Abstract 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.
Abstract 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.
Trilinguals' three languages can be activated simultaneously, but the patterns of co-activation in the language network remain unclear. Our study examines language processing and co-activation in trilingual speakers of Russian, Hebrew, and English. Participants completed a visual search eye-tracking experiment in three languages with cross-linguistic competitors from either one or two languages present in the visual display, as well as vocabulary assessments indexing proficiency and a Flanker task indexing cognitive control. When competitors were present from only one non-target language, higher proficiency in the non-target language increased co-activation, while higher proficiency in the target language decreased co-activation or showed no effects. When competitors were present from two non-target languages, higher proficiency decreased co-activation of one competing language and had a variable effect on the second. Decreased co-activation of more-dominant languages and increased co-activation of less-dominant languages was associated with stronger cognitive control. We conclude that trilinguals co-activate languages similarly to bilinguals when competitors from only one language are present but show different patterns when competitors are present from two languages, with individual differences in language proficiency, dominance, and cognitive control shaping levels of co-activation of each language in the trilingual cognitive system.
Although the home literacy environment (HLE) is known to influence early literacy, less is understood about how language-specific HLE components relate to literacy outcomes in bilingual children. This study examined the HLE of 104 first-grade Chinese-English bilinguals and its associations with English literacy. Parents completed parallel HLE questionnaires for Chinese and English, and children were assessed on English receptive vocabulary, letter-word recognition, and reading comprehension using standardized tests. Descriptive results showed children experienced a richer HLE in English than in Chinese, though parents engaged in literacy activities in both languages. Children performed above age expectations in reading-related skills but below average in receptive vocabulary. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed distinct patterns: English HLE had limited associations with English outcomes, whereas several Chinese HLE components were significantly linked to English literacy. When both HLEs were considered, Chinese book exposure and English digital device use positively predicted reading comprehension and overall reading, while Chinese digital device use negatively predicted reading comprehension and receptive vocabulary. These results highlight the differentiated roles of language-specific HLE components in bilingual contexts and suggest that bilingual HLEs function as integrated, interrelated literacy ecologies rather than separate monolingual environments. Supporting both languages at home may therefore enhance literacy outcomes across languages.
Abstract In prior studies, contextual diversity (CD) has been shown to significantly impact word learning, yet gaps remain in understanding its theoretical underpinnings and moderating factors. This research aimed to synthesize trends in CD studies, evaluate the heterogeneity in its definitions and operationalizations, explore its correlation with word learning, and examine potential moderators influencing this relationship. After a literature search and application of screening criteria, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis of 20 empirical studies. The primary target population comprises both L1 monolingual and L2 bilingual speakers. Behavioral studies revealed a significant effect of CD on word learning (Cohen’s d = 0.44, p < .001). Eye-tracking data demonstrated significant effects during early and later stages of processing, reflecting heightened attention: first fixation duration: d = −0.365, p = .023, gaze duration: d = −0.574, p = .005, go-past time: d = −0.749, p = .023, and total time: d = −0.691, p = .009. Moderator analysis identified age as a key factor, while gaps in theoretical frameworks and assessments of cognitive moderators were noted. These findings highlight the need for integrating offline and online methods and developing clearer theoretical models to advance our understanding of CD.
Increased interest in depth of processing (DoP) within instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) research highlights its influence on L2 learning outcomes, especially in vocabulary retention, grammatical accuracy, and overall proficiency. Despite its theoretical significance, inconsistencies in DoP's conceptualization and operationalization have resulted in mixed findings regarding its impact on language development. This study presents a research synthesis and quantitative meta-analysis of ISLA studies on DoP, examining the operational definitions of DoP and the variations in its operationalizations across studies. The analysis examines how DoP affects L2 learning outcomes and how differences in its definition and operationalization shape these outcomes. The study also identifies key limitations in DoP research, including inconsistencies across conceptual frameworks and operationalizations, and a lack of a unified approach. Finally, it discusses the methodological and pedagogical implications of DoP and proposes future research directions to refine its operationalization and explore its sustained effects on L2 development.
