This study investigated the effects of a high-variability phonetic training (HVPT) regime using nonwords (NW), compared to a comparable regime using real words (RW), on the perception of English front vowels by L1-Catalan/Spanish learners. Participants completed pre-and posttest tasks targeting both pre-lexical (vowel identification of NW and RW) and phono-lexical processing (word-picture matching, WPM, and lexical decision, LD). Training consisted of six sessions of phoneme identification with either NW or RW stimuli. Results revealed that the RW group consistently outperformed the NW group, with significant differences in RW identification and WPM. Importantly, learning generalized to new speakers and items, particularly in the RW condition. Lexical tasks proved more challenging than pre-lexical ones, with lower overall scores and no significant gains in LD. These findings indicate that RW training produces stronger perceptual and phono-lexical gains than NW training, challenging findings from prior studies that favored NW-based regimes.

Network analysis assessed the relationship between listening fatigue (Vanderbilt Listening Fatigue Scale; VFS) and foreign language learning anxiety (Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale; FLCAS). Nodes represented the questions on each scale, and edges between nodes represented the strength and direction of the correlation between those questions/nodes. A simple correlation of the sum scores revealed a negative correlation: students reporting high fatigue reported low anxiety. This result may be due to the way in which cognitive resources are allocated (i.e., “ego depletion”). Analysis of the micro- and meso-level structure of the network revealed two distinct subsets of nodes (i.e., communities), with one community containing many of the FLCAS items (and the 5 nodes highest in strength) and the other community containing the VFS items and several items from the FLCAS that assessed confidence in using L2 rather than anxiety in learning L2. Additional ways that network science can be used to increase our understanding of language learning are discussed.

English adverbial sentences allow flexible clause ordering: main-adverbial and adverbial-main, and their comprehension by English monolingual speakers is influenced by iconicity. Iconic sentences, whose clause order reflects the chronological sequence of real-world events, are more easily comprehended (“We ate dinner before we went to see a movie”; “After we ate dinner, we went to see a movie”) than non-iconic sentences where the order of the clauses does not match the order of events in the real world (“Before we went to see a movie, we ate dinner”; “We went to see a movie after we ate dinner”). However, Mandarin speakers strongly prefer the adverbial-main order in spontaneous Mandarin speech. This paper examines whether iconicity represents a generally preferred strategy for interpreting English adverbial sentences or whether a speaker’s first language affects processing. In two studies, we tested the comprehension of English before- and after-sentences by Mandarin-English bilingual and English monolingual adults, using online pupillometry with offline accuracy in a sentence-picture matching task. We found that bilinguals, like monolinguals, comprehended after-sentences in the iconic adverbial-main order (also the preferred order in Mandarin) more accurately and with less effort than in the reverse order. However, unlike monolinguals, bilinguals did not comprehend before-sentences better in either the iconic main-adverbial order or the preferred adverbial-main order for Mandarin. Our results suggest that iconicity is not universal; instead, language-specific usage patterns, such as preferred clause order, compete with iconicity to influence processing of adverbial sentences.

This study examines the relationship between code-switching (CS) experience, as measured by the Bilingual Code-Switching Profile (BCSP), and ratings from an acceptability judgment task (AJT). Although the BCSP offers a structured way to quantify bilinguals’ CS behavior, its application in grammaticality studies and its ability to reflect bilingual heterogeneity have been underexamined. We address this by asking: (1) How do BCSP scores predict acceptability ratings of Spanish–English CS sentences? and (2) How do BCSP scores reflect the social heterogeneity of US bilingual populations, focusing on age, gender, region, place of birth, and national origin? A total of 137 Latinx bilinguals across the USA completed an online survey including the BCSP and 40 reggaetón-inspired CS sentences, balanced for grammaticality and experimental label (i.e., Source: Reggaetón lyrics). Results from multilevel and linear regression models indicate that higher BCSP scores are associated with higher AJT ratings, particularly among participants who report frequent CS use, greater proficiency, and positive attitudes. Social variables had limited impact, although age and place of birth emerged as modest predictors. These findings highlight the BCSP’s value in capturing CS experience and stress the need to account for bilingual variability in studies of acceptability judgments.

