the adult subjects used in our study - supposedly linguistically competent - committed errors, significantly varying their strategies for naming dimensions from one case to another, and showing a lack of consistency between them. The results are discussed in terms of assumed theoretical validity with regard to theoretical semantic analysis, as well as the methods of research about the acquisition of lexical meaning.

Second language acquisition research (sla) is the systematic exploration of the conditions that make the acquisition of a foreign language possible, both in natural and in instructional settings. Its objects of study are the biological, linguistic, psychological, and emotional makeup of language learners and the educational, social, and institutional context of learning and teaching. Whereas language as a linguistic system is studied through the metalanguage of linguistics (phonology, syntax, and semantics), language learning, as psycholinguistic process and sociolinguistic discourse, is researched through the metadiscourse of applied linguistics: psycho- and sociolinguistics, anthropological and educational linguistics, discourse analysis, pragmatics, stylistics, and composition and literacy studies. These fields illuminate what it means to learn to speak, read, write, and interact in a foreign language, what it means to appropriate for oneself the national idiom of communities that share a history and a culture that are different from one's own. SLA provides the applied linguistic metadiscourse for the practice of language learning and teaching.

Although both Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and grammatical gender acquisition have been the focus of scientific interest for decades, a few research has been conducted in order to explore how DLD Russian-speaking children acquire this linguistic category. One of the main reasons for this is the difficulty of recruiting DLD children as we still cannot reliably identify these children. Previous studies claim that typically developing children acquire grammatical gender at about 3-4 years of age, but have difficulties with neuter gender up to 6 years of age. This brief report aims at providing the theoretical background of a research in process. The review deals with the issue of grammatical gender acquisition by Russian-speaking children diagnosed with DLD. Specifically, this paper reviews i) the main findings of studies on gender acquisition in typically developing Russian-speaking children, ii) the outcomes of research on how Russian-speaking DLD children make use of grammatical gender. References Anderson, R.T. & Souto, S.M. (2005). The use of articles by monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26(4), 621-647. Bedore, L. M., & Leonard, L. B. (2001). Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44(4), 905–924 Bishop, D.V.M., Snowling M.J., Thompson, P. A., Greenhalgh Y., & The CATALISE Consortium. (2017): Phase 2 of CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study of problems with language development: Terminology. PLoS ONE, 11(7), 1-26. Clahsen, H., Bartke, S. & Göllner S. (1997). Formal features in impaired grammars: A Com­parison of English and German SLI children. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 10(2/3), 151-171. Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Гвоздев, А.Н. (1961). Формирование у ребенка грамматического строя русского языка. Москва: АПН РСФСР. Jackson-Maldonado, D. & Maldonado, R. (2017). Grammaticality differences between Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment and their typically developing peers. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 52(6), 750-765. Leonard, Laurence B. (2014). Children with Specific Language Impairment. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Mitrofanova, N., Rodina, Y., Urek, O. & Westergaard, M. (2018). Bilinguals’ Sensitivity to Grammatical Gender Cues in Russian: The Role of Cumulative Input, Proficiency, and Dominance. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01894 Orgassa, A., & Weerman, F. (2008). Dutch gender in specific language impairment and second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 24(3), 333–364. Popova, M. I. (1973). Grammatical elements of language in the speech of pre-preschool children. In Studies of child language development, (pp. 269–80). C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (eds). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Rakhlin, N., Kornilov, S., & Grigorenko, E. (2014). Gender and agreement processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder. Journal of Child Language, 41(2), 241–274. Rodina, Y. (2008). Semantics and morphology: The acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian. Doctoral thesis. Tromso: University of Tromso. Retrieved from: https://munin.uit.no/handle/ 10037/2247. Rodina, Y. & Westeergard M. (2012). A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian. Journal of Child Language, 39(5), 1077-1106. Roulet-Amiot, L., & Jacubowicz, C. (2006). Production and perception of gender agreement in French SLI. Advances in Speech Language Pathology, 8(4), 335–346. Silveira, M. (2006). A preliminary investigation of grammatical gender abilities in Portuguese speaking children with Specific Language Impairment. Unpublished working paper, University College London, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics. Retrieved from: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ psychlangsci/research/linguistics/publications/wpl/06papers/silveira Tribushinina, E., & Dubinkina, E. (2012). Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 26(6), 554–571. Tribushinina, E., Mak, M., Dubinkina, E. & Mak, W.M. (2018). Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with developmental language disorder and Dutch-Russian simultaneous bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(5), 1033-1064. Цейтлин, С. Н. (2005). Категория рода в детской речи. Проблемы функциональной грамматики: полевые структуры. А.В. Бондаренко (ред.). Санкт-Петербург: Наука, 346-375. Цейтлин, С.Н. (2009). Очерки по словообразованию и формообразованию в детской речи. Москва: Знак. Varlokosta, S. & Nerantzini, M. (2013). Grammatical gender in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from Determiner-Noun Contexts in Greek. Psychology, 20(3), 338-357. References (translated and transliterated) Anderson, R.T. & Souto, S.M. (2005). The use of articles by monolingual Puerto Rican Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Applied Psycholinguistics, 26(4), 621-647. Bedore, L. M., & Leonard, L. B. (2001). Grammatical morphology deficits in Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 44(4), 905–924 Bishop, D.V.M., Snowling M.J., Thompson, P. A., Greenhalgh Y., & The CATALISE Consortium. (2017): Phase 2 of CATALISE: a multinational and multidisciplinary Delphi consensus study of problems with language development: Terminology. PLoS ONE, 11(7), 1-26. Clahsen, H., Bartke, S. & Göllner S. (1997). Formal features in impaired grammars: A Com­parison of English and German SLI children. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 10(2/3), 151-171. Corbett, G. G. (1991). Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Гвоздев, А.Н. (1961). Формирование у ребенка грамматического строя русского языка. Москва: АПН РСФСР. Gvozdev, A. N. (1961). Formirovanie u Rebenka Grammatičeskogo Stroja Russkogo Jazyka [The Construction of the Grammatical Basis of the Russian Language in a Child]. Moscow: The Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. Jackson-Maldonado, D. & Maldonado, R. (2017). Grammaticality differences between Spanish-speaking children with specific language impairment and their typically developing peers. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 52(6), 750-765. Leonard, Laurence B. (2014). Children with Specific Language Impairment. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Mitrofanova, N., Rodina, Y., Urek, O. & Westergaard, M. (2018). Bilinguals’ Sensitivity to Grammatical Gender Cues in Russian: The Role of Cumulative Input, Proficiency, and Dominance. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01894 Orgassa, A., & Weerman, F. (2008). Dutch gender in specific language impairment and second language acquisition. Second Language Research, 24(3), 333–364. Popova, M. I. (1973). Grammatical elements of language in the speech of pre-preschool children. In Studies of child language development, (pp. 269–80). C. A. Ferguson & D. I. Slobin (eds). New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Rakhlin, N., Kornilov, S., & Grigorenko, E. (2014). Gender and agreement processing in children with Developmental Language Disorder. Journal of Child Language, 41(2), 241–274. Rodina, Y. (2008). Semantics and morphology: The acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian. Doctoral thesis. Tromso: University of Tromso. Retrieved from: https://munin.uit.no/handle/ 10037/2247. Rodina, Y. & Westeergard M. (2012). A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in Russian. Journal of Child Language, 39(5), 1077-1106. Roulet-Amiot, L., & Jacubowicz, C. (2006). Production and perception of gender agreement in French SLI. Advances in Speech Language Pathology, 8(4), 335–346. Silveira, M. (2006). A preliminary investigation of grammatical gender abilities in Portuguese speaking children with Specific Language Impairment. Unpublished working paper, University College London, Department of Phonetics and Linguistics. Retrieved from: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ psychlangsci/research/linguistics/publications/wpl/06papers/silveira Tribushinina, E., & Dubinkina, E. (2012). Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with specific language impairment. Clinical Linguistics and Phonetics, 26(6), 554–571. Tribushinina, E., Mak, M., Dubinkina, E. & Mak, W.M. (2018). Adjective production by Russian-speaking children with developmental language disorder and Dutch-Russian simultaneous bilinguals. Applied Psycholinguistics, 39(5), 1033-1064. Цейтлин, С. Н. (2005). Категория рода в детской речи. Проблемы функциональной грамматики: полевые структуры. А.В. Бондаренко (ред.). Санкт-Петербург: Наука, 346-375. Ceitlin, S. N. (2005). Kategorija roda v detskoj reči [The category of gender in child speech]. In Problemy funkcional'noj grammatiki: Polevye struktury [Issues in functional grammar: Field structures], (pp. 346–375). A. V. Bondarko (ed.). S.-Petersburg: Nauka. Цейтлин, С.Н. (2009). Очерки по словообразованию и формообразованию в детской речи. Москва: Знак. Ceitlin, S. N. (2009). Ocherki po slovoobrazovaniju i formoobrazovaniju v detskoj rechi [On Inflection and Derivation in Child Language]. Moscow: Znak. Varlokosta, S. & Nerantzini, M. (2013). Grammatical gender in Specific Language Impairment: Evidence from Determiner-Noun Contexts in Greek. Psychology, 20(3), 338-357.

