Cross-linguistic influence (CLI) is widely acknowledged to be bidirectional; however, empirical evidence concerning L2-to-L1 effects on cognitive processing remains limited. Drawing on the notion of progressive aspect saliency, which distinguishes languages by the degree of grammaticalization of ongoingness, the present study investigated whether the saliency of progressive aspect in a second language (L2) affects motion event processing in the first language (L1) with two psycholinguistic experiments. Experiment 1 employed a video description task to assess lexicalization preferences. Compared with Chinese monolinguals, learners of German mentioned endpoints more frequently, whereas learners of English showed an increased focus on trajectories, which indicated that the saliency of progressive aspects in L2 would influence the lexicalization of the motion events in L1. Experiment 2 used a matching decision task with and without verbal interference. In the verbal-interference condition where a digit-rehearsal task was involved, no group differences were found. However, the no-interference condition showed that group differences emerged when the digit-rehearsal task was removed: learners of English were more likely than those of German to falsely accept trajectory-matching targets, whereas learners of German were more likely than those of English to falsely accept endpoint-matching targets. The findings demonstrated that the saliency of progressive aspects in L2 would not influence the non-linguistic perceptual representations of the motion events in L1. Taken together, the acquisition of progressive aspects in L2 would influence the processing of motion events in L1 at the linguistic level rather than the cognitive level.
Korean negation has two forms, Short-Form Negation (SFN) and Long-Form Negation (LFN), claimed to have different pragmatic meanings in terms of formality. This paper investigated whether Korean 5-year-old children and adults responded to the level of formality in a conversation, using an experimental design in which a puppet asked the participants either formal or informal-style questions. The results showed that adults produced long-form negation significantly more often in the formal condition than in the informal condition, whereas children predominantly preferred short-form negation across both conditions. Generalized linear mixed-effects modelling revealed significant main effects of speech style and age group. Although the interaction between speech style and age group was not statistically significant, planned pairwise comparisons indicated a significant effect of speech style in adults but not in children. These findings suggest that sensitivity to speech style in negation selection is evident in adults but is not yet fully established in 5-year-old children, supporting the view that pragmatic control over negation forms continues to develop during language acquisition.
Imageability, the ease with which a word evokes a mental image, is known to facilitate word processing in young adults. Both imageability ratings and vocabulary increase with participants’ age, and semantics are thought to play an important role in lexical processing in normal aging. Yet, word processing research has rarely included older adults. The aim of this study was to investigate age-related changes in the imageability effect in visual word recognition, along with its relationship with vocabulary. In total, 47 young adults and 47 older adults performed a lexical decision task. The materials included 50 high and 50 low imageability words. We assessed vocabulary using the LexTale. Additionally, we controlled for mental imagery vividness and alexithymia. In line with the literature, imageability and vocabulary positively predicted performance in the lexical decision task. Importantly, response times revealed that age modulated the facilitatory imageability effect, with older adults showing an increased benefit from high imageability compared to younger adults. This effect did not change reliably according to the vocabulary level of the participants. The data suggests that older adults rely more on word imageability in visual word recognition than younger ones, possibly due to compensatory mechanisms. The increased reliance on imageability in older adults brings new evidence of the involvement of sensorimotor representations in facilitating lexical access. Our results highlight the importance of considering individual characteristics such as participants’ age when investigating lexico-semantic processing.
The present study investigated how Mandarin-speaking 3- to 5-year-olds map temporal sequences onto three spatial axes: sagittal, vertical, and horizontal. Two experiments were conducted. In Experiment 1, children arranged pictorial event sequences along each axis. In Experiment 2, they chose between ordered and unordered temporal sequences in a simpler choice task. Across the preschool years, children showed increasing use of spatial structure to represent time, but the pattern varied across axes. In Experiment 1, responding in the conventionally coded direction appeared earlier on the vertical and horizontal axes than on the sagittal axis. In Experiment 2, children's selection of ordered chronological sequences increased with age and was already detectable in the youngest group, although ordered-sequence choice remained relatively weaker on the sagittal axis. These findings suggest that early mental timeline development involves not only growing sensitivity to ordered temporal structure, but also the gradual coordination of temporal order with spatial direction through axis-specific linguistic, cultural, embodied, and task-related factors.
