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.

This study examined the relationship between cognitive abilities and linguistic abilities in children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD). The cognitive abilities we investigated were scene analogies (a form of nonverbal analogical reasoning), grammatical analogies (using a grammatical sensitivity subtest from a foreign language aptitude test battery), implicit statistical learning, and inhibition. 39 language typical children and 34 children with DLD (M = 10;8 years) took part in a moderated online study. Our results revealed large between-group differences in all linguistic abilities. Regarding cognitive measures, there were large between-group differences in performance for both analogical reasoning tasks, but similar performance between groups in inhibition and implicit statistical learning. The most striking finding was that analogical reasoning is the cognitive ability that predicted most of the variance in all linguistic measures, suggesting that analogical reasoning could play a key role in linguistic abilities in children with and without DLD.

The vast majority of research on false-belief understanding has been conducted with literate populations. However, to our knowledge, no prior study has examined how literacy acquisition itself influences false-belief reasoning. The development of false-belief understanding is shaped by a range of factors, including language skills, education, reading experience, and cognitive abilities. Illiterate speakers often show substantial variability in language skills and cognitive abilities. In this study, we investigated the impact of nonverbal IQ, inhibitory control, and reading fluency on false-belief understanding in adult native Turkish speakers, comparing literate and illiterate participants. We found considerable individual differences in false-belief performance across both groups, as well as in the cognitive measures. Strikingly, reading fluency (assessed via a 1-minute timed word-reading task) emerged as the most significant predictor of false-belief performance, accounting for 49% of the variance. We propose that literacy acquisition may support the development of false-belief reasoning by enhancing language skills, cognitive control, metalinguistic awareness, and perspective-taking through engagement with written narratives. These findings carry broader implications for psychology, linguistics, and adult education.

Despite longstanding assertions that first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition rely on fundamentally different processes, recent research increasingly questions this dichotomy by exploring the cognitive mechanisms underlying them. The present study investigates the contribution of two explicit learning abilities, language analytic ability and non-verbal abstract reasoning, traditionally deemed irrelevant for L1 acquisition, in accounting for individual differences in grammatical comprehension in both L1 and L2 contexts. Adult native speakers of English were tested on their ability to comprehend various syntactic structures in their L1 as well as in a newly acquired artificial language. Our findings revealed that language analytic ability and non-verbal reasoning contribute to variance in grammatical comprehension in both languages. Additionally, considerable interindividual variation was observed in the L1 task, challenging the prevailing view of uniformity in native grammar acquisition. These results underscore the role of explicit learning mechanisms in both native and non-native language acquisition and suggest that the cognitive factors influencing them are more similar than previously recognized.

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have varied strengths and difficulties in both language and cognition but we do not yet have a comprehensive understanding as to how these abilities are interrelated. In this study, we explore performance in language typical children and children with DLD to evaluate how different areas of nonverbal cognition predict linguistic outcomes. We investigate nonverbal intelligence, working memory, implicit statistical learning, and the speed of automatization. 77 children (54 language typical children and 23 children with DLD), aged between 6;9 and 10;8 years, completed a battery of cognitive and language tasks. Our results show between-group differences in both language and cognitive abilities. We propose a cumulative risk model, suggesting that important predictors of language in children with DLD are a combination of nonverbal working memory, nonverbal intelligence, and the speed of automatization.

This study examines the role of the timing of obligatory disambiguating information – obligatory cues – and presence/absence of optional morphological markers in resolving temporary syntactic ambiguity in Spanish object relative clauses. Native adult comprehension (Study 1) reveals similar accuracy for clauses with relatively early obligatory cues, regardless of the presence/absence of additional markers, and those with late obligatory cues with additional markers, but reduced accuracy for those with late obligatory cues without additional markers. Given the phonetic resemblance of the late-disambiguated variant with its corresponding subject relative, we conduct two follow-up perceptual identification tasks with the whole relative clause, including the head (Study 2), and relative clause fragments (Study 3). The identification tasks show that, when instructed to attend to the form of the structures, participants perceive acoustic differences but retain a bias towards subject-relative interpretations. Our results suggest that additional markers aid comprehension of non-canonical structures when obligatory cues occur relatively late within the structure and highlight the dominance of predictive processing over perceptual information in such cases of late disambiguation.

Traditional linguistic reference works are static artefacts that diverge from the representation of language as a cognitive phenomenon in several ways: Historically, these artefacts are rooted in the intuitions of highly educated speakers, they impose an artificial division between lexicon and grammar, and they lack psychological plausibility. Constructionist approaches break with this tradition and attempt to model language in cognitively plausible networks, known as constructicons , that are intended to mirror the linguistic knowledge as represented in speakers’ minds. However, there are numerous concepts of constructicons, including the concepts of reference and mental constructicons. This dichotomy reintroduces an old problem in a new guise. These two concepts fundamentally differ from each other, as the former describes language as an individual, cognitive phenomenon, and the latter describes language as a social phenomenon, extrapolating over more than one mental constructicon. This paper explores these fundamental differences using the example of German noun phrase agreement. First, it models NP agreement within a reference constructicon framework, followed by a comparison with elicited production data, which reveals substantial differences between reference and mental constructicons.