Data from language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and diachronic studies have all shown that the lexicon has a clear internal structure, which includes relationships among lexical items based on phonetic and phonological characteristics, semantic features, morphology, and frequency of use. In the absence, however, of direct evidence from grammar, such lexical structure has even recently been deemed irrelevant to linguistic theory. In this paper, I use evidence from German grammar, specifically gender assignment, to support a model of lexical structure like that proposed particularly within Natural Morphology. German gender assignment has been shown to be largely predictable on the basis of phonological shape (e.g. final and initial segments or clusters), semantic features, and morphological features — all factors considered to be part of the lexicon's internal structure by Bybee and others. In this way gender assignment reflects lexical structure. Moreover, frequently used vocabulary tends to violate such rules, as Bybee's view of lexical structure would predict. By so doing, German grammar exploits almost exactly the structure of the lexicon which has been proposed based on data from areas other than grammar in its narrow sense.

Abstract Research confirms the multifaceted nature of spelling development and emphasizes the importance of both cognitive and linguistic skills (such as working and long-term memory, phonological processing, rapid automatized naming, orthographic awareness, mental orthographic images, semantic knowledge and morphological awareness) that affect spelling development. This has clear implications for many second-language spellers (L2) with auditory processing difficulties because writing systems are graphic representations of spoken language, and literacy development involves learning the association between the printed and oral forms of language (also known as phonological awareness and processing). In the present investigation, the researchers sampled second-language spellers (n = 22) with significant auditory processing delays and implemented an intervention programme that utilized visual and tactile coding strategies as part of the multi-sensory intervention therapy programme (for a period of six months). Post-test results were very promising and showed that L2 English-language spellers significantly improved in both short-term memory processing, phonological awareness and spelling performances. Considering this investigation’s contribution to effectively supporting the spelling development of children with auditory processing delays, the researchers are confident that it will expand and improve existing theoretical accounts of literacy (and spelling) acquisition in the field of psycholinguistics, whilst also facilitating the academic success of the growing L2 learner population in South Africa (and internationally).