Definitional competence involves the ability to understand and produce definitions of different kinds of words. The Co.De. Scale was developed to systematically assess this skill across age groups, emphasizing both linguistic form and semantic content. This study aimed to provide normative data for the Italian population and validate the Co.De. Scale in terms of its validity, reliability, and responsiveness. A sample of 2262 participants aged 3–62 years from various regions in Italy was assessed using the Co.De. Scale, and age-stratified percentile norms were derived. Dimensionality and construct validity were examined through parallel analysis, confirmatory factor analyses comparing different models, an item response theory model, and measuremen-invariance analyses across gender and age-group; convergent validity was examined though associations with linguistic and cognitive measures. Reliability was evaluated via internal consistency and inter-rater agreement, and responsiveness via pre-post changes in an intervention study. Definitional competence showed a clear developmental progression, with significant effects of age and education levels. Bifactor indices supported an essentially unidimensional structure, which was fully invariant across gender but—consistent with a developing ability—not across age groups. The scale showed excellent internal consistency, high inter-rater agreement, significant correlations with related constructs, and sensitivity to intervention-related change. The Co.De. Scale is psychometrically sound tool for assessing definitional competence from preschool to adulthood. Its applications in educational, clinical, and research settings, combined with its ability to capture developmental changes, underscore its value for understanding and enhancing linguistic and cognitive development.
The plasticity of bilingual language systems across the lifespan remains a central issue in theories of language representation and control, yet late-life language learning is rarely integrated into these accounts. This review synthesizes behavioral and neurocognitive evidence on older adults acquiring an additional language, with the aim of clarifying how aging shapes bilingual language learning mechanisms. We first report a quantitative synthesis of behavioral studies examining the effects of late language learning on control-related domains implicated in bilingual language processing, including executive coordination, attentional regulation, and working memory. Results indicate a small but reliable effect, with modest improvements primarily observed in higher-order executive processes rather than broad enhancements in general cognitive function. We then review neuroimaging evidence showing that late language acquisition engages language, control, and memory systems, including frontal–parietal and memory-related networks, in patterns shaped by task demands, age-related constraints, and learning stage. Building on these findings, we propose the Cognitive and Neural Preservation in Older Language Learners (CNPOLL) framework as a lifespan account of bilingual language plasticity in older adulthood. By situating late-life language learning within contemporary models of bilingualism, this review highlights older learners as a theoretically informative population for understanding the adaptability and limits of bilingual language systems.
The aging process is associated with changes in cognitive and communicative skills, including pragmatic one, the ability to appropriately use language and other expressive means in social contexts. Despite its importance for quality of life and autonomy, the decline of pragmatic ability has received little attention in aging research and intervention. This preliminary study aims to investigate the efficacy and specificity of the Advanced Cognitive Pragmatic Treatment (Advanced-CPT), a novel training program designed to improve pragmatic performance in healthy older adults by targeting different expressive modalities, i.e., linguistic, extralinguistic, and paralinguistic, in addition to sensitivity to context. Twenty-four healthy participants aged 65–86 years completed the nine-week group training. Participants were assessed immediately before and after the training, and at a three-month follow-up. Cognitive functions, i.e., attention, memory, processing speed, executive functions and Theory of Mind (ToM) were also evaluated pre- and post-training. Participants showed a significant improvement in overall pragmatic performance from pre- to post-training, which was maintained at follow-up. Significant improvements were noted in both pragmatic comprehension and production, and in both linguistic and extralinguistic expressive means. A trend towards enhancement was also observed in paralinguistic ability, although the changes did not reach statistical significance, while no significant change emerged in sensitivity to the context. As expected, cognitive and ToM measures remained stable. The findings provide preliminary support for the potential of the Advanced-CPT to improve pragmatic ability in healthy aging, with gains that remained detectable at follow-up. Cognitive and ToM measures did not show comparable pre-post changes, suggesting that the main improvements observed in the present study were confined to the pragmatic domain.
Grounded in Social Cognitive Theory, this study investigated the associations among self-efficacy, personal motivation, critical thinking, perceived value of English, and English learning performance (ELP) among 322 Chinese EFL learners. The structural equation modeling results showed that students with higher levels of self-efficacy and personal motivation tended to report stronger critical thinking, which was, in turn, positively associated with their ELP. Perceived value of English further intensified the link between critical thinking and ELP. These findings lend support to the view that critical thinking may serve as a cognitive route through which motivational beliefs are related to language learning outcomes, while also underscoring the role of perceived value in conditioning the strength of this relationship in EFL learning contexts.
This study investigates the processing of two Chinese reflexives, ziji ('self') and ta-ziji ('s/he-self'), in structural contexts that support plain anaphor and intensifier interpretations, respectively. Two self-paced reading experiments were conducted to examine the interpretive patterns. Converging evidence from post-reading acceptability judgments and reading times showed that, in contexts supporting plain anaphor readings, both reflexives exhibited locality biases. However, in structural contexts that enforce intensifier readings, the processing patterns changed. These findings highlight the different processing profiles of the two reflexives and provide new insights into how discourse and syntactic constraints interact during online reflexive resolution.