Readers associate the generic masculine (e.g., in German, die Zuschauer, for a gender-mixed group) more with men, whereas they associate the German gender star form (e.g., die Zuschauer*innen) more with women. However, the stability or malleability of these gender biases is unclear. In the present study (N = 272), we examined whether increasing the salience of the gender star form's inclusiveness (by anaphoric references to an equal number of women and men) in a first task influences gender representations in ensuing tasks. We observed no influence of the salience manipulation on two measures, but for a third measure, response speed, the female bias of the gender star form was neutralized by the salience manipulation. Thus, for some-though not all-measures, experiences in a previous task seem to influence how easily representations of men compared to women are available, indicating that gender representations elicited by language forms are malleable.
Abstract This study examines whether readers simulate the colors of objects during vocabulary processing and how varying levels of automatization in word recognition influence this process. Sixty-seven participants completed a semantic Stroop task in both their first language (Japanese) and second language (English), identifying the font color of presented nouns. Automatization in word recognition was assessed through a lexical decision task. The results did not provide clear evidence for a Stroop effect, and the degree of automatization in word recognition also did not show notable effects. Interestingly, reaction times were faster in the second language than in the first language only under matched conditions. These findings suggest that embodied knowledge may not always be engaged during linguistic processing.
Abstract Communication often hinges on our ability to describe and explain things clearly so others can understand them. While this ability develops throughout childhood, little is known about how it is shaped in adulthood. This gap matters, as referential communication is central to everyday social and professional interactions. This study examines how nonverbal intelligence, formal education, literacy, and theory of mind (ToM) predict referential communication performance in adults. Forty female Spanish-speaking adults in Monterrey, Mexico—20 low-SES and 20 high-SES—completed a referential communication task along with measures of reading fluency, print exposure, nonverbal IQ, and ToM (false-belief and faux-pas tasks). Results revealed that IQ, years of education, and faux-pas comprehension significantly predicted referential communication scores. Our findings suggest that referential clarity in adult speech may rely less on reading experience and more on cognitive ability, opportunities to practice referential communication, and sensitivity to social norms and intentions. We discuss the implications of these findings.
Abstract 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.
Abstract Sentences with plural expressions can be ambiguous between a collective interpretation, where a group of agents acts together on a single object, and a distributive interpretation, where individual members act separately on different objects. Previous studies have identified developmental differences in both interpretation preferences and the use of distributive markers such as universal quantifiers: adults prefer collective interpretations, while children show no clear preference between readings; moreover, children struggle with distributive quantifiers in both comprehension and production, while adults reliably use them when needed. This study is the first to compare both comprehension preferences and production patterns across three age groups: Italian-speaking preschoolers, second graders, and adults. In a picture selection task, participants chose between collective and distributive pictures in response to unmarked, distributive, or collective sentences. In a production task, they described scenes depicting either collective or distributive actions. Results showed that all groups—including, surprisingly, preschoolers—accurately comprehended both distributive and collective markers and interpreted unmarked sentences as collective. However, in production, adults and second graders were more likely to explicitly mark distributive rather than collective interpretations, while preschoolers rarely used any disambiguating expressions. We argue that these findings reflect a developmental shift in pragmatic competence rather than in lexical knowledge, contributing new insights into the interface between semantics, pragmatics, and language development.
Although children with cochlear implants (CIs) have limited access to pitch information due to the suboptimal device transmission, durational cues are relatively well preserved, allowing for the acquisition of prosodic cues needed for communication. Recent findings show that Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs can produce prosodic cues (e.g., duration and pitch) to disambiguate noun-noun compounds (e.g., xiong-mao "panda") and lists (e.g., xiong, mao "bear, cat"), with those implanted early (before age 2) demonstrating production patterns similar to their typical hearing (TH) peers. This then raises questions about these children's ability to perceive prosodic cues, and if early implantation again enhances their performance. These questions were investigated using a two-alternative forced-choice task with 57 Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with CIs and 66 TH peers. The results show that all preschoolers can perceive the prosodic cues needed to identify compounds but not lists, suggesting that, like English, the mapping between prosodic cues and postlexical meaning is also acquired late in children learning a tonal language. In terms of the effect of CIs, those implanted before age 2 performed as well as their TH peers. These findings suggest that preschoolers may rely more on other linguistic information rather than prosodic cues when comprehending compounds and lists, offering cross-linguistic evidence for this tendency. Furthermore, interventions for preschoolers with CIs should support the mapping of prosodic cues to discourse functions rather than just vocabulary training, improving daily communicative abilities.