Optimality theory as used in linguistics (Prince & Smolensky, 1993/2004; Smolensky & Legendre, 2006) and cognitive psychology (Gigerenzer & Selten, 2001) is a theoretical framework that aims to integrate constraint based knowledge representation systems, generative grammar, cognitive skills, and aspects of neural network processing. In the last years considerable progress was made to overcome the artificial separation between the disciplines of linguistic on the one hand which are mainly concerned with the description of natural language competences and the psychological disciplines on the other hand which are interested in real language performance. The semantics and pragmatics of natural language is a research topic that is asking for an integration of philosophical, linguistic, psycholinguistic aspects, including its neural underpinning. Especially recent work on experimental pragmatics (e.g. Noveck & Sperber, 2005; Garrett & Harnish, 2007) has shown that real progress in the area of pragmatics isn’t possible without using data from all available domains including data from language acquisition and actual language generation and comprehension performance. It is a conceivable research programme to use the optimality theoretic framework in order to realize the integration. Game theoretic pragmatics is a relatively young development in pragmatics. The idea to view communication as a strategic interaction between speaker and hearer is not new. It is already present in Grice' (1975) classical paper on conversational implicatures. What game theory offers is a mathematical framework in which strategic interaction can be precisely described. It is a leading paradigm in economics as witnessed by a series of Nobel prizes in the field. It is also of growing importance to other disciplines of the social sciences. In linguistics, its main applications have been so far pragmatics and theoretical typology. For pragmatics, game theory promises a firm foundation, and a rigor which hopefully will allow studying pragmatic phenomena with the same precision as that achieved in formal semantics. The development of game theoretic pragmatics is closely connected to the development of bidirectional optimality theory (Blutner, 2000). It can be easily seen that the game theoretic notion of a Nash equilibrium and the optimality theoretic notion of a strongly optimal form-meaning pair are closely related to each other. The main impulse that bidirectional optimality theory gave to research on game theoretic pragmatics stemmed from serious empirical problems that resulted from interpreting the principle of weak optimality as a synchronic interpretation principle. In this volume, we have collected papers that are concerned with several aspects of game and optimality theoretic approaches to pragmatics.

The paper presents research findings with 56 Roma children from Macedonia and Serbia between the ages of 3-6 years. The children’s knowledge of Romani as their mother tongue was assessed with a specially designed test. The test measures the children’s comprehension and production of different types of grammatical knowledge such as wh–questions, wh-complements, passive verbs, possessives, tense, aspect, the ability of the children to learn new nouns and new adjectives, and repetition of sentences. In addition, two pictured narratives about Theory of Mind were given to the children. The hypothesis of the authors was that knowledge of the complex grammatical categories by children will help them to understand better the Theory of Mind stories. The results show that Roma children by the age of 5 know most of the grammatical categories in their mother tongue and most of them understand Theory of Mind. References Bakalar, P. (2004). The IQ of Gypsies in Central Europe. 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This study investigates the acquisition and on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative verbs in second language (L2) Spanish by English-speaking learners. It asks whether L2 learners make a syntactic distinction between the two verb classes and whether there is an effect of semantic subclass, in accordance with a semantic hierarchy. Participants were 35 native Spanish speakers and 44 English-speaking learners of Spanish ranging from intermediate to advanced proficiency. The main task was an on-line visual probe recognition task. Subjects read sentences on a computer screen and had to decide whether a word had appeared in the sentence. The results of this study showed that native speakers who scan their syntactic representations to find a word contained in a complex subject noun phrase recognized the word faster with unaccusative-verb sentences than with unergative-verb sentences, suggesting that the syntactic presence of a trace in unaccusative-verb sentences facilitates comprehension. The L2 learners showed a similar response pattern, confirming that they differentiated between the two classes of verbs. Analyses of reaction times by verb class indicated that not all of the verbs in each class were responded to consistently: some subclasses induced shorter reaction times than others.

Linguistic and psycholinguistic evidence is presented to support the use of structure-mapping theory as a framework for understanding effects of iconicity on sign language grammar and processing. The existence of structured mappings between phonological form and semantic mental representations has been shown to explain the nature of metaphor and pronominal anaphora in sign languages. With respect to processing, it is argued that psycholinguistic effects of iconicity may only be observed when the task specifically taps into such structured mappings. In addition, language acquisition effects may only be observed when the relevant cognitive abilities are in place (e.g. the ability to make structural comparisons) and when the relevant conceptual knowledge has been acquired (i.e. information key to processing the iconic mapping). Finally, it is suggested that iconicity is better understood as a structured mapping between two mental representations than as a link between linguistic form and human experience.