While the impact of prosody on sentence processing in a first language (L1) has been widely studied and is well-documented, the extent to which second language (L2) learners utilize prosodic cues remains less clear. This study investigated how prosody affects the resolution of prepositional phrase (PP) attachment ambiguity, particularly when combined with visual contextual cues, and compared the performance by native English speakers and Chinese learners of English. Participants' attachment preferences alongside their reaction time from both correct and incorrect responses were analyzed to assess differences in L1 and L2 sentence processing. The results reveal that native participants were able to make effective use of prosodic information to resolve PP-attachment ambiguity, even when the accompanying visual context biased a noun phrase attachment. In contrast, the Chinese L2 learners showed a strong and consistent preference for the verb phrase attachment. This suggests that their sentence processing relied more heavily on the structure-based parsing strategies. These contrasting patterns between L1 and L2 speakers highlight the challenges L2 learners have in coordinating multiple information sources, such as prosody and visual context, during language comprehension.
Alignment refers to the tendency of interlocutors to reuse each other's language patterns during interaction, which has been regarded as a learning mechanism in second language (L2) development. Existing research has primarily examined how task-related factors shape L2 alignment, whereas much less is known about whether learner-related individual differences are associated with variation in alignment and with its subsequent learning benefits. This study examined whether learners' implicit capacity for adaptation was associated with the magnitude of L2 alignment and writing development in a comparative continuation task. Participants completed a baseline writing task, a continuation task, two priming-based measures of implicit capacity for adaptation (i.e., L1 lexical priming and L1 syntactic priming), and LLAMA_D as a supplementary measure of implicit phonological sensitivity. Results showed that sensitivity to L1 lexical priming was positively correlated with the magnitude of L2 lexical alignment, and sensitivity to L1 syntactic priming was positively correlated with the magnitude of L2 syntactic alignment. Furthermore, sensitivity to L1 syntactic priming positively predicted gains in overall L2 writing quality, accuracy, and fluency, whereas sensitivity to L1 lexical priming positively predicted gains in fluency alone; LLAMA_D was a positive predictor and sensitivity to L1 syntactic priming a negative predictor of gains in syntactic complexity. These findings highlight the role of implicit capacity for adaptation in L2 alignment and writing development, shedding new light upon individual differences in L2 learning.
The thesis of the Ontogenesis of Reference by Quine (1960, 1969, 1973) has aroused the interest of certain authors in developmental psychology. This theory claims that ontology is acquired only through language learning by the child, rejecting the possibility of an innate conceptual ontology. Developmental psychologists have attempted to test the plausibility of this hypothesis by conducting several experiments with children, generally concluding that Quine was mistaken. However, it will be argued that none of the experiments really affect Quinean philosophy. For this, a deep insight into his philosophical position is needed, to properly understand the theoretical notions that the psychologists confuse in their experiments.
This study reports on an empirical study, focusing on the declarative and procedural knowledge in English-speaking learners’ acquisition of the verbal identity condition in their second language Chinese grammars. While subjects and objects in English sentences are generally overt, both subjects and objects in Chinese can be ‘covert’. It is argued in this article that the absence of subjects and objects in affirmative answers to Chinese yes–no questions arises from TP ellipsis under a verbal identity condition (Simpson, 2014). A cross-modal self-paced reading task (SRT) and an acceptability judgment task (AJT) are involved in the study, and the results of the AJT show that all learner groups, like native Chinese speakers, judge answers with covert arguments under the verbal identity condition as more natural than those not under such a condition. In the SRT, however, beginner learners, but not intermediate and advanced learners, fail to show sensitivity to the verbal identity condition. These findings align with the Declarative/Procedural Model (Ullman, 2005, 2015), indicating that beginners rely on declarative, rule-based knowledge to evaluate grammaticality but lack proceduralized capacity to process covert arguments in real time. With increased exposure and proficiency, learners proceduralize grammatical computations, such as lexical identity checking, movement, and ellipsis, which enable them to acquire native-like sensitivity to the verbal identity condition in their procedural as well as declarative knowledge.
In this article we explore the use of Granger Causality as a method to shed light on causal relationships in studies on (second) language acquisition. Understanding such relationships remains a central challenge in longitudinal SLA research, where both learner variables and measures of linguistic development interact and evolve dynamically over time. We first explain the concept of Granger Causality and show how the method works, before providing an illustration using weekly measures of L2 development (C-Test performance and speech fluency) and individual difference variables (operation span, motivation and wellbeing) to explore their possible causal relationships in a longitudinal study with later-life language learners. The results reveal several asymmetric patterns. The findings are discussed in relation to the existing literature on later-life language learning and demonstrate that Granger causality is a valuable method for examining the directionality of relationships between variables in longitudinal data.
