Journal of Psycholinguistic Research最新文献

In recent years, second language (L2) learner agency has attracted increasing attention in language education research. However, the effects of the individual factors, namely self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation and test anxiety on L2 agency remains unclear. This study seeks to deepen our understanding of learner agency in second language acquisition (SLA) through a systematic examination of self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and test anxiety. By analyzing these intertwined factors within a unified framework, this study offers a comprehensive perspective on their combined impact, shedding light on how they shape the development of learner agency in the L2 context. A mixed-methods study was conducted with 203 L2 learners from three public universities in China. The results reveal that L2 learners exhibit moderate levels of self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and agency, while test anxiety remains relatively low. Furthermore, self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, and agency are interconnected, though no significant relationship is found between test anxiety and these variables. Specifically, the results show that intrinsic motivation has a significant indirect effect on the relationship between self-efficacy and agency, while self-efficacy directly influences agency. In conclusion, these findings offer practical implications for incorporating psychological factors into language education settings to foster L2 learner agency, hence providing valuable insights for both educators and learners.

The status of the consonantal root in Arabic (and Semitic, in general) has been subject to controversy in both theoretical and experimental research. While most priming experiments reported root effects in Arabic, a few reported either inconsistent effects or no such effects at all, questioning the morphemic status of the root and pointing to the possible role of the stem, instead. We carried out a visual lexical decision masked priming experiment to explore the extent to which the stem may prime lexical access in Arabic. The same target (ya-ʕtamid "he approves") was preceded by a prime that was either (i) an inflectional relative, member of the same lexeme, with which it shares the surface stem (na-ʕtamid "we approve"), (ii) a derivationally close relative, member of a separate lexeme, with which it shares the same abstract stem (mu-ʕtamid "approving"), or (iii) a derivationally distant relative with which it shares the root consonants only (ʕtimaad "approval"). A phono-orthographic condition (iv) was used as a baseline in which the target was preceded by an unrelated prime with which it shares all but one or two sounds of the surface form (yaʕtaqid "he believes"). Results show a gradient facilitation effect across all four conditions and a significant main effect of priming in the three related conditions. They further reveal that Condition (i) showed significantly more priming than Conditions (ii) and (iii). In Condition (iv), reaction times were much slower compared to Conditions (i) and (ii), but not as much when compared to Condition (iii). These results suggest that words sharing the inflectional stem prime each other more than words sharing the derivational stem or abstract consonantal root and argue in favor of gradient salience of the stem and root and their roles in Arabic lexical organization. We discuss the implications of these results to the theoretical debate surrounding the status of the root and stem in Arabic and argue for a hybrid model of the Arabic lexicon and morphology in which a word can be accessed both through its root and through its stem.

A growing body of research has explored the cognitive factors influencing aging adults' recognition of spoken words and phrases. In contrast, research on the cognitive contributions to speech prosody comprehension in tonal languages across adulthood remains relatively limited. This study aimed to bridge this gap by investigating the contributions of language-specific and domain-general cognitive factors to focus prosody comprehension performance among aging speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin. Young, middle-aged, and older healthy native speakers of Jianghuai Mandarin (N = 30 per group) performed a focus comprehension task, where they inferred the underlying intentions conveyed by different conditions (initial focus, medial focus, and final focus) of focus prosody. They also completed a series of language-specific (acoustic representation, meaning categorization, and focus knowledge) and domain-general (inhibitory control, attention switching, and working memory) cognitive assessments pertinent to understanding focus prosody. Findings showed an age-related decline in the comprehension of focus prosody, along with different rates of reduction in language-specific and domain-general cognitive abilities. These cognitive abilities did not modulate the focus comprehension performance among the young and middle-aged groups. In the older group, however, positive associations were observed between focus comprehension performance and certain domain-general abilities, as evidenced by the strong predictive power of attention switching and working memory. The findings provide insights into the mechanisms underpinning linguistic prosody processing among aging adults.

It has been reported that children's comprehension of complex structures is affected by temporary ambiguity. Yet, much less is known about its effect on children's comprehension of relative clauses (RCs). To fill this gap, the present study focused on Mandarin RCs, where temporary ambiguity often plays a role in the comprehension of object-extracted RCs. More specifically, we directly manipulated the (non)existence of temporary ambiguity in object-extracted RCs and compared 3- to 5-year-olds' understanding of object-extracted and subject-extracted RCs. Using the Truth Value Judgment Task, we found a clear developmental trajectory of preschoolers' abilities to comprehend the RCs. The 3-year-olds could correctly understand the object-extracted RCs only when there was no temporary ambiguity in the sentence, while the 4- and 5-year-olds exhibited successful comprehension regardless of the (non)existence of temporary ambiguity. In addition, when temporary ambiguity was not present, object-extracted RCs were generally easier than subject-extracted RCs for preschoolers to comprehend. Taken together, the findings inform us about the role of temporary ambiguity in RC comprehension, and point to the necessity of taking into account this factor when examining children's sentence comprehension performance.