The article highlights several cognitive, psychological, and linguistic issues, reflecting the problems of the Russian language acquisition by the foreign students in the natural environment. The study is based on modern interpretations of language contacts and the specifics of intercultural communication, multilingualism, and communication studies. The study uses the techniques of a psycholinguistic experiment, a sociolinguistic survey, lexico-semantic and contextual analysis techniques, as well as various approaches to describing speech mistakes because of interlanguage interference. The material for the article was the data of the foreign informants' written survey in the multilingual environment of the host region. In the bilingual Russian-English questionnaire, it was required to justify the choice of the country, the university of study, difficulties in completing educational programs. The survey involved the foreigners who are at different stages of the Russian language acquisition. The main objective of the study was to establish the leading channels of the Russian language perception and to describe the interfering influence of the native languages and dialects of the Hindus, as well as international English, on the language of the host country acquisition. On the text fragments and individual statements, the directions of interlanguage interference were shown, its leading types were identified – phonetic, phonemic, grapheme, morphological and lexical. The role of the English language as an intermediary in the process of the new language acquisition has been established. The performed analysis confirmed the leading position in the sensory system of the auditory perception channel, prevailing over visual perception. There is a tendency to contamination of written and oral speech, compression, and the use of abbreviations; interlanguage interference at the semantic-cognitive, phonetic, phonemic, grapheme, phonemic-grapheme, morphological and lexical levels of the native languages and partially English. The strategy of using Internet translation and literal translation from English into Russian, represented as the author’s text in Russian, is determined. The survey showed that at an advanced level of the Russian language proficiency, the most problematic is the semantic differentiation of single-root lexemes formed prefixally.

Listening comprehension is an important part in English teaching, and it is also an important research theme in second language acquisition (SLA). Through the application of psycholinguistic research results, this paper attempts to explore the process of comprehending semantic meaning of sentences in listening comprehension, thus providing solutions to improve listening skills.

Introduction. The article highlights psycholinguistic features of students’ acquisition of visual-semantic image of a hieroglyph in studying Japanese. The choice of the image category is justified by its ability to reflect in individual’s consciousness a complete picture of the object of cognition, which corresponds with the specific character of the hieroglyphic script. The visual-semantic image of a hieroglyphic sign has been defined as a complicated cognitive complex (mental image), which is an integral product of visual sensory-perceptual reception of all graphic elements of the hieroglyph formal structure, a coherent vision of it and conceptual representation, embodied in the meaning. Goal. The purpose of the article is to present results of the study of psycholinguistic features of students’ acquisition of visual-semantic images of hieroglyphs. The following techniques have been chosen as the main psychodiagnostic tools: «Pictograms» by О. Luria, «Hidden Figures» by K Gottschaldt, «Matching Familiar Figures» by J. Kagan, «Free Sorting of Objects» by R. Gardner in modification by V. Kolg. Results. Results of theoretical explorations on the psychological features of the problem of a personality’s acquisition of foreign languages, particularly, hieroglyphic, have been presented. It has been shown that interpretive capabilities of hieroglyphic signs are fundamentally different from the usual European method of linguistic codification of reality and that optimization ways of Oriental languages acquisition should be based on the differences between phonemic and hieroglyphic writing. Psycholinguistic peculiarities of students’ acquisition of the visual-semantic image of a hieroglyph have been revealed – character and structure of students’ visual and meaning images of hieroglyphic meanings have a significantly expressed individuality. The study of individual cognitive learning styles the educational information by students has shown that main cognitive skills and abilities are one of the factors of this success in combination with others; quality of the hieroglyphics acquisition improves with a good ability in systematization, generalization, unification of the unit into broad classes, as well as in the tendency to reasonableness.

The present work is an attempt to explain how the structure of derived words influences the order of acquisition of word formation rules. Three main types of derivatives — transpositions, modifications and mutations — are investigated in Polish child language. The differences among the three categories (analyzed in nouns, verbs and adjectives) are discussed, regarding semantic and formal changes undergone in the process of forming complex words. It is claimed that semantic-formal correspondence is an essential factor influencing the order of acquisition of word formation rules. Modifications in which the correspondence is both preserved and has a simple character emerge earlier than the other types of derivatives — transpositions (the correspondence is broken) and mutations (the correspondence is complex). The proposal is said to be complementary to Clark’s principles of acquisition of complex words (Clark, 1993). Polish has a very rich word formation system (compared e.g. with English), thus the analysis of word formation acquisition in such a language seems to be especially important for developmental psycholinguistic research. The proposal is tested on four Polish children’s speech diaries available in CHILDES (Smoczynska, 1998). All data available from ages two to seven were analyzed. The analyses revealed that indeed modifications are acquired earlier than transpositions and mutations. The consequences of the finding for psycholinguistic theory are discussed.

Cut-off analysis is very important in the Second Language testing domain considering the type of tools administered at schools and beyond. Verbal reasoning and lexical decision are crucial to be examined along with additional linguistic tasks in immigrant school population. 108 Portuguese immigrants, with ages between 7-17, from 20 countries and speakers of 21 mother tongues completed a laterality task (dichotic listening test) in order to understand if this type of task should integrate a full diagnostic test for non-native students. Participants answered the test in a single session lasting approximately 60 minutes (along with more tasks in a battery), in the same space that had been previously stipulated by the schools and on appropriately determined schedules. Dichotic Listening test assesses both cognitive and linguistic skills mainly focusing lexicon retrieval and semantic comprehension. Phonological dimension is also evaluated by the binaural detection test. Portuguese immigrants with an age of onset (age of acquisition of Portuguese as Second Language) under eight years were considered for this sample. The Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) analysis was carried out to define the cut-off points of different tasks. In the present study we will present the specificity, sensitivity and AUC for the dichotic listening. The score calculation took into account the laterality (right or left-handed) and also controlling for gender and age variables. The results pointed out to the predictive value of the dichotic listening task for right-handed, meaning that is able to distinguish proficiency levels and immigrants at risk (right-handed) concerning the evaluation and the learning process. These data highlight the discriminatory power of specific tests with specific sensitivity and specificity properties that could inform which areas are fragile attending the inter-individual variation.

