An empirical study is presented that tests a novel prediction generated by the Metaphor-by-Pattern-Completion (MPC) connectionist model of metaphor comprehension (Thomas & Mareschal, 2001). The MPC model predicts a developmental progression in the way that children process metaphors, from a preference for basic-level metaphors to a preference for subordinate-level metaphors. Preference for diff...

This study was the first to examine the relationship between wide reading and listening comprehension in the first language. It answered two questions concerning this relationship. First, higher levels of wide reading were associated with stronger listening comprehension ability. Second, there was indirect evidence to suggest that wide readers may be increasing their listening comprehension abi...

Previous research has established that direct priming effects on implicit memory tests can be dissociated from explicit remembering. Evidence from studies of college students suggests that priming on various implicit tests can be characterized as a presemantic phenomenon: Priming can occur at full strength following nonsemantic encoding tasks that typically produce low levels of explicit memory...

Electrophysiological studies consistently find N400 effects of semantic incongruity in nonnative (L2) language comprehension. These N400 effects are often delayed compared with native (L1) comprehension, suggesting that semantic integration in one's second language occurs later than in one's first language. In this study, we investigated whether such a delay could be attributed to (1) intraling...

The main concern of the present study was to compare Iranian monolingual and bilingual EFL students’ listening comprehension in terms of Latinized Persian subtitling of English movie to see whether there was a significant difference between monolinguals and bilinguals on immediate linguistic comprehension of the movie. Latinized Persian subtitling was representing Persian language in Latin scri...

Two studies aimed to investigate the reading comprehension abilities of 14 readers with Down syndrome aged 6 years 8 months to 13 years relative to those of typically developing children matched on word reading ability, and to investigate how these abilities were associated with reading accuracy, listening comprehension, phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Study 1 confirmed signifi...

The goal of the current study was to identify the neural substrate of idiom comprehension using fMRI. Idioms are familiar, fixed expressions whose meaning is not dependent on the literal interpretation of the component words. We presented literally plausible idioms in a sentence forcing a figurative or a literal interpretation and contrasted them with sentences containing idioms for which no li...

The current study investigated comprehension of object labels in young children. Eightand 14-month olds were presented with pairs of pictures (e.g., dog and ball) to establish infants’ initial looking preferences and then children heard a linguistic label (e.g., dog). Only 14-month-olds reliably increased looking to the referents after hearing the labels relative to their initial preference, wh...

BACKGROUND Metacognition and working memory (WM) have been found associated with success in reading comprehension, but no studies have examined their combined effect on the training of reading comprehension. Another open question concerns the role of listening comprehension: In particular, it is not clear whether training to improve reading comprehension must necessarily be based on processing ...

Hearing loss is one of the most common complaints in adults over the age of 60 and a major contributor to difficulties in speech comprehension. To examine the effects of hearing ability on the neural processes supporting spoken language processing in humans, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging to monitor brain activity while older adults with age-normal hearing listened to sentences t...