For individuals with agrammatic aphasia, producing sentences with non-canonical word orders is a challenging feat. Studies on different languages report deficits in this area of sentence production: some citing problems related to retrieval of verb morphology while others pursue a more holistic approach by attributing the root of the deficit towards the process of thematic role assignment. It has been shown that agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian are relatively unimpaired in the use (in spontaneous speech) and comprehension of passive constructions. These studies suggest the high frequency of the passive structure in Standard Indonesian may play a role in its retrieval and processing. For the current study, we tested sentence production in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian. The purpose of the present study is to assess the effects of syntactic frequency and word order on sentence production in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian. Twelve agrammatic speakers were tested with a picture elicitation task. The participants had to produce active and passive, reversible and non-reversible sentences. No main effects of sentence type were observed; reversible and non-reversible active and passive sentences were produced with comparable accuracy. Despite this observation, the majority of errors produced were associated with role-reversals and verb inflection. Lack of a specific deficit in the production of structures with non-canonical word order suggests the impact of syntactic frequency on agrammatic sentence processing. As with previous studies on Indonesian sentence comprehension, the present results provide evidence for the preservation of the passive structure in agrammatic speakers of Standard Indonesian.

The study describes the semiotic analysis of the solar symbolism of Chinese ceramics and its cross-cultural transition to the Middle East. The study aims to show how these borrowings and other symbols complement each other intersemiotically to achieve their communicative goal. The relevance of this research focuses on the use of semiotics as an artistic methodology to explain and interpret solar symbolism on ceramics in Chinese culture in the Neolithic period. The semiotic approach to intercultural communication between China and the Middle East showed the similarity of information sign systems. The study relies on the semiotic analysis approach, which focuses on the author's interpretation of the sign in terms of its denotative and connotative meanings (decoding). The scenarios of human behavior, the laws of society, and religious and artistic tendencies have been revealed. The cultures under study are presented as polycode space. With the help of common cultural signs, the phenomena of culture as facts of communication have been considered; the individual communication messages are structured and understood in accordance with a certain code. Thus, with the help of the semiotic approach, their deep meanings and information, which are encoded in sun patterns and ornaments of ceramic ware, have been discovered.

This paper investigates the relationship between the structural features of Chinese characters and the handwriting quality of Chinese as a Foreign Language (CFL) beginners. The study involved 22 CFL beginners transcribing characters using digital ink technology. Correlations were analyzed between structural features (including stroke count, stroke types, and specific stroke forms like hooks and folds) and three key handwriting quality indicators: Composite Stability, symmetry, and slant. The results revealed significant correlations between character complexity and handwriting quality. Specifically, characters containing right-falling strokes exhibited lower Composite Stability, whereas a higher number of hooks correlated with improved Composite Stability. Characters with more diverse stroke types were associated with better symmetry, while folds negatively impacted both symmetry and slant. Furthermore, characters with a greater number of left-falling strokes, right-falling strokes, and folds were linked to poorer slant performance. These findings underscore the importance for Chinese language teachers to consider character structural features in instructional design and suggest that targeted practice with structurally challenging characters, focusing on specific stroke configurations, may more effectively enhance learners' Chinese character writing skills.

The Referential Process (RP) is defined as a set of functions (Arousal, Symbolizing, and Reflecting/Reorganizing) that describe the rendering of subsymbolic experience into verbal, symbolized form. Movement through the RP-beginning with the subsymbolically-dominated Arousal function-has been associated with therapeutic progress and personality change. The present exploratory study examined therapist language features linked to facilitation of patients' movement from Arousal to Symbolizing. Using treatment transcripts for six treatments from the RP Data Base, cases of high patient Arousal were divided into intervention categories based on the presence and/or positioning of the subsequent patient Symbolizing peak. The language of therapists' interventions in response to high patient Arousal moments was examined using the computerized measures of the RP, as well as measures of Disfluency and other linguistic features. Interventions most immediately facilitative of patient movement from Arousal to Symbolizing displayed significantly higher Reflecting/Reorganizing scores, and occurred earlier in the session, as compared to interventions in which a patient symbolizing peak occurred later, and those in which no patient symbolizing peak occurred at any subsequent point in the session.

There is variation in the adaptation of loanwords, because the adaptation may be based on the similarity in pronunciation or spelling. For example, the English word Manitoba (containing a VNV sequence) is borrowed into Mandarin Chinese (MC) as man.ni.tuo.ba (a perception-based adaptation) or ma.ni.tuo.ba (an orthography-based adaptation). Previous studies indicate that the orthography seems to play a greater role in influencing loanword adaptation patterns in some cases than others. But few studies attempt to explain the factors that influence the degree of orthography effect in the lexical borrowing process. To fill in the gap, the present study aims to explore three extra-linguistic factors that may determine the degrees of orthography effect. The three factors are borrowers' L2 proficiency, times of exposure to L2 letter-sound pairs, and the spelling similarity between the source word and the loan word (source-loan spelling similarity). In order to examine the effect of these factors, an online adaptation experiment was conducted. The experiment involves borrowing the English non-words containing VNV sequences into MC. The results demonstrate that the degree of orthographic influence is closely associated with these factors. The findings can be well addressed within the Dual Route Cascaded (DRC) model of reading. In the lexical borrowing, the L1 grapheme-to-phoneme correspondence rules (GPCs) will be more frequently activated when reading L2 words if (i) borrowers are less proficient L2 learners or monolingual speakers of L1, (ii) borrowers are less frequently exposed to certain L2 letter-sound pairs, and (iii) the spellings of words from source language (SL) are highly similar to those in the borrowing language (BL), thereby leading to more orthography-based adaptations. The study concludes by proposing that the loanword adaptation result may be systematically influenced by the orthography, and deviate from the prediction of perceptual and phonological similarity. Orthography influences in loanword adaptation would be maximal if borrowers are uncertain or unknown about the phonemic identity of the input source word.