Journal of Psycholinguistic Research最新文献

Classifiers, as a reference-tracking device of nouns, have caught much research attention over the past two decades. Beyond their grammatical function, classifiers are unique in their semantic association with the internal properties of head nouns, which raises questions about the relationship between language and cognition. Previous research reported a classifier effect (e.g., Saalbach and Imai in Lang Cogn Processes 27(3):381-428, 2012; Speed et al. in J Exp Psychol Learn Memory Cogn 7(4):625-640, 2021), with classifier speakers (vs. non-classifier speakers) showing greater sensitivity to parameters such as animacy, shape and function. This study thus further testified the classifier effect through a fine-grained similarity judgement task. Chinese speakers (N = 41) rated significantly lower than English speakers (N = 41) in taxonomic pairs, but not in thematic, classifier or filler pairs. Subset analysis of taxonomic pairs revealed disparities in conceptual saliency, with animacy most salient, followed by function and shape. Meanwhile, both groups rated thematic pairs highest, followed by taxonomic, classifier and filler pairs. Chinese speakers also needed longer response time in each pair condition. Findings together suggested an implicit classifier effect in Chinese speakers, but classifier relation itself was not the predominant parameter guiding object perception.

The main aim of this paper is to examine the differences in sarcasm use between the two understudied populations from distinct cultures - Polish and Turkish - and to investigate the role of a range of factors that might impact sarcasm use, including the Big Five personality traits, gender and age. The study was conducted online using the Sarcasm Self-Report Scale and The Ten Item Personality Inventory (TIPI). Overall, 332 Polish- and Turkish-speaking participants completed the study. Our key finding was that Polish participants reported more frequent sarcasm use than the Turkish participants. Additionally, men reported higher levels of self-reported sarcasm use compared to women and the effect of gender on sarcasm use did not differ significantly between Poland and Turkey. Finally, in both samples, more frequent sarcasm use was linked to lower agreeableness. Our study serves as a starting point for subsequent analyses of the role of cultural communicative norms and/or personality factors in nonliteral language use.

This study examined the impact of Arabic diglossia on children's emotional intelligence, emotional intensity, and emotions identification. The participants were 250 Israeli Arabic-speaking children in the fifth and seventh grades, all native speakers of Palestinian Arabic. Children were examined for their Trait Emotional Intelligence (EI) performance, emotional intensity perception, and identifying feelings of episodes in spoken Arabic (SpA) and standard Arabic (StA). Findings revealed an advantage in Trait Emotional Intelligence in SpA compared to StA across ages, suggesting that the spoken form of Arabic may facilitate greater ease or preference in identifying emotional content. Additionally, the results showed that SpA phrases were perceived as greater emotional intensity than in StA. As to the grade level, no difference was observed between ages regarding emotional intensity perception. Finally, the results indicated that children more frequently selected SpA items than StA when choosing expressions to represent their feelings. The findings highlight the importance of the diglossic Arabic language form in shaping social-emotional skills, particularly through SpA, which appears to facilitate easier emotional selection and may carry stronger emotional connotations due to its frequency in everyday communication. These findings provide new insights into the socio-emotional implications of diglossia, revealing its impact beyond linguistic constraints. The study's results contribute to our understanding of how diglossia influences emotional development, with implications for both theoretical models of language-emotion interaction and pedagogical approaches in Arabic-speaking educational settings.

Speech segmentation in statistical learning is typically measured by the 2-alternative-forced-choice (2AFC) task. Although previous analysis has found performance differences among learners and better performance might stems from the larger representational differences between target words and partwords given the memory-based model, the underlying learning mechanism that drives these differences remains unclear. In the current study, seventy-four participants listened to a novel language and were then asked to complete a 2AFC task and a 7-point Likert scale familiarity rating task. On the basis of participants' performance on the 2AFC task, we identified a real-learning criterion and divided participants into a superior-level group (38% of participants) and a regular-level group. Though both groups exhibited above-chance learning in the 2AFC and familiar rating tasks, superior learners performed significantly better than regular learners. In addition, a series of linear mixed effect models showed that superior- and regular-level groups produced comparable ratings on target words and nonwords; however, superior-level participants rated partwords as less familiar than regular-level participants. These patterns suggest that the only difference that contributed to their overall performance on the SL task was their perceived level of familiarity of partwords. This study highlights the importance of investigating SL mechanism from a memory-based model and provides a nuanced method for examining individual differences in SL tasks.

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.