A central issue in second language (L2) acquisition concerns how explicit learning (EL) and implicit statistical learning (ISL) aptitudes contribute during the earliest stages of learning, and whether the effect of EL precedes that of ISL, as traditionally assumed, or can instead follow it. This paper explores these possibilities by tracking the contributions of these two aptitudes, as well as sustained attention (SA) to vocabulary and grammar learning across five sessions of exposure to an artificial language. Results indicated that vocabulary and grammar learning were modulated by EL and SA, with ISL additionally accounting for variance in vocabulary learning. Crucially, contrary to the standard view, for both grammar and vocabulary, the ISL effects were most pronounced early on, whereas the EL effects increased over time. These results underscore the dynamic interplay between the two aptitudes in early L2 acquisition and highlight the time-varying nature of their contributions.

Purpose: There is a growing body of research on developmental language disorder (DLD), but very few studies have focused on the role of cognitive abilities in adulthood. The present study explored the relationship between cognition and language in adults with and without DLD. Method: Sixty participants, 30 language typical (LT) adults and 30 with DLD, completed a battery of online cognitive and language assessments. Cognitive tasks included language analytic ability (the ability to recognize the grammatical functions of sentence elements), nonverbal IQ, explicit learning of form-meaning pairings, implicit statistical learning, and speed of automatization. Language assessments included two grammar tasks (assessing morphosyntax) and vocabulary. Accuracy and reaction time measures were obtained for all tasks. Results: Between-group differences demonstrated that language remains an area of difficulty for adults with DLD. Language analytic ability was a significant predictor of grammatical and vocabulary knowledge in the LT group and of grammar in the DLD group. In addition, we found that explicit learning of form-meaning pairings predicted linguistic outcomes in adults with DLD. We found small or no differences for all the other cognitive abilities; this is in line with previous studies that report a relative "catch up" in cognitive abilities in adults with DLD. Response times for the DLD group were slower in both linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks. Conclusions: Our results demonstrate that language difficulties in DLD persist into adulthood. Regarding cognitive measures, we show that language analytic ability is a key predictor of linguistic outcomes in both groups, and explicit learning of form-meaning pairings predicts grammar and vocabulary in the DLD group. These findings have important implications for clinical interventions, as they suggest that both implicit (fast, effortless, and unconscious) and explicit (slow, effortful, and conscious) processes are relevant to language. In addition, adults with DLD may require additional processing time in cognitive and linguistic tasks.

Nativist theories of language development assume that all native speakers of a particular language ultimately converge on (more or less) the same grammar, and argue that this is only possible because they are born with a genetic blueprint for language. However, a number of recent studies have found that there are, in fact, considerable individual differences in adult native speakers’ grammatical attainment. In this study, we examine some possible reasons for these differences. We examine both learner internal cognitive factors (implicit and explicit memory for sequences, non-verbal working memory, and language analytic ability) as well as an experiential factor (print exposure). In contrast to many earlier studies which focused on the temporal aspects of language processing, we are interested in the extent to which individuals are able to use grammatical cues to extract meaning from complex sentences. To minimize the effect of performance factors, sentences remained on screen while participants responded to comprehension questions (thus easing working memory load) and participants were given as much time as they needed to respond. Our findings revealed large effects of language analytic ability and print exposure, and a much smaller effect of implicit learning. While the effect of implicit learning fits in well with current theories of language acquisition and processing, the first two findings do not. The strong relationship between print exposure and comprehension suggests that the ability to process complex syntax may depend on a particular type of language experience which is not available to all speakers. Finally, the effect of language analytic ability challenges the wide-held conviction that the ability to identify and explicitly reason about linguistic patterns is only relevant in adult second language learning.

According to the Critical Period Hypothesis, successful language learning is optimal during early childhood, whereas language learning outside of this time window is unsuccessful. In this respect, early language acquisition is viewed as convergent and reliable but late acquisition is not. The present study revisits the idea of a critical period by investigating the grammatical attainment of early bilinguals/heritage speakers (HSs), late second/foreign language (L2) learners, and comparable groups of monolinguals by testing Greek-English bilinguals in the two languages they speak by means of a grammaticality judgment task. Our findings show that in English, HSs performed on par with monolinguals, both groups surpassing the late L2 learners, who performed about 2 SDs below the HSs and the monolinguals. In Greek, late L2 learners and monolinguals exhibited comparable performance, contrasting sharply with the HSs’ significantly lower proficiency, which was on average about 5 SDs below the late L2 learners and the monolinguals. Consequently, our results show that the performance gaps between HSs and Greek monolinguals/late L2 learners were more pronounced than the differences between late L2 learners and English monolinguals/HSs, suggesting that the early bilinguals’ success in English may come at the expense of their heritage language (Greek). Furthermore, we observe substantially more individual variation within HSs in their heritage language than within the late L2 learners for their second language. Thus, testing bilinguals in both of their languages allows us to unveil the complexity of grammatical ultimate attainment and prompt a re-thinking of age as the major determining factor of (un)successful attainment.

Few drugs have been successfully formulated as submicron emulsions. The physicochemical stability of submicron emulsions on admixture of drugs is the main factor limiting a wider use of this type of vehicle for parenteral or other routes of administration. In a short-term stability studies we have investigated 35 drugs with regard to their compatibility with 20 or 5% parenteral fat emulsions. The study has shown that interaction of drugs with submicron emulsions is complex in nature. Taking into consideration the physicochemical properties of a drug e.g. lipophilicity or ionization, it is difficult to predict changes in the physical stability of the system. If destabilization occurs it is maximal at saturated concentrations and the presence of even significant amounts of the solid phase formed by undissolved drug does not influence the short-term stability of the system. Due to the increased ratio of emulgator to oil, emulsions containing 5% of oily phase are less susceptible to destabilization than 20% emulsions.