This study examined fingerspelling accuracy and error patterns in deaf American Sign Language (ASL) signers and written spelling in hearing English speakers to investigate how orthographic representations are shaped by phonological, visual, and motor encoding strategies. Deaf participants (n = 39) completed a fingerspelling repetition task, while hearing participants (n = 35) completed a written dictation task using the same word and pseudoword stimuli. While overall accuracy did not differ significantly between groups, deaf participants exhibited qualitatively distinct error patterns, including higher rates of deletions and transpositions, compared to hearing participants who made more substitution errors. Deaf participants also produced more pronunciation-violating errors. Notably, they showed greater accuracy in preserving geminate (double letter) segments, highlighting enhanced sensitivity to letter identity and quantity, likely supported by the explicit visual-motor representation of geminates in fingerspelling. Additionally, deaf participants showed no difference in accuracy between real words and pseudowords, indicating that fingerspelling strategies generalized beyond stored lexical forms. We interpret these findings in light of graphemic buffer constraints, motoric fluency pressures, and the structural affordances of the fingerspelling system. Visually based encoding strategies can support robust orthographic representations for those who rely less on speech-based phonological coding.
This study investigates how lexical, phrasal, and contrastive stress are acoustically realized in American English, focusing on whether men and women differ in how they use pitch, amplitude, and duration to convey stress. Thirty-six native speakers completed minimal-pair stress production tasks online. We analyzed the resulting speech using prosodic contour measures, Bayesian ANOVAs, mixed-effects regression, Random Forest Classification, and human coder judgments. Results show greater acoustic overlap between lexical and contrastive stress than between either of those and phrasal stress. Duration was the primary cue for phrasal stress, while lexical and contrastive stress relied more evenly on multiple cues. Gender-based differences were especially evident in contrastive stress, which, to our knowledge, has not previously been studied in relation to gender: women relied more on pitch, while men emphasized amplitude and duration. These findings highlight the multidimensional acoustic nature of stress realization and demonstrate the value of combining computational and perceptual approaches in prosody research.
Evidence that certain semantic and pragmatic skills follow a similar developmental trajectory cross-linguistically suggests an important role for semantic-pragmatic tasks in the assessment of bilingual children. This study investigates whether quantifiers constitute a language-neutral linguistic category in this context. Forty-three Polish-English bilingual children aged 4-7 years completed the Quantifier Comprehension Task (QCT) and the Test for Reception of Grammar (TROG-2), a standardized morphosyntactic assessment, in both languages. The results indicated that children's performance on QCT is strongly correlated between their two languages. This correlation was significantly stronger than that observed for the TROG-2, indicating that quantifier comprehension may be less language dependent than general grammar comprehension measures. These findings highlight the diagnostic value of semantic-pragmatic tasks, particularly quantifier interpretation, in evaluating bilingual language development. While the children in this study are all typically developing bilinguals, our goal is to explore whether quantifier comprehension tasks can support the development of language-neutral tools for assessing bilingual language skills.
Acquiring morphology poses a considerable challenge in second language acquisition (SLA), highlighting the need to explore methods that facilitate this task for L2 learners. One potential facilitator is salience, which is theorized to aid language acquisition by directing learners' attention to certain linguistic elements. To empirically investigate the impact of one type of salience, perceptual salience, a text-based eye-tracking experiment was conducted with 68 L1 Dutch speakers who read 240 sentences in Englishti, an English-based semi-artificial language featuring perceptually high-salient (-ulp) and low-salient (-o) morphemes according to length. Learning context was manipulated with participants being either assigned to an intentional or an incidental paradigm. The task consisted of two phases: a learning phase involving input flooding of the target morphemes followed by content-related questions, and a testing phase where participants completed a grammaticality judgment task on Englishti sentences, half of which were familiar from the learning phase and half of which were new. The results revealed a significant influence of salience, mediated by learning context and English proficiency, on fixation durations, thus empirically confirming the effect of perceptual salience on attention allocation in L2 morphology acquisition.
