Journal of Psycholinguistic Research最新文献

Chinese is widely known as a topic-prominent language, and topic sentences are typical Chinese sentence structures. Sparse previous L2 processing studies of Chinese topic sentences mainly focused on single-topic sentences, while this study examined the processing of Chinese double-topic sentences. Beginning with three sentence-initial NPs (double topics and a subject), Chinese double-topic sentences are subject to the double-topic constraint, which requires the base-generated topic to precede the moved topic. Adopting a self-paced reading task, this study explores how intermediate and advanced Korean learners of Chinese as well as Chinese native speakers process the double topics and the subject, and whether they are sensitive to the double-topic constraint, revealing to what extent their processing is nativelike. The results showed that all participants had a similar pattern in processing the double topics and the subject in that they showed a reanalysis effect in analyzing the second and third NP. Besides, the Chinese native speakers and advanced Korean learners of Chinese were found to be sensitive to the double-topic constraint, but the intermediate Korean learners were not. The implications of the results for L2 sentence processing are discussed.

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.