Journal of Psycholinguistic Research最新文献

The fluency of second language (L2) speech can be influenced by L2 proficiency, but also by differences in the efficiency of cognitive operations and personal speaking styles. The nature of cognitive fluency is still, however, little understood. Therefore, we studied the cognitive fluency of Finnish advanced students of English (N = 64) to understand how the efficiency of cognitive processing influences speech rate. Cognitive fluency was operationalised as automaticity of lexical access (measured by rapid word recognition) and attention control (measured by the Stroop task). The tasks were conducted in both L1 (Finnish) and L2 (English) to examine the (dis)similarity of processing in the two languages. Speech rate in a monologue task was used as the dependent measure of speaking performance. The results showed that after controlling for the L1 speech rate and L1 cognitive fluency, the L2 attention control measures explained a small amount of additional variance in L2 speech rate. These results are discussed in relation to the cognitive fluency framework and general speaking proficiency research.

Building on the cross-linguistic variability in the meaning of vague quantifiers, this study explores the potential for negative transfer in Italian-Slovenian bilinguals concerning the use of quantificational determiners, specifically the translational equivalents of the English "many", that is the Slovenian "precej" and "veliko". The aim is to identify relevant aspects of pragmatic knowledge for cross-linguistic influence. The study presents the results of a sentence-picture verification task in which Slovenian native speakers and Italian-Slovenian bilinguals evaluated sentences of the form "Quantifier X are Y" in relation to visual contexts. The results suggest that Italian learners of Slovenian, unlike Slovenian native speakers, fail to distinguish between "precej" and "veliko". This finding aligns with the negative transfer hypothesis. The study highlights the potential role of pragmatic knowledge in cross-linguistic transfer, particularly in the context of vague quantifiers.

Uncertainty is unavoidable in life; it is also an indispensable characteristic of educational settings. The process of learning a foreign language naturally involves interaction and coconstruction of knowledge. During this process, students may encounter uncertainty from a variety of sources, including the course, context, friends, or the teacher. Besides, to communicate meaningfully, the mutual effort of both the listener and the speaker is needed to deal with uncertainty. Considering this, the present study makes an effort to comprehend how learners appreciate and manage uncertainty in language learning environments. Although uncertainty is considered a multidisciplinary research topic, a limited number of studies are found in the literature which examine how students experience uncertainty and how they react to it. Regarding foreign language learning, related research focused on a specific form of uncertainty, Tolerance of Ambiguity, which is conceptualized as a cognitive style. In-class pen-and-paper surveys, reflective journals, video recordings, and stimulated recall interviews were the instruments used to gather data. The findings demonstrate that language learners frequently encounter uncertainty during the language learning process due to course-related, cognitive, and social factors, and learners may appreciate uncertainty in both positive and negative ways. Additionally, learners' emotional reactions to uncertainty depend on their positive or negative appraisals of uncertain situations. By recognizing and embracing uncertainty, language learners will adapt to it and be able to handle it through a variety of techniques. The results suggest that learners employ a variety of strategies, such as reducing, maintaining, and resolving uncertainty as well as ignoring uncertainty.

Although many studies document the role of propositional truth-value in human psychological reading behavior, there is a relative paucity of research examining the role of differential propositional truth-value in processing Chinese counterfactual conditionals. This study is to investigate the role of differential propositional value in processing Chinese counterfactual conditionals by means of ERPs (event-related potentials). The study is based on comprehending two types of Chinese counterfactual conditionals, which is propositional truth value introduced by two different markers of conditional conjunctions in the protasis and apodosis, such as true counterfactual conditional markers jiaru (if) & jiu (so) in the sentence wo xiang yu jiaru you tui jiu keyi zai shuixia zhixi (I think if fish had legs so they could stifle under water), and false counterfactual conditional markers ruguo (if) & namo (then) in the sentence wo xiang gou ruguo you lin namo keyi zai shuixia huxi (I think if dogs had scales, then they could breathe under water). Two counterfactual propositional values (i.e. true and false propositional values) are constructed through manipulating sentence counterfactuality between the true and false counterfactual conditional markers in the protasis and the apodosis. Twenty-four full-time Chinese college students participated in the ERP study. The results demonstrated that processing the true counterfactual propositional sentences with conditional markers jiaru (if) & jiu (so) elicited the N400 effect relative to false propositional sentences with conditional markers ruguo (if) & namo (then). Moreover, the counterfactual sentences with true propositional conditions varied from the elicitation of the N400 effect in the protasis and absence of the N400 effect in the apodosis, showing that semantic roles may gradually disappear under the impact of truth value of propositional counterfactual condition, and/or the roles of semantic anomaly was eliminated in the accumulated sentence processing. While for the false counterfactual conditional sentences, elicitations of P300 in the protasis and robust N400 effect in the apodosis were shown, indicating the increasing semantic role in the processing. Interestingly, there was the absence of the P600 effect for processing sentences with syntactic violation, suggesting little extra syntactic cost in processing sentences with false propositional condition.