Many people experience workplace-related biases because of how they speak, which stems from listener processes including social categorization (placing speakers into groups), stereotyping (forming simplified beliefs about speakers), and processing (dis)fluency (struggling to understand speakers). However, it is unclear how these processes account for evaluations of speakers with intersecting, voice-cued identities across different job contexts. We recruited 192 listeners to assess the employability of men whose speech marks them as first (L1) or second (L2) language speakers and as gay- or straight-sounding men. The speakers were presented as applicants for jobs considered gay- or straight-typed and involving high or low communication demands. Besides employability, listeners evaluated speakers' sexual orientation and ease of understanding (comprehensibility as processing fluency). Straight-sounding L1 speakers received the highest employability ratings, followed by straight-sounding L2 speakers and gay-sounding L1 speakers, with gay-sounding L2 speakers ranked lowest. Processing fluency mediated the effect of language status, with L1 speakers rated as more employable partly because they were more comprehensible. Job communication demands (but not job stereotypicality) interacted with speaker effects, where L1 and straight-sounding speakers were perceived as more employable in low-communication jobs. We discuss how speaker identity, job context, and listener experience shape evaluations.
The current study investigated two heuristic processing strategies, the agent-first strategy and an animacy-based strategy, in visual world eye-tracking data as well as sentence final interpretations of wh-questions in adolescent L1 German learners of English in both their L1 and their L2. We observed differences between online and offline measures, as well as L1-L2 differences, both in the selection and the time course of application of the heuristics. In L1 German, heuristics were visible only in online data, and the dominant heuristic was animacy-based. In L2 English, the animacy-based heuristic was applied later and to a lesser degree than the agent-first heuristic. The results speak against a direct transfer of heuristic strategies from the L1 to the L2. Instead, we suggest that low-proficiency learners may not have the capacity to use several heuristics at once, and may thus prioritize the agent-first strategy due to its broad domain of application.
Research on how non-natives process and learn binomials (black and white) is limited. The present study addresses this gap using online (eye-tracking) and offline (familiarity rating) tasks. Sixty non-native speakers of English (L1 = Arabic) read six stories seeded with 21 novel binomials in three conditions: one exposure, six exposures, and no exposure (i.e., only in post-test) in a counter-balanced design. Each item was also presented in the reversed order (white and black). The non-natives read the stories as their eye movements were monitored and answered comprehension questions. In addition to the novel binomials, 12 existing binomials (congruent with Arabic) were included in the passages as a baseline for comparison. After completing the reading task, the participants completed an offline rating task as a measure of declarative knowledge of the binomial configuration (i.e., word order). All items were rated twice, once in the forward direction and once in the reversed direction. Online results showed that non-natives were not sensitive to the configuration of existing binomials, and there was limited evidence of any sensitivity to novel binomials. Offline, non-natives showed sensitivity to the configuration restrictions of existing binomials but not novel ones.
In the continued effort to identify creative talent, divergent thinking (DT) assessments are commonly employed to objectively assess aspects of individual creative ability. Despite their common usage, the selection of DT prompts remains unstandardized. This is concerning because it is unclear if all prompts can be employed equally or if certain characteristics associated with the acquisition and usage of said prompt in a given language affect the magnitude of response originality. Researchers administered a computer-based DT assessment to 386 elementary students and compared the originality scores of the respondents to the originality scores predicted by prompts' psycholinguistic features. Hierarchical linear modeling was employed to control individual DT ability and examine the effects of psycholinguistics on originality at two levels, with individual response originality scores (level 1) nested within individual respondents (level 2). Results indicated statistically significant main effects for word frequency, semantic diversity, prompt type, and item reaction time. There were also several significant interaction effects between prompt type and word frequency, prompt type and word length, and prompt type and semantic diversity. The resulting final model explained approximately 18% of the variance in originality scores, suggesting the need for further consideration of DT prompt choice.
