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General academic words are those which are typically learned through exposure to school texts and occur across disciplines. We examined academic vocabulary assessment data from a group of English-speaking middle school students (N = 1,747). We tested how word frequency, complexity, proximity, polysemy, and diversity related to students’ knowledge of target words across ability levels. Our results affirm the strong relation between vocabulary and reading at the individual level. Strong readers were more likely to know the meanings of words than struggling readers were, regardless of the features of the academic words tested. Words with more meanings were easier for all students, on average. The relation between word frequency and item difficulty was stronger among better readers, whereas the relation between word complexity and item difficulty was stronger among less proficient readers. Our examination of academic words’ characteristics and how these characteristics relate to word difficulty across reading performance has implications for instruction.

Lupyan's (2012) label-feedback hypothesis proposes that linguistic labels affect our conceptual and perceptual representations through top-down feedback. We investigated whether such representations in bilinguals are influenced by labels from both of their languages by examining the effect of Chinese word structure on picture perception in Chinese–English bilinguals. A visual-oddball task with ERP was used. Pictures of four birds were used as standards and deviants. The robin-ostrich pair shared a category cue in their Chinese names (like blackbird in English), and the pigeon-penguin pair did not. In Chinese–English bilinguals who were new to Canada, the visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) elicited by deviant stimuli was significantly larger for pairs without category cues than pairs with cues, but, in long-stay bilinguals and English monolinguals, the vMMN was similar for the two pairs. These results demonstrate that object perception is influenced by the labels in both of a bilingual's languages.

In this work, we will investigate hybridization, borrowing, and grammatical reorganization phenomena in the Arbëresh dialects of San Marzano (Apulia) and Vena di Maida (central Calabria). The data from the Arbëresh of S. Benedetto Ullano (northern Calabria) will be useful to provide a comparative frame. Arbëresh is the name of the Albanian varieties spoken in the villages/cities generally formed in the late fifteenth century by communities fleeing from Albania as a consequence of the Ottoman occupation. The long-time contact with neighboring Romance varieties is reflected in the extended mixing phenomena which characterize the lexicon and the morphosyntactic organization of Arbëresh as a heritage language. This is particularly evident in the two dialects that we investigate in this contribution, where relexification and grammatical reorganization phenomena provide us with an interesting testing ground to explain language variation.

This article deals with two theoretical aspects of lexical derivation, productivity and graduality. After a discussion of transparency and opaqueness in Old English word-formation, it focuses on lexical productivity and puts forward a typology of recursive phenomena. On the basis of this typology, the morphological template of the Layered Structure of the Word is revised. The main conclusion is that a more diachronically oriented analysis is likely to opt for a decompositional template, whereas a more synchronically directed study which seeks typological validity will probably favour the template with one functional slot. If the focus is on diachronic linguistics, a template based on minimal constituent analysis can guarantee a detailed description of the derivational steps of the word, including non-affixal derivation and semantically opaque affixes.

This article presents SUBTLEX-AR, a digital database providing an extensive collection of attributes related to Modern Standard Arabic words (Arabic for short). SUBTLEX-AR combines a novel dataset of 120 million word tokens from movie subtitles with 40 million tokens from newspaper articles originally collected in ARALEX (Boudelaa & Marslen-Wilson, Behavior Research Methods, 42 , 481–487, 2010 ), ensuring comprehensive coverage. SUBTLEX-AR provides information about the statistical properties of Arabic words at the orthographic, phonological, morphological, and semantic levels. The database also includes information on sub-word structure properties like bigram and trigram frequencies, as well as lemmas and part-of-speech information along with their corresponding frequencies. The online interface of SUBTLEX-AR allows users either to upload a set of words to receive their properties or to receive a set of words matching constraints on predefined properties. The properties themselves are easily extensible and will be expanded over time. SUBTLEX-AR is freely accessible here: https://subtlexar.uaeu.ac.ae/