This study examined the enduring influence of societal Spanish dominance on the indigenous Kaqchikel Mayan heritage language through three experiments with native Kaqchikel speakers. The experiments assessed word production and the processing of transitive and interrogative sentences in both Kaqchikel and Spanish. In Experiment 1, Kaqchikel speakers produced more words in Spanish than in their heritage language, indicating Spanish dominance in lexical access and suggesting a possible shift in language dominance. Given Kaqchikel’s traditional VOS (verb–object–subject) order and Spanish’s predominant SVO (subject–verb–object) order, Experiment 2a showed that in Kaqchikel, SVO sentences were processed with slightly higher accuracy than VOS sentences. In Experiment 2b for Spanish, SVO sentences were processed significantly faster than VOS sentences. Experiment 3 investigated subject (who, SquestVO) and object (whom, OquestVS) questions. In Kaqchikel (Experiment 3a), no significant differences were found in accuracy or reaction time between the two structures. In Spanish (Experiment 3b), SquestVO sentences were processed more accurately and quickly than OquestVS sentences. Overall, Kaqchikel appears to be influenced by Spanish with a general reduction in the VOS advantage and becoming more sensitive to SVO instead. These findings highlight the strong influence of Spanish on language processing among Kaqchikel speakers and reveal clear disparities between the two languages.

The current study investigates whether inclusive writing (IW), specifically full doublets (FD), that explicitly mention both masculine and feminine forms (e.g., les étudiants[masc.] et les étudiantes[fem.] | male students and female students), can reduce male-default bias in adolescents’ mental representations, and whether reading fluency or gender moderates this effect. One hundred and nine French-speaking adolescents (mean age = 12.1 years), with a broad range of reading abilities, produced lists of YouTubers and influencers under either masculine or FD instruction. Results from mixed-effects models revealed that FD significantly increased the proportion of female figures named, compared to the masculine condition, independently of reading fluency. Girls generated more female exemplars than boys, but there was no interaction with instruction type. These findings suggest that FD effectively reshape referential processing in adolescence, even for less fluent readers, by facilitating the activation of feminine exemplars in working memory and guiding referential resolution. Practically, this demonstrates that brief linguistic interventions can influence social cognition across diverse literacy profiles. Our study bridges developmental, social, and psycholinguistic perspectives, offering scalable, low-cost strategies to promote gender equity. Future work should compare FD with other inclusive formats and examine online processing costs (e.g., via eye-tracking) in educational contexts.

Abstraction is a fundamental cognitive capacity underlying the organization of semantic knowledge. This study examines the development of language-mediated abstraction in school children, defined as the ability to generate increasingly more general lexical items from a given prompt, and investigates how this ability is shaped by word semantics. Children aged 9–13 years completed a longitudinal, generative word-production task in which they constructed taxonomic hierarchies by linking words through categorical inclusion relations (IS-A, e.g., dog IS-A animal), starting from prompts that varied in concreteness. Their productions were analyzed in terms of hierarchical productivity (ladder length) and validity (accuracy of taxonomic relations). Results revealed that language-mediated abstraction improves over time, particularly among younger children. Moreover, these longitudinal changes could not be explained by chronological age alone. Improvements occurred across semantic domains, although abstract prompts consistently elicited shorter taxonomic hierarchies than other concepts. Developmental variations also emerged in abstraction pathways, with nontaxonomic semantic relations occurring most frequently in children of intermediate age and in response to abstract and emotional concepts. Together, the findings provide evidence that concreteness and specificity constitute dissociable dimensions of abstraction, each contributing uniquely to the development and organization of semantic categories. By adopting a generative, longitudinal approach, this study offers novel insight into how children progressively construct and refine hierarchical conceptual knowledge through language.

Video games are prevalent and provide interactive reading platforms for learning. Despite its popularity and pedagogical potential, little is known about how players from different language backgrounds read text in video games. This exploratory study recruited 104 participants, including 56 first-language (L1) English speakers and 48 second-language (L2) English learners, who played the tutorial chapter of a commercial video game while their eye movements were recorded. The results showed that, at the subtitle level, L2 players had higher fixation counts and longer saccades than L1 players. At the word level, the word frequency effect was stronger among L2 players than L1 players in both early- and late-stage linguistic processing, as indicated by longer fixations on lower-frequency words. These eye-movement patterns suggest that L2 players adopted a more in-depth and effortful scanning strategy than L1 players when sampling textual information in gameplay. A similar lexical processing pattern was also found in an exploratory analysis of L2 players with different levels of L2 proficiency, further indicating the importance of vocabulary size for efficient lexical processing. The findings provide empirical insights into reading theories and practices related to digital reading.

