Multi-word expressions (MWEs) are fixed, conventional strings of language (e.g. idioms, collocations, binomials, proverbs) which have been found to be widespread in language use. Research has shown that MWEs exhibit an online processing advantage over control phrases by first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers. While this line of research has helped us better understand the nature of MWEs and factors that may influence their processing in real time, there remain several gaps that future research should focus on. In this piece, we focus on four main topics related to the online processing of MWEs: (1) comprehension of MWEs by L1 and L2 speakers, (2) production of MWEs by L1 and L2 speakers, (3) the processing of modified MWEs by L1 and L2 speakers, and (4) the processing of MWEs by L1 children. Under each topic, we propose nine research tasks that will further advance our understanding of MWE processing in real time. We conclude with relevance of MWE processing research to L2 teaching and learning.

One barrier to patients’ compliance in following instructions to take prescription medication is their memory of those instructions. Effective communication can be challenging with older adults, since people can use ineffective strategies to compensate for older adults’ presumed communication difficulties. The purpose of this study was to test whether older adults would benefit from gestures and/or props in hearing explanations of the appropriate use of prescription medication. Participants were 181 adults 65 years or older. They evaluated pharmacy students on their communication. Each participant watched video clips of pharmacy students explaining how to use fictional medications in three conditions: (1) speech only, (2) speech and gestures, and (3) speech and props. Participants were tested on their memory and rated the effectiveness of the communication of each pharmacy student. Participants showed no differences in memory across conditions. These findings do not support the use of gestures and/or props in effective communication with older adults.

This essay defends a new interpretation of Kant’s account of the theoretical use of the ideas of reason based on the idea that reason is the faculty that delivers comprehension, i.e., cognition that essentially involves explanatory understanding. I argue that the ideas are conditions of the possibility of comprehension, just as the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience. In virtue of being constitutive of comprehension, the ideas are also regulative of experience. For experience is acquired not for its own sake but for the sake of comprehension.

This paper reports an expansion of the English as a second language (L2) component of the Multilingual Eye Movement Corpus (MECO L2), an international database of eye movements during text reading. While the previous Wave 1 of the MECO project (Kuperman et al., 2023) contained English as a L2 reading data from readers with 12 different first language (L1) backgrounds, the newly collected dataset adds eye-tracking data on English text reading from 13 distinct L1 backgrounds (N = 660) as well as participants’ scores on component skills of English proficiency and information about their demographics and language background and use. The paper reports reliability estimates, descriptive statistics, and correlational analyses as means to validate the expansion dataset. Consistent with prior literature and the MECO Wave 1, trends in the MECO Wave 2 data include a weak correlation between reading comprehension and oculomotor measures of reading fluency and a greater L1-L2 contrast in reading fluency than reading comprehension. Jointly with Wave 1, the MECO project includes English reading data from more than 1,200 readers representing a diversity of native writing systems (logographic, abjad, abugida, and alphabetic) and 19 distinct L1 backgrounds. We provide multiple pointers to new venues of how L2 reading researchers can mine this rich publicly available dataset.

A survey of instruction delivery and reinforcement methods in recent laboratory experiments reveals a wide and inconsistently reported variety of practices and limited research evaluating their effectiveness. Thus, we experimentally compare how methods of delivering and reinforcing experiment instructions impact subjects’ comprehension and retention of payoff-relevant information. We report a one-shot individual decision task in which non-money-maximizing behavior can be unambiguously identified and find that such behavior is prevalent in our baseline treatment which uses plain, but relatively standard experimental instructions. We find combinations of reinforcement methods that can eliminate half of non-money-maximizing behavior, and we find that we can induce a similar reduction via enhancements to the content of instructions. Residual non-money-maximizing behavior suggests that this may be an important source of noise in experimental studies.

This study will investigate how children acquire the option to drop the subject of a sentence, or null subjects (e.g., “Tickles me” instead of “He tickles me”). In languages that do not permit null subjects, children produce sentences with null subjects from 1 to 3 years of age. This non-adultlike production has been explained by two main accounts: first, the null subject sentences may accurately reflect the children’s linguistic knowledge, that is, a competence account. Alternatively, they may result from immature processing resources, therefore underestimating children’s competence, that is, a performance account. We will test the predictions of these accounts by using a central fixation preference procedure and elicited imitation to measure children’s comprehension and production, respectively, in monolingual 19- to 28-month-olds acquiring English (a non-null subject language) and Italian (a null subject language). The results will shed light on acquisition across languages, and the features that provide evidence to a learner.

Computational simplification tools can make complex information sources easier to read for engineering designers. To guide and evaluate such approaches, it is necessary to understand how designers process information and how that information can be enhanced and measured. Here, we establish an approach for enhancing and measuring the comprehensibility of technical information for engineering designers. It is grounded in theories of document search and comprehension and provides theoretically supported principles for enhancing information and methods for measuring comprehension experimentally. It is tailored for engineering design in that it (i) does not summarize or remove potentially important information, (ii) is suitable for long, complex sources of information, (iii) can be applied in experiments that simulate real-life information sharing scenarios, and (iv) enables the measurement of domain-specific comprehension. The feasibility of the approach was tested by using patent documents as a test case since they represent a valuable but underutilized source of technical information. A 2 (patent documents) × 2 (conditions: control vs. modified) experiment was conducted with 28 professional engineering designers. Two patent documents were modified with six information design principles. Comprehension scores were higher for the modified patent than for the control, but the change was not statistically significant (p = 0