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. Psycholinguistics studies the psychological and neurological factors that enable human to acquire, use and understand language. Psycholinguistics mainly concern with the use of psychological / scientific / experimental methods to study language acquisition, production and processing. In this study is to reveal theoretical information about psycholinguistics.

Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. Psycholinguistics studies the psychological and neurological factors that enable human to acquire, use and understand language. Psycholinguistics mainly concern with the use of psychological / scientific / experimental methods to study language acquisition, production and processing. In this study is to reveal theoretical information about psycholinguistics.

The present article reviews three collections of papers edited by Cenoz and colleagues on the topic of third language (L3) acquisition from perspectives including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and education. Our focus is on psycholinguistics, in particular, lexical acquisition studies, and with particular reference to two central notions in the study of L3, namely, language-selectiveness and cross-linguistic influence. The article also discusses expansion of the study of L3 acquisition into the Universal Grammar/Second Language Acquisition (UG/SLA) paradigm, and closes by looking at future directions for the L3 field.

AbstractObjective:To determine the effect of three psycholinguistic variables—lexical frequency, age of acquisition (AoA), and neighborhood density (ND)—on lexical-semantic processing in individuals with non-fluent (nfvPPA), logopenic (lvPPA), and semantic primary progressive aphasia (svPPA). Identifying the scope and independence of these features can provide valuable information about the organization of words in our mind and brain.Method:We administered a lexical decision task—with words carefully selected to permit distinguishing lexical frequency, AoA, and orthographic ND effects—to 41 individuals with PPA (13 nfvPPA, 14 lvPPA, 14 svPPA) and 25 controls.Results:Of the psycholinguistic variables studied, lexical frequency had the largest influence on lexical-semantic processing, but AoA and ND also played an independent role. The results reflect a brain-language relationship with different proportional effects of frequency, AoA, and ND in the PPA variants, in a pattern that is consistent with the organization of the mental lexicon. Individuals with nfvPPA and lvPPA experienced an ND effect consistent with the role of inferior frontal and temporoparietal regions in lexical analysis and word form processing. By contrast, individuals with svPPA experienced an AoA effect consistent with the role of the anterior temporal lobe in semantic processing.Conclusions:The findings are in line with a hierarchical mental lexicon structure with a conceptual (semantic) and a lexeme (word-form) level, such that a selective deficit at one of these levels of the mental lexicon manifests differently in lexical-semantic processing performance, consistent with the affected language-specific brain region in each PPA variant.

Through psychology we can learn about how students ' attitudes and behaviors in acquiring and learning languages while through linguistics we can learn about language concepts and structures. At the stage of language acquisition, there are four phases of language acquisition in the child (1) the level of the (starting from age 0 sampai1 years), (2) period of holophrase (starting at the age of 1 to 2 years), (3) The two-word greeting period (starting at 2 to 2 years 6 months) (4) The starting period of grammar (starting at 2 years 6 months – up to 3 years and above). And the four advanced stages are; 1. Sensorimotor stage (birth up to age 2 – 3 years), (2) Pre-operational stage (3 to 6 or 7 years old) (3) concrete operational stage (aged 6/7 years to 11 or 12 years), (4) Formal operational stage (12 years old to adulthood). While language learning is done formally in formal settings, For example language learning in the classroom. It is not important to learn anywhere while not in the classroom as long as the process of learning is directed at the mastery of the rules of the language consciously by educators as well as learners, the process is called learning. During the formal and informal learning process, the psycholinguistic process works to acquire language knowledge through a study. So this interdisciplinary can lead educators to understand the process that happens in every student who is faced with when they are trying to understand and identify the material understanding in language learning presented in the classroom.

Abstract Psycholinguistic investigations of translated audiovisual products have been conducted since at least the 1980s. These mainly concerned the role of subtitles in the processing of language in the context of language acquisition, literacy, and education. This article provides an overview of some of the most productive lines of research from a psycholinguistic angle in audiovisual translation (AVT), focussing on studies that investigated the positive effects of subtitles on language performance, but also on a growing body of behavioural research on the cognitive processing of the language of subtitles. The article evaluates a number of methodologies in some of the most prominent studies on the processing of subtitles, primarily making use of eye tracking, and then provides some thoughts on future directions in psycholinguistic studies on the processing of the language of AVT.

Clahsen and Felser (CF) present a thought-provoking article that is likely to have a strong impact on the field, in particular, on developmental psycholinguistics and second language (L2) acquisition research. Unlike the majority of previous work on language acquisition that focused on “competence,” that is, the knowledge basis underlying grammar, CF emphasize the need to approach language acquisition with psycholinguistic measures of processing. Based primarily on behavioral and electrophysiological on-line data, they argue that language acquisition in early first language (L1) and late L2 follows different patterns.