Previous first (L1) and second language (L2) vocabulary acquisition research suggests that newly learned words are initially encoded episodically and are only fully integrated into the lexicon after a period of offline consolidation. While prior L2 consolidation research has utilized intentional vocabulary learning tasks, L2 vocabulary learning often occurs incidentally during meaning-focused tasks. To investigate consolidation under more incidental learning conditions, adult L1 Polish-L2 English learners read and listened to a story that contained 12 novel English-like words with novel semantic meanings. Lexical integration was measured using a pause detection task in which response latencies were compared between competitor words similar in form to the newly learned English-like words (e.g., daffodil) and control words. Overall, there was no increase in response latency for competitor words after a 24-hour consolidation period. However, higher word recognition accuracy immediately after the learning task led to increased response latencies for competitor words relative to control words after a 24-hour consolidation period. These results suggest that initial learning of the L2 form—as measured by recognition accuracy—is critical for L2 lexical integration and that consolidation effects can extend to adult L2 word learning under more incidental learning conditions.

The study investigates the memory effects of explicit and implicit negation used to inform about the absence of objects. Existing research indicates that negation can lead to incorrect recognition of negated objects as present (a negation-to-affirmation shift—NAS). Moreover, explicit and implicit negation leads to similar memory recognition errors. The current study broadens the scope of this research by including non-verbal recognition and free recall tests. In two experiments, participants were exposed to source material containing explicit or implicit negation, and their memory was assessed using a non-verbal recognition (Experiment 1) or a free recall test (Experiment 2). In both experiments, the quality of recall was not different between explicit and implicit negation. The results are consistent with accounts of negation processing that involve simulation-based representations. In a non-verbal recognition test, the NAS effect was replicated.

We examine the acceptability of agreeing infinitivals in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) using an offline Bi-modal Acceptability Judgment Task (B-AJT) based on Modesto (2018. Complement clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition (pp. 59–129). John Benjamins.), originally designed to test the Movement Theory of Control (MTC, e.g., Hornstein 1999. Linguistic Inquiry, 30, 69–96.). Following the MTC, subject raising and subject-control sentences are analyzed uniformly within a formal syntactic paradigm (e.g., Chomsky 1995. The minimalist program. MIT Press. et sequens). Rodrigues and Hornstein (2013. Syntax, 16(3), 292–309.) argue that intuitions on agreeing infinitives in BP in Modesto (2018. Complement clauses in Portuguese: Syntax and acquisition (pp. 59–129). John Benjamins.) are inconclusive and not worthy of serious consideration, thus neutralizing a would-be challenge to the MTC. We examine acceptability data from BP speakers (n = 52) living in the Southeastern US, which reveal a statistically significant difference (p < 0.029) in the acceptability of partial control (PC, m = 1.68/4) and no-control (NC) sentences (m = 2.26/4) with agreeing infinitives. We interpret this to be indicative of robust intuitions related to sentence structures with agreeing infinitives. The validity of such intuition data lends further credence to Merchant and Gupton (2025. Journal of Linguistics, 61(2), 301–337.), which reveals significant processing differences between control and raising structures, which is unexpected under the MTC account. Linear regression results reveal a correlation between geographic region and acceptability, highlighting the importance of geographic variation, which can reveal subtle microparametric differences within languages.

This study examined the effects of typographic enhancement (TE) on the attention to and learning of novel L2 collocations. In a within-participants design, 69 Dutch-speaking L2 English learners read nine texts containing 15 medical collocations (half typographically enhanced, half unenhanced) over two days while their eye movements were recorded. Eye movement data showed a significant effect of TE and exposure count on the processing of target collocations, with lower first pass times and higher rereading probabilities and fixation counts for enhanced collocations. Fixation durations, rereading probabilities, and fixation counts decreased across exposures, but the observed decreases were more pronounced for enhanced collocations. TE also resulted in higher gains in form recall and recognition tests. Regardless of TE, attention during reading, as measured by summed total reading times, was a marginally significant negative predictor of form recall, but not of form recognition.

