Abstract By adopting a pre- and post-test design, the current study longitudinally examined the complex relationship between two different dimensions of phonological vocabulary knowledge (declarative vs. automatized) and their ultimate impacts on global L2 listening proficiency among 133 Japanese EFL students. The declarative group focused solely on what target words sound like and mean via meaning recognition tasks. The automatization group worked not only on such form-meaning mappings but also on prompt access to the target words in a semantically, collocationally, and grammatically appropriate manner via lexicosemantic judgment tasks. Compared to the declarative group, the automatization group showed relatively robust learning in both declarative and automatized dimensions of target words. Although neither training approach showed clear superiority, the results suggest that relative gains in automatized, rather than declarative, dimensions are associated with enhanced L2 listening proficiency. The distinction between declarative and automatized dimensions of phonological vocabulary knowledge, along with the absence of a direct link between training type and improved listening proficiency, offers valuable insights for future extension studies.

Abstract The comprehension of irony involves a sophisticated inferential process requiring language users to go beyond the literal meaning of an utterance. Because of its complex nature, we hypothesized that working memory (WM) and fluid intelligence, the two main components of executive attention, would be involved in the understanding of irony: the former by maintaining focus and relevant information active during processing, the latter by disengaging irrelevant information and offering better problem-solving skills. In this eye-tracking reading experiment, we investigated how adults (N = 57) process verbal irony, based on their executive attention skills. The results indicated a null (or indirect) effect for WM, while fluid intelligence directly modulated the comprehension and processing of irony during reading. As fluid intelligence is an important individual-difference variable, the findings pave the way for future research on developmental and clinical populations who tend to struggle with nonliteral language.

Abstract The dual route cascaded (DRC) model proposes that the mapping from orthography to phonology occurs through two pathways: the sublexical and lexical routes. Cross-linguistic studies have found that Chinese character reading relies more on the lexical pathway, whereas English word reading relies more on the sublexical pathway. However, it remains unclear how these two pathways collaborate in the L2 word reading of Chinese–English bilinguals and whether their reading strategies are influenced by L2 proficiency. In the current study, 72 Chinese–English bilinguals with varying levels of L2 proficiency were tested. They were asked to name English words that varied in frequency and spelling-sound consistency. The results showed that participants with lower L2 proficiency were more sensitive to frequency, indicating a greater reliance on lexical processing in L2 word reading. In contrast, participants with higher L2 proficiency were more sensitive to consistency, suggesting a greater reliance on sublexical processing. These findings suggest that L2 word reading strategies vary as a function of L2 proficiency. As L2 proficiency increases, Chinese–English bilinguals’ reading strategies may shift from primarily relying on lexical to sublexical processing. This study provides evidence from L2 readers for the DRC model, helping to broaden the explanatory scope of the model.

Abstract Encountering new words multiple times in the input is crucial for incidental vocabulary acquisition. While there is extensive research exploring the impact of word frequency on both learning and processing of novel vocabulary during reading, there is a notable gap in studies examining how contextual factors impact these processes, especially when reading texts, rather than short sentences. The present study aims to fill this gap by exploring the effect of contextual diversity or sameness on adult L2 English learners’ processing and incidental learning of novel lexical items through repeated reading of complete texts. Participants (N = 42) read one short story three times as well as three different stories, while their eye movements were recorded. Each contextual condition (Same vs. Different) contained ten pseudowords, repeated six times across the treatment. Participants were tested on both immediate and delayed vocabulary learning via form and meaning recognition tests. Our results indicate that repeated readings of the same text led to faster processing as well as better short-term learning of novel vocabulary, although this advantage was not retained for long-term learning. In contrast, initial encoding and lexical integration took longer in the Different condition, although this was not reflected in higher vocabulary gains either in the short- or the long term.

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

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

Abstract Studies investigating phonological processing indicate that words with high regularity/consistency in pronunciation or high frequency positively impact reading speed and accuracy. Such effects of consistency and frequency have been demonstrated in Japanese kanji words and are known as consistency and frequency effects. Using a mixed-effects model analysis, this study reexamines the two effects in Chinese–Japanese second-language (L2) learners with two different L2 proficiency levels. The two effects are robustly replicated in oral reading tasks; in particular, the performance of intermediate learners is similar to that of Japanese semantic dementia patients, whose reading accuracy is affected by sensitivity to the statistical properties of words (i.e., reading consistency and lexical frequency). These results are explained by the interaction between semantic memory and word statistical properties. Moreover, the interaction highlights the important consequences of statistical learning underlying L2 phonological processing.

Abstract To determine the source of transfer in third language acquisition (L3A), we tested the effects of grammatical feature typology and L2 Spanish proficiency on the comprehension and production of grammatical [gender] and [number] in the early stages of L3A of Portuguese. We distinguish between the two features based on their participation in the lexical-conceptual structure of the lemma and its interaction with the morpho-syntactic derivation. L1 English speakers were tested on their knowledge of the features in both their L2 and their L3 through a grammaticality judgment task and an elicited production task. Results show that L3 learners transfer only some features, specifically [gender] rather than [number], suggesting a fine-grained divide in feature compositionality between the structural ([gender]) and semantic ([number]) features. We also found facilitative transfer only after a threshold acquisition in L2, in support of the Threshold Hypothesis. For beneficial transfer of a feature, mere knowledge of the L2 structure was found to be sufficient. However, a higher generalized L2 proficiency threshold was found to predict high L3 accuracy.

Abstract The current study examined speakers’ performance in identifying syntactic and pragmatic violations of definiteness use across four types of tasks: (1) a reading acceptability judgment task, (2) an auditory acceptability judgment task, (3) an online self-paced reading task, and (4) an online self-paced listening task. This investigation aimed to clarify how methodological differences and similarities within psycholinguistic research might influence linguistic performance in adult speakers. The four experiments focused on pragmatic and syntactic violations of definiteness in Hebrew in both subject and object positions. Overall, participants detected definiteness violations across different modalities and tasks, but notable differences emerged among the tasks. For instance, in the self-paced listening task, sentences with no violations and those with pragmatic violations were indistinguishable, while slower response times were observed exclusively for syntactic violations in the object position. These performance variations may stem from the phonological reduction of the definite article in spoken Hebrew, coupled with online measurement methods that may have led to shallower processing and an increased likelihood of violation overlooking. Alternatively, participants in the online self-paced reading task exhibited the strongest effects in identifying both syntactic and pragmatic violations, indicating that task type and stimulus representation can significantly influence linguistic performance.

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