Language processing research is changing in two ways that should make it more relevant to the study of grammatical learning. First, grammatical phenomena are re-entering the psycholinguistic fray, and we have learned a lot in recent years about the real-time deployment of grammatical knowledge. Second, psycholinguistics is reaching more diverse populations, leading to much research on language processing in child and adult learners. We discuss three ways that language processing can be used to understand language acquisition. Level 1 approaches (“Processing in learners”) explore well-known phenomena from the adult psycholinguistic literature and document how they play out in learner populations (child learners, adult learners, bilinguals). Level 2 approaches (“Learning effects as processing effects”) use insights from adult psycholinguistics to understand the language proficiency of learners. We argue that a rich body of findings that have been attributed to the grammatical development of anaphora should instead be attributed to limitations in the learner’s language processing system. Level 3 approaches (“Explaining learning via processing”) use language processing to understand what it takes to successfully master the grammar of a language, and why different learner groups are more or less successful. We examine whether language processing may explain why some grammatical phenomena are mastered late in children but not in adult learners. We discuss the idea that children’s language learning prowess is directly caused by their processing limitations (‘less is more’: Newport, 1990). We conclude that the idea is unlikely to be correct in its original form, but that a variant of the idea has some promise (‘less is eventually more’). We lay out key research questions that need to be addressed in order to resolve the issues addressed in the paper.

Learning English as a second language is an area of study which demands persistent research, probing and application of the findings. In India, English language is a part of everyday life, and the exposure to English vocabulary comes through a multitude of sources which include media, game applications and social networking among others. In many instances, even complicated and less frequent words are made familiar by these sources. However, the learners of ESL struggle for a good choice of words when they are in a situation to use the language. This has led the researcher to question how the process of vocabulary acquisition happens and how the acquired words are organised and stored. The current research is a psycholinguistic analysis of the way words are organised and associated with each other in the mental lexicon of the learners. The researcher attempts to study the role and impact of associations in vocabulary acquisition through an experimental study. The participants of the study are 120 Indian ESL learners enrolled for an undergraduate programme. They were tested with two methods of teaching vocabulary, namely the word definition method and semantic cluster method. The outcome of the study is discussed in the research paper. References Aitchison, J. (1987). Words in the Mind. An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. Oxford: Blackwell. Crystal, D. (1988). The English Language. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Ervin, S. M. (1961). Changes with age in the verbal determinants of word association. American Journal of Psychology 74: 361–72. Fitzpatrick, T. (2006). Habits and rabbits: Word associations and the L2 lexicon. EUROSLA Yearbook 2006, 6, 121–45. Meara, P. (2009). Connected words: Word Associations and Second Language Vvocabulary acquisition. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Nation, I.S.P. (2013).Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. 2nd Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sahgal, A. (1991). Patterns of language use in a bilingual setting in India. In: J. Cheshire, ed. English around the world: Sociolinguistic perspectives. (pp. 299–307). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, N. (2000). Vocabulary in Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, N. (2010). Researching Vocabulary: A Vocabulary Research Manual. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Singleton, D. (1999). Exploring the Second Language Mental Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.V. Kavitha, Padmasani Kannan

The article identifies four different types of meaning situated in different modules of language. Such a modular view of language architecture suggests that there may be differential difficulties of acquisition for the different modules. It is argued that second language (L2) acquisition of meaning involves acquiring interpretive mismatches at the first and second language (L1-L2) syntax-semantics interfaces. In acquiring meaning, learners face two types of learning situations. One situation where the sentence syntax presents less difficulty but different pieces of functional morphology subsume different primitives of meaning is dubbed simple syntax–complex semantics. Another type of learning situation is exemplified in less frequent, dispreferred, or syntactically complex sentences where the sentential semantics offers no mismatch; these are labeled complex syntax–simple semantics. Studies representative of these learning situations are reviewed. The issues of importance of explicit instruction with respect to interpretive properties and the effect of the native language are addressed. Studies looking at acquisition of language-specific discourse properties and universal pragmatics are also reviewed. These representative studies and numerous other studies on the L2 acquisition of meaning point to no visible barrier to ultimate success in the acquisition of semantics and pragmatics.

Interest in third language (L3) acquisition has increased exponentially in recent years, due to its potential to inform long-lasting debates in theoretical linguistics, language acquisition and psycholinguistics. From the very beginning, researchers investigating child and adult L3 acquisition have considered the many diverse cognitive factors that constrain and condition the initial state and development of newly acquired languages, and their models have duly evolved to incorporate insights from the most recent findings in psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and cognitive psychology. The articles in this Special Issue of Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, in dealing with issues such as age of acquisition, attrition, relearning, cognitive economy or the reliance on different memory systems – to name but a few – provide an accurate portrayal of current inquiry in the field, and are a particularly fine example of how instrumental research in language acquisition and other cognitive domains can be to each other.

Psycholinguistics has provided numerous theories that explain how a person acquires a language, produces and perceives both spoken and written language. The theories have been used in the field of language teaching. Some experts use them as the basic theories in developing language teaching methods. It is known as psycholinguistics approach. Psycholinguistic approach views learning as a cognitive individual process happening within the individual and then moves to the social dimension. As an approach, there are some methods which were developed based on psycholinguistics theories such as natural method, total physical response method, and suggestopedia method. These methods apply psycholinguistic principles that how a person acquires his/her mother tongue or first language (First Language Acquisition), learns his/her second or third language (Second Language Learning), perceives a language (Language Perception), and produces language (Language Production). Language perception refers to listening and reading, while the language production refers to speaking and writing. Listening, reading, speaking and writing are called as the four of language skills. Specifically, psycholinguistics helps to understand the difficulties of these four skills both intrinsic difficulties and extrinsic difficulties. Psycholinguistics also helps to explain the errors students do in the language learning. Moreover psycholinguistics also defines some kinds of brain disorders that affect language learning performance such as agraphia and aphasia which must be treated properly. Psycholinguistics mainly helps teachers to consider the use of appropriate method to teach that four language skill.