Phonological awareness (PA) is a foundational skill in early literacy acquisition across languages, including English and Spanish. While previous research has explored how factors such as word structure, phoneme characteristics, syllable stress, and syllable complexity influence PA item difficulty, the relative impact of these features—and how they may operate similarly or differently across languages—remains insufficiently understood. This study investigated the linguistic and task-format features that contribute to item difficulty in an elision task and compares these effects in English and Spanish. Using adaptive LASSO regression and dominance analysis, the study identified three significant predictors of item difficulty in English and six in Spanish. In both languages, the medial position of the deleted segment and the use of expressive response formats are the strongest predictors of increased item difficulty. In Spanish, items that produce nonwords involve longer phonological structures or require syllable deletion are associated with higher difficulty, whereas initial segment deletion tends to be easier. For English, word-level elision is associated with lower difficulty. Together, these findings highlight important considerations for designing more linguistically sensitive PA assessments in both English and Spanish.

This study investigates the semantic representation of English psych verbs in Chinese-English bilinguals (CEBs) and how L2 proficiency modulates this process. A total of 180 CEBs, divided into low-, intermediate-, and high-proficiency groups, completed two masked priming experiments. Experiment 1 examined intralanguage semantic processing (synonym/antonym associations, word frequency effects) and found that high-proficiency learners showed a significant processing facilitation for high-frequency synonyms over antonyms, reflecting robust facilitation of high-frequency synonym priming. Experiment 2 explored interlanguage processing via Chinese-English (C-E)/English-Chinese (E-C) translation equivalents and word frequency, showing that low-proficiency participants exhibited the largest translation priming effects, particularly for high-frequency words in the C-E direction. Across all proficiency levels, intralanguage processing was generally faster than interlanguage processing, whereas interlanguage priming effects tended to be more pronounced overall. These findings reveal proficiency-dependent shifts in the interaction between semantic and frequency information, highlight translation equivalence as a core mechanism in bilingual semantic organization, and refine the distributed feature model and the shared asymmetric model by demonstrating their applicability to abstract verb categories beyond the concrete nouns on which they were originally developed.

This study employed electrophysiological measures to investigate the extent to which early exposure to a minoritized language (Otomi) influences the learning of its written words. Participants were adult heritage speakers who acquired Otomi and Spanish either simultaneously or sequentially during childhood but had never learned to read or write in Otomi. Their neural and behavioral responses were compared to those of Spanish-speaking L2 learners of Otomi. During two training sessions, all participants completed an association task pairing auditory Otomi words with images depicting their meanings and their written forms. In a third session, participants’ brain activity was recorded using event-related potentials (ERPs) during a no-go task that required evaluation of semantic congruency between Otomi written words and preceding images. Heritage speakers responded faster and more accurately than L2 learners. ERP results revealed an N400 effect for semantically incongruent word-image pairs in heritage speakers, but not in L2 learners. The N400 modulation observed in heritage speakers suggests reliance on lexical knowledge of their heritage language during written-word processing, reflecting the influence of early language exposure. These findings provide insight into how linguistic knowledge is maintained among heritage speakers of minoritized languages in contexts of social restriction and limited daily use.

We focus on lexical ambiguity to convene two frameworks—embodied cognition and models of representation of ambiguous words. In the first of the two studies, we collected sensorimotor ratings for separate meanings/senses of ambiguous words and compared homonyms (words with multiple unrelated meanings; e.g., bank) and polysemes (words with multiple related senses; e.g., paper) for the similarity of the obtained profiles on the 12 scales to demonstrate that the linguistic categorization was mirrored in the sensorimotor experience with the referents. We then collected subjective ratings of semantic similarities between pairs of meanings/senses within a word and investigated their relation with the similarity of the sensorimotor profiles to corroborate that the sensorimotor-based similarity was semantic in nature. Our results speak in favor of sensorimotor information as a component of representations of polysemous senses/homonymous meanings and advise future norming studies to take into account lexical ambiguity.

