Journal of Psycholinguistic Research最新文献

Mandarin Chinese has two different types of tone sandhi (TS) rules. One is known as the Tone 3 Sandhi (T3S) rule, a general rule that applies to the T3 syllable, whereby a T3-T3 sequence is realized as T2-T3. The other is associated with specific words and is often referred to as morpheme-specific TS rules, whereby the underlying T4 surfaces as T2 when followed by another T4. The extant literature has yielded mixed results on children's acquisition of the general T3S rule, and less is known about their acquisition of morpheme-specific TS rules. To fill the gap, the present study explored 4- to 6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's understanding of the general T3S rule associated with hen (meaning 'very') and the morpheme-specific TS rule associated with bu (meaning 'not'), using a tone sandhi predictive processing task. The results showed that the children exhibited a developmental trajectory in their comprehension of the two TS rules, with the 6-year-olds performing significantly better than the 4- and 5-year-olds. To explore how core cognitive abilities like Working Memory (WM, measured by the n-back task) contributed to the observed developmental trajectory, we also examined how the children's WM capacity was associated with their performance in the tone sandhi predictive processing task. The findings showed that the children's scores in the 1-back task reliably predicted their performance in the processing of the morpheme-specific TS rule, highlighting the interaction between the children's knowledge of TS rules and their WM capacity during their development.

This study reports the effects of gender and age on the production of Voice Onset Time (VOT) of stop consonants in Rural Jordanian Arabic (RJA). Participants of the study were divided into four age groups, namely children, preadolescents, adolescents, and adults, and were equally stratified according to their gender. They were asked to produce a series of Arabic words beginning with one of the six stop consonants: voiceless /tˤ/, /t/, /k/ and voiced /b/, /d/, /ɡ/. The results show that voiceless stops were characterized by a long lag (aspirated, positive VOT), and voiced stops were characterized by a long voicing lead (prevoiced, negative VOT). Across all age bands, the results of the study indicated that females have significantly longer VOT durations than males for both the voiced and voiceless stops. In addition, children had significantly the longest VOT duration as compared to preadolescents, adolescents, and adults across the board. Notably, the VOT duration of both voiced and voiceless stops shortened with increasing age; the younger the age, the longer the VOT is, suggesting that VOT production in RJA is gradually incrementally developing.

Recent evidence within the noisy-channel framework suggests that when encountering implausible sentences, rational readers can make inferences about the speaker's intentions. However, it remains unclear how the nature of noise and the degree of changes from a plausible sentence to its implausible alternative affect the reader's inferences. Using an explicit error-correction task, we manipulated the degree of changes in implausible sentences by transposing two characters within a Chinese reversible word, either maintaining or changing its syntactic category. The nature of noise was also manipulated between participants by having them read, along with experimental stimuli, exposure sentences that contained common mistakes, transposition errors, mixed errors, or no errors. Results showed that Chinese readers were able to infer that the implausible test sentences were corrupted by word transpositions, and that their inferences were modulated by the exposure condition, but not by the degree of changes. These findings are consistent with the Context-Specific Noise hypothesis, suggesting that Chinese readers make fine-grained inferences for implausible sentences, independent of the degree of changes between the implausible and plausible alternatives.

This study explores the comprehension of four meronymy types: Component Meronymy (CM), Member Meronymy (MM), Substance Meronymy (SM) and Portion Meronymy (PM) among 20 Arabic-speaking, children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and 20 Typically Developing children (TD) using a picture-matching task. The ASD children were recruited from an autism center, while the TD group was sampled from a kindergarten in Amman. T-tests were employed to determine if the differences between the performance of the two groups on the four types of meronymy are statistically significant. The results showed that TD children consistently outperformed ASD children in CM, MM, and SM, whereas both groups found PM relatively easier. The results reveal certain challenges in semantic processing for ASD children especially with: (1) recognizing and internalizing the organizational framework, which binds parts together in CM; (2) the concept of membership within a group in MM; and (3) abstract relationships where the connection between the entities is less concrete and organized in SM. Within the ASD group, statistically significant differences were found in favor of PM over MM and SM due to the simplicity and the concrete nature of PM, which required less cognitive abstraction in comparison to the other types. These findings suggest that assessments of semantic understanding in Arabic-speaking children with ASD should consider the specific challenges posed by different types of meronymy. Targeted interventions focusing on these specific meronymy types may improve communication skills and support the academic progress of children with ASD in Jordanian schools and therapy settings.

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.