Most studies on Bilinguals First Language Acquisition (BFLA) are concerned with giving explanation for language mixing in young bilinguals. It is commonly stated that language mixing in children has to be interpreted as evidence for confusions in the bilingual’s language acquisition, in the sense that the two languages are not acquired separately but start out as a single system. In other words, it is in contrast to adults’ code-switching. In this article, early mixing in bilingual children is explored based on psycholinguistics view. This article will first discuss the language acquisition, then the theories and assumptions on bilingualism in early childhood, and last the early mixing in bilingual children. According to the review of related literature, it can be inferred that from psycholinguistics view, language mixing cannot indicate the bilingual children’s lack of ability to differentiate the two language system. Spontaneous translation employed by the bilingual children shows that bilingual awareness and language differentiation is possible at an early stage. Bilingual infants can do language mixing as an evidence of their meta-linguistic awareness and language differentiation. As language mixing may be a good indicator of bilingual fluency, we can say that children who become bilingual in their early childhood will reach their fluency in the two languages by doing language mixing according to the two languages they have acquired.

This article presents the benefits of using online methodologies in second language acquisition (SLA) research. It provides a selection of online experiments that have been widely used in first and second language processing studies that are suitable for SLA research and most importantly discusses the hardware and software packages and other equipment required for the setting-up of a psycholinguistics laboratory, the advantages and disadvantages of the software packages available and what financial costs are involved. The aim of the article is to inspire researchers in second language acquisition to embark on research using online methodologies.

Yuliana Stoyanova’s book provides a complete overview of the most important issues in general psycholinguistics, especially in the field of developmental psycholinguistics. The Bulgarian contributions in this relatively young interdisciplinary field are clearly highlighted. An emphasis is placed on the acquisition of the Bulgarian language, which not only fills a gap in the psycholinguistic research worldwide, but also provides an opportunity to verify existing models by attracting plentiful data from another language.

Previous studies on second language (L2) acquisition of English dative alternation by Korean speakers (Oh and Zubizarreta, 2003, 2006a, 2006b) have shown that the acquisition of English benefactive double object (DO) (e.g. John baked Mary a cake) lags behind that of its counterpart goal double object (e.g. John sent Mary the letter). This asymmetry was attributed to grammatical differences between English and Korean benefactive DOs; goal DOs in the two languages have similar grammatical properties. Given the negative first language (L1) influence attested in the acquisition of English DOs by Korean speakers, this article examines the recovery process from these negative effects of L1 transfer and the triggering factors in such a process by investigating L2 learners’ knowledge of semantic properties pertinent to English DOs, using an Acceptability Judgment task with contexts. The present study found that most advanced learners are indeed capable of acquiring semantic properties of both types of English DOs, restructuring their interlanguage grammar in such a way that both types of DOs denote prospective possession. This article suggests that acquisition of the semantics of goal DOs, possibly attributed to L1 transfer, bootstraps acquisition of the semantics of benefactive DOs, and that this generalization from goal DOs to benefactive DOs is made possible by the surface generalization hypothesis (Goldberg, 2002), which states that argument structure patterns sharing the surface forms should be analysed on their own as a class. Furthermore, this article argues that this recovery process can be interpreted as evidence of a tie between syntax and semantics: developing sensitivity to the semantics of English DOs is indispensable for acquiring the syntax of English DOs (compare Lardiere, 2000; Slabakova, 2006). On this view, learning a construction essentially means learning its associated semantics, and acquisition of the syntax of a construction is a consequence of acquisition of the semantics of the construction.

This article investigates knowledge of semantics-syntax correspondences in SLA within the Principles and Parameters framework. A parameter of semantic structure is used to investigate knowledge of two distinct, but underlyingly related, verb classes: change of state locatives and 'psychologi cal' verbs. Chinese and English contrast in terms of the parameter setting. Experimental evidence indicates that adult Chinese learners of English L2 initially transfer parameter settings, but are able to reset the parameter. However, they only acquire L2 lexical properties and concomitant syntactic privileges with ease when L2 input adds a representation to their grammar. When positive L2 input should pre-empt overgeneralizations based on rep resentation transferred from the L1, for some learners L1 influence persists until quite advanced stages of acquisition. The implications of the results for the parameter-setting model of SLA are discussed.

Organized under the auspices of the Language Learning Roundtable Conference Grant (2012), this seminar aimed to provide an interactive forum for a group of second language acquisition (SLA) researchers with particular interests in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics to discuss key theoretical and methodological issues in the roles of key human memory systems (in particular, working memory) in various aspects of SLA. The seminar consisted of a tutorial workshop (Michael Ullman), three keynotes (Michael Ullman, Peter Skehan, and Cem Alptekin), and other invited speeches addressing the more specific relationships between working memory (WM) and various aspects of SLA (e.g. vocabulary, grammar, reading, speaking, writing, and interpreting).

This article addresses the relationship between two major terms, psycho-linguistics and applied linguistics, and in the process, explores key issues in multilingual processing. A straightforward definition of psycholinguistics is provided by Kess (1991:1): ‘The field of study concerned with psychological aspects of language studies.’ In the last decade, the definition has become more restricted, leaving out more social-psychological aspects like the study of attitudes in language use. Here, psycholinguistics will be further restricted to the study of processes of language production and perception (as opposed to acquisition and attrition).

The author updates N.I. Zhinkin’s idea that the language, intelligence, sensing are the mechanizms for getting and processing of information. Any objective perception is the essentially result of polymodal activity, so «significatums of a natural language demand the corpus and emotions being semantically functional». The program of generalization of all extra and inner impacts play the great role in the formation of language capacity. The idea of the unity of somatic and psychological processes became the basis of the new tendency of psycholinguistics – so called corporeal semantics.

We review major issues in research on reading, including theories of word reading, cross-writing system comparisons, comprehension, reading difficulties, learning how to read, and cognitive neuroscience studies of reading. Each of these topics has psycholinguistic components that reflect the language foundations of reading. These foundations lie in two facts: (1) a writing system connects to a linguistic system at one or more levels, meaning that word reading is partially a psycholinguistic process; and (2): reading comprehension shares processes (e.g., parsing) with general language comprehension. One trend of recent research is the development of models of word identification that rely on single rather than dual mechanisms and their extension to explain reading difficulties. Another is the conclusion that phonology plays a role in reading that cuts across writing systems. Reading comprehension research continues to reflect two different traditions, sentence parsing and text comprehension. Both show increasing influence of general cognitive explanations, as opposed to strictly linguistic explanations, for comprehension phenomena. Studies of brain activation bring converging evidence on reading processes and provide neuroanatomical correlates of reading problems. In one area, the acquisition and teaching of reading, advances come from increasing consolidation and practical use of previous research gains.

Compared to research on language acquisition, research on the maintenance and loss of language skills is a relatively recent development. There is, of course, a longstanding sociolinguistic tradition of research on language shift, but work in the field of attrition really started in the US in the late 1970s (Lambert and Freed 1982). Since then, research on language attrition has grown rapidly in different countries, as is witnessed by special issues devoted to the topic in the journals Applied Psycholinguistics in 1986, ITL-Review of Applied Linguistics in 1989 and Studies in Second Language Acquisition in 1989, as well as by three recent volumes: Weltens, de Bot and van Els (1986), Weltens (1989), and Seliger and Vago (1991).

Ray Jackendoff,Foundations of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xix+477.Ray Jackendoff is well qualified to talk about the trend towards increasing specialization and fragmentation of the science of language. For over 30 years he has been a prolific contributor to a number of different topics in syntax and semantics, and has also made notable contributions to other areas of cognitive science, including music, consciousness, spatial cognition, and psycholinguistics. It's hard to find many in the field who can match Jackendoff's breadth. Therefore, all linguists should be interested in Jackendoff's most recent book, Foundations of language, in which he lays out a series of objectives for the science of language, and describes some of the steps that he believes are needed in order to reintegrate theoretical linguistics with psycholinguistics and even computational neuroscience.

Learning is a unit consisting of various factors that support each other. In learning Arabic, it is not only teacher factors and Arabic language material that must be considered, students as second language learners also need attention for the success of learning. The purpose of this article was to describe the role of psycholinguistics in learning Arabic for non-native speakers. Researchers used literature review to extract data from various sources. From the data obtained, it was known that the role of psycholinguistics in learning Arabic makes teachers able to understand the processes that occur in students when they listen, speak, read, or write. Psycholinguistics as an applied science between psychology and linguistics can be used to understand the behavior of second language learners, language acquisition, and language production and the processes that occur in it.

AbstractThe origins and nature of consciousness have preoccupied mankind since human beings became aware of themselves as thinking beings. Seeking answers to these questions was the focus of the life-long research project of the former Soviet scholar, Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (1896–1934), who was intent on developing a holistic theory of psycholinguistics to explore consciousness through psyche. In this quest, he concentrated on rechevóye myshlénie, a key element of consciousness created through the unification of thinking processes and languaging processes (the processes involved in the acquisition and use of language). However, the fact Vygotsky used this concept to imply a psychological process/ formation/system is lost when understanding it as “verbal thinking.” Despite its centrality in his whole theory of psycholinguistics, Vygotsky’s analysis of rechevóye myshlénie as the cornerstone of the creation of znachenie slova (meaning through language) has not received the same attention as his analyses of other concepts. Therefore, in this article we attempt to make a detailed investigation of rechevóye myshlénie upon Vygotsky’s methodology of psychological materialism and a number of related concepts compared with some prevalent translations and interpretations.

In a brief article published some years ago (Foster-Cohen 1993), I suggested that fruitful collaboration between the fields of first and second language acquisition was underexploited. I also suggested that second language researchers were, in general, better at keeping themselves informed of developments in first language studies than first language researchers were at paying attention to second language issues. I think it fair to say that there are some signs this is changing. One is the now established existence of the journal Language Acquisition (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates), started in 1990, which publishes work in both first and second language acquisition with a view to understanding the nature of language acquisition in general. Its preference for papers that address issues in formal linguistic theory complements well Applied Psycholinguistics (Cambridge University Press), which has always published material relevant to both fields, but which also goes well beyond acquisition issues in its brief. A second factor seems to be a gentle but insistent re-examination of issues in bilingualism and a growing awareness that bilingual studies, second language studies, and first language studies overlap in important ways in the study of the bilingual individual. One key indicator of this shift is the appearance of a new journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition (Cambridge University Press).