This study provides a multidimensional comparison of Standard Modern Greek and Standard Albanian, examines bidirectional cross-language vowel categorization, and identifies the acoustic cues that drive discriminability. Forty-two adults produced nonce words in carrier phrases; we extracted midpoint frequencies for the first three formants, formant dynamics, and vowel duration, and analyzed acoustic differences with mixed-effects models. We also simulated bidirectional category mapping using Random Forest classifiers trained on one language and applied to the other, and used explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to identify the features driving classification. The results showed that the shared five-vowel inventory was comparable across languages in overall spatial overlap, though with selective spectral/dynamic differences and pervasive timing divergence. The mapping simulations yielded largely corresponding mappings for shared vowels in both directions, although the reciprocal mappings were not fully symmetrical. Albanian /ə/ was classified mainly as Greek /o/, and Albanian /y/ primarily as Greek /i/. The machine learning classifier performed well, with XAI indicating duration as the dominant cue. The study demonstrates that cross-language vowel similarity is inherently multi-dimensional, since apparent equivalence in canonical vowel space can coexist with systematic temporal and spectral divergence that supports robust discriminability and predictable category mapping.

Understanding how verbs are processed during lexical access remains an open theoretical question, as most large-scale evidence has focused on nouns. This megastudy analyzes variables involved in the processing of Spanish verbs through response times obtained in a lexical decision task. The dataset, named SpaVerb-LD (Spanish Verb Lexical Decision), continues the SpaVerb-WN (Spanish Verb Word Naming), allowing direct comparison across tasks. The linear mixed-effects model revealed consistent facilitatory effects of word frequency and neighborhood size and inhibitory effects of word length and age of acquisition (AoA). For the first time in Spanish, we observed a facilitatory effect of word prevalence and an inhibitory effect of verb motor content. Previously reported two-way interactions were also replicated, including those between word prevalence and frequency, prevalence and neighborhood size, and AoA and length. A paradoxical interaction between AoA and word frequency was also identified. Crucially, these interactions indicate that lexical decision performance is shaped by the interplay between lexical and semantic variables, highlighting the role of semantic richness in verb processing. The findings support the view that semantic access is involved in lexical decision even in transparent languages and demonstrate that word prevalence and motor content are key to understanding lexical-semantic verb processing beyond traditional frequency-based accounts.

The Competition Model proposes that sentence interpretation relies on cues such as word order and verb agreement, weighted by their validity, cost, and strength. Heritage bilinguals offer an especially informative lens for this framework because they access multiple cue systems and vary widely in language experience, proficiency, and societal exposure. This study examined how these factors shape sentence interpretation in 49 English monolinguals and 52 Spanish–English heritage bilinguals using a sentence-interpretation task in English and Spanish. Results showed that bilinguals adapted cue strategies across languages, relying more on verb agreement in Spanish and word order in English, consistent with patterns of amalgamation and transfer. Processing costs increased under cue conflict, reflected in longer response times, particularly when bilinguals engaged morphosyntactic cues in noncanonical structures. Objective proficiency demonstrated language-specific effects in English: English vocabulary and bilingual listening comprehension predicted greater reliance on word order in English. Whereas objective Spanish vocabulary and self-reported Spanish proficiency predicted stronger agreement-cue use in Spanish. Bilinguals exhibited diverse cue-dominance profiles, highlighting substantial within-group variability and extending the Competition Model through composite measures of cue strength.

This study investigates how statistical orthographic knowledge—how frequently a phonological unit is written in a language—influences phonological awareness tasks. In Experiment 1, 144 children with varying reading levels and 61 undergraduate French-speaking students completed a syllable-counting task for consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) and consonant-consonant-vowel-consonant (CCVC) acoustic monosyllabic pseudowords. The number of syllables of the pseudowords was ambiguous (one or two) since some of their ending rhymes could be frequently spelled with an “e” (e.g., [-uʃ]), whereas others are frequently spelled without an “e” (e.g., [-is]). The results showed that (1) pseudowords tended to be more frequently counted as one-syllable sequences when they had a high probability of not be spelled with an “e” rather than when they had a low probability of not be spelled with an “e, ” and that (2) this effect was more pronounced in literate adults as compared to children with lower reading levels. Experiment 2, involving prereaders, confirmed that children without formal literacy instruction showed little influence of orthographic information on syllable counts. These findings suggest that phonological responses are shaped by statistical relationships between phonological and orthographic representations, which emerge gradually through learning to read.