The present study investigated the effect of verbal working memory capacity (VWMC) on the processing of semantic information during on-line lexical ambiguity resolution of bilinguals. Seventeen Persian-English subordinate bilinguals of similar proficiency level were recruited to perform two experimental tasks: (1) a multi-load-level reading span task designed to measure their VWMC and (2) a cross-modal semantic priming task (CMPT), 24 h subsequent to the last encoding session, to assess their performance on semantic processing of L2 homographs whose subordinate readings were deemed "novel" for them. An overall 2 × 3 repeated-measures ANOVA revealed a statistically significant difference in the processing of the encoded semantic information between high and low WMC participants. The findings of the experiments lend support to the veracity of the assumptions made by Reordered Access Model in that biasing semantic context facilitates the ambiguity resolution of lexical items. Lastly, the pedagogical implications of the findings were expounded on.

This study investigates persuasive strategies used in the writings of Iranian university students in the field of teaching English as foreign language (TEFL). The study utilized the 7 principles of persuasive strategies presented by Cialdini (The psychology of persuasion, Quill William Morrow, New York 1984; Pre-suasion: A revolutionary way to influence and persuade, Simon & Schuster, New York 2016), which include 'reciprocity', 'commitment and consistency', 'social proof', 'liking', 'authority', 'scarcity', and 'unity'. The results indicate that strategies such as 'liking', 'unity', and 'authority' were used more frequently than other persuasive strategies. On the other hand, 'scarcity' was the least used strategy by the participants. Significant gender differences were also observed in the data. These findings have important pedagogical implications and suggest the need to incorporate persuasive strategies into instructional materials and teaching practices to enhance the persuasive writing skills of university students. Furthermore, gender differences highlight the importance of considering individual differences when teaching persuasive writing. Finally, the study discusses the pedagogical implications of these findings in the context of learning and teaching.

In the past, research on the cognitive neural mechanism of second language (L2) learners' processing time information has focused on Indo-European languages. It has also focused on the temporal category expressed by morphological changes. However, there has been a lack of research on L2 learners' various time coding means, especially for Mandarin, which lacks morphological changes. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), we investigated the cognitive neural mechanism of L2 learners with native Indonesian background in processing two time coding means (time adverbs and aspect markers) in Chinese. Indonesian has time adverb encoding time information similar to that of Chinese, but there are no aspect markers similar to Chinese in Indonesian. We measured ERPs time locked to the time adverb " (cengjing)" and the aspect marker "verb + (verb + guo)" in two different conditions, i.e., a control condition (the correct sentence) and a temporal information violation. The experimental results showed that the native speaker group induced the biphasic N400-P600 effect under the condition of time adverb violation, and induced P600 under the condition of the aspect marker "verb + (verb + guo)" violation. Indonesian L2 learners of Chinese only elicited P600 for the violation of time adverbs, and there was no statistically significant N400 similar to that of Chinese native speakers. In the case of aspect marker violation, we observed no significant ERPs component for the Indonesian L2 learners of Chinese. Both groups of subjects induced elicited a widely distributed and sustained negativity on the post-critical words after "verb + (verb + guo)" and "(cengjing)". This showed that the neural mechanism of Indonesian L2 learners of Chinese processing Chinese time coding differs from that of Chinese native speakers.

This study was conducted with the aim of exploring the general parsing mechanisms involved in processing different kinds of dependency relations, namely verb agreement with subjects versus objects in Punjabi, an SOV Indo-Aryan language. Event related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded as twenty-five native Punjabi speakers read transitive sentences. Critical stimuli were either fully acceptable as regards verb agreement, or alternatively violated gender agreement with the subject or object. A linear mixed-models analysis confirmed a P600 effect at the position of the verb for all violations, regardless of whether subject or object agreement was violated. These results thus suggest that an identical mechanism is involved in gender agreement computation in Punjabi regardless of whether the agreement is with the subject or the object argument.