Studies in alphabetic languages have consistently demonstrated the significant contribution of morphological awareness to word reading and reading comprehension in elementary school aged children. However, there are mixed findings regarding the size of the effect of morphological awareness to reading skills while there is limited research on the relationship between compounding morphological awareness and reading. In this study we aimed to examine the unique contribution of compounding morphological awareness and inflectional morphological awareness to reading in Greek language. One hundred and twenty children in Grade 1 and one hundred and twenty-six children in Grade 3 were assessed on measures of phonological awereness, vocabulary, decoding, reading comprehension, inflectional morphological awareness and compounding morphological awareness. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that compounding morphological awareness made significant consistent contributions to word reading in Grade 1 and in Grade 3 when phonological awareness and vocabulary were accounted for but not when we controlled for inflectional morphological awareness, phonological awareness, and vocabulary. However, only in Grade 3 compounding morphological awareness remained a significant predictor of reading comprehension even after controlling for inflectional morphological awareness, word reading, for but not when we controlled for inflectional morphological awareness, phonological, and vocabulary. The semantic transparency of compounds appeared to affect the relation between compounding morphological awareness and reading comprehension.
This study investigated the relationships of language aptitude (LA) with working memory (WM) and their predictive roles in explaining third language (L3) comprehension. A sample of L1 Turkish-speaking English language teaching majors (N = 109) completed the LLAMA version 3 (Meara Rogers, 2019), forward digit span, rotation, symmetry, and operation span tasks (Foster et al., 2015). L3 listening and reading comprehension measures were also administered to a subgroup of participants with L3 learning experience (N = 33). A factor analysis indicated verbal/phonological memory (digit span, operation span, and partially LLAMA D), visuospatial WM (symmetry and rotation span), and LLAMA (LLAMA B, E, F, partially D) factors. The L3 experience was not significantly correlated with any of the cognitive factors. The cognitive factors did not significantly contribute beyond L3 experience in explaining variance in L3 reading and listening comprehension. Findings were discussed regarding the verbal abilities shared by LA and WM and the potential sources of variation within L3 experience in young adult populations.
Understanding the cognitive mechanisms of spoken language production is essential for explaining human communication. Grounded in embodied cognition theory, this study investigates how object-directed sensorimotor features shape the conceptual preparation stage underlying concept selection. In Experiment 1, participants selected concepts from two dimensions: graspability (graspable vs. non-graspable) and semantic category (artificial vs. natural). This was done under three levels of response competition. Results showed a robust processing advantage for graspable objects over non-graspable ones across all tasks. More importantly, a systematic and pervasive advantage for artificial objects over natural ones was also found specifically in the control and low-choice task conditions. Experiment 2, which also employed the concept selection paradigm, examined graspable objects only, distinguishing between precision and power grips. Results revealed that precision-grip objects were selected faster than power-grip objects, an advantage that was most pronounced in the low-choice condition. Notably, this precision motor facilitation was reliable for both artificial and natural objects. Moreover, the advantage for artificial objects over natural objects remained significant and was independent of the grip-type effect. These findings demonstrate that motor representations are automatically and robustly activated during conceptual preparation. Their facilitatory influence is characterized by a consistent categorical advantage for artifacts and an additive benefit from fine-grained motor parameters, with the expression of these effects being dynamically calibrated, but not abolished, by task-imposed cognitive demands. This study underscores the hierarchical and context-sensitive interplay between sensorimotor and semantic systems in concept selection during spoken language production.
This study investigated the extent to which the role of lexical tone is contingent upon phonemic segments. Employing the printed-word paradigm, this study presented native Mandarin speakers with a visual display comprising a target word (e.g., "" /chai2huo3/, "firewood"), a same-tone competitor (e.g., "" /cha2dao4/, "tea ceremony"), a different-tone competitor (e.g., "" /cha1kong3/, "socket"), and two distractors. Simultaneously, participants listened to an auditory target word. Critically, the phonological competitors shared partial segmental information with the spoken target words. Participants were then required to select the visual target word in the visual display. Results revealed substantial phonological competition effects in both the same-tone and different-tone conditions, with the former exhibiting a more pronounced effect. These results elucidate that the role of lexical tone partially depends on the availability of segmental information. Even in cases where certain segments are accessible, lexical tone can still influence the activation degree of the lexical candidate based on the tonal similarity, where the more similar candidates are activated to a higher degree than the less similar ones.