This study examined how Chinese native speakers (NSs) and second language (L2) learners process compound words. The findings showed that they used the hybrid model of coexistence for whole word and morphemes; and were influenced by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. The results revealed that two groups of participants used hybrid representation when identifying high-frequency words and whole-word representation when identifying low-frequency words. Besides, semantic transparency might impact word structure awareness, and subject-predicate words were the most difficult to process. The research also showed that L2 learners’ word frequency effect was more robust than NSs’; morpheme location information might affect NSs, but L2 learners could not process it. There was variation in NSs’ speed in recognizing transparent and obscure words, but there was no difference among L2 learners. Besides, L2 learners’ word recognition speed could not reach the levels of NSs. Plain Language Summary Since the mental lexicon was put forward, researchers have begun to study the processing and representation of words. As an important part of vocabulary, the processing mechanism of compound words has also received much attention. There have been many studies on how native speakers process compound words so far, but researches on L2 learners are still in its infancy, and most of these studies have been done on English L2 learners, with little research on other languages, for example, Chinese as a second language. Compound words account for about 65% of the vocabulary in Mandarin Chinese. Therefore, research on the processing of Chinese compound words is of great significance. Two lexical judgment experiments were designed for the present study respectively with word frequency, semantic transparency, and lexical structure as independent variables to solve the disputes in the processing of compound words among native Chinese speakers and L2 learners adopting the repetitive priming paradigm based on the reaction time task. This work is the first to explore the interaction effects of semantic transparency and lexical structure on compound word processing. This study may be of particular interest to the general readers of your journal as it gives insight into the compound word processing mechanism of non-English second languages and enriches the theoretical knowledge of L2 word processing from a cross-language perspective. The findings show that they employ the hybrid model of coexistence for whole words and morphemes, and are affected by word frequency, semantic transparency, and word structure. We found that both Chinese native speakers (NS) and L2 learners use hybrid representation when identifying high-frequency words and whole-word representation when identifying low-frequency words; word structure awareness is affected by semantic transparency, and subject-predicate words are the most difficult to process. However, we also found that L2 learners’ word frequency effect is stronger than NSs’; morpheme location information may have an effect on NSs, but L2 learners cannot process it; There is variation in NSs’ speed in recognizing transparent and obscure words, but there is no difference among L2 learners. In addition, L2 learners’ word recognition speed and aptitude cannot reach the levels of NSs. Thus, Chinese L2 learners differ from English L2 learners in their lexical representations, as well as in the effects of semantic transparency, which further enriches the theory of L2 lexical processing.

Cross-linguistic interactions are the hallmark of bilingual development. Theoretical perspectives highlight the key role of cross-linguistic distances and language structure in literacy development. Despite the strong theoretical assumptions, the impact of such bilingualism factors in heritage-language speakers remains elusive given high variability in children's heritage-language experiences. A longitudinal inquiry of heritage-language learners of structurally distinct languages – Spanish–English and Chinese–English bilinguals ( N = 181, M age = 7.57, measured 1.5 years apart) aimed to fill this gap. Spanish–English bilinguals showed stronger associations between morphological awareness skills across their two languages, across time, likely reflecting cross-linguistic similarities in vocabulary and lexical morphology between Spanish and English. Chinese–English bilinguals, however, showed stronger associations between morphological and word reading skills in English, likely reflecting the critical role of morphology in spoken and written Chinese word structure. The findings inform theories of literacy by uncovering the mechanisms by which bilingualism factors influence child literacy development.

While consonant acquisition clearly requires mastery of different articulatory configurations (segments), sub-segmental features and suprasegmental contexts influence both order of acquisition and mismatch (error) patterns (Bérubé, Bernhardt, Stemberger & Ciocca, 2020). Constraints-based nonlinear phonology provides a comprehensive framework for investigating the impact of sub- and suprasegmental impacts on acquisition (Bernhardt & Stemberger, 1998). The current study adopted such a framework in order to investigate these questions for Granada Spanish. Single-word samples of monolingual preschoolers in Granada (29 typically developing; 30 with protracted phonological development) were transcribed by native Spanish speakers in consultation with an international team. Beta regression analyses showed significant effects of age, developmental group, and word structure variables (word length, stress, position of consonants and syllables within the word); salience, markedness and/or frequency across the phonological hierarchy accounted for many patterns. The study further demonstrates the impacts of sub- and suprasegmental constraints of the phonological system on consonant acquisition.

Classical mereology seems unable to characterise the identity conditions of word types. For example, the same letter types ordered differently result in different word types; but mereological fusions of the same letters are identical, regardless of the order of the letters. We show, however, that by combining classical mereology with plural logic one can give a definition of word types that satisfies the identity criteria of word types. This means that it is not necessary to abandon classical mereology in order to give an analysis of the mereological structure of word types.

Morphological awareness (MA) is an important predictor of reading outcomes in different languages. The consonantal root is a salient feature of Arabic lexical structure and critical to MA. The goals of this study were to (a) develop a measure of root awareness (RA) as one dimension of MA in Arabic, and (b) validate the RA measure by predicting reading outcomes in an Arabic population. A set of RA items was administered to 194 Arabic-speaking third-grade children. A one-factor model was specified using confirmatory factor analysis to examine the model fit of the RA measure. A structural equation model was then developed to examine the relation between the RA measure and important reading outcome measures including word reading, reading fluency, and reading comprehension. The results of these analyses indicated good model fit, and the RA measure accounted for a substantial portion of the variance in the outcomes. The establishment of the RA measure is an important preliminary step to efficiently assessing MA in Arabic and could serve as an integral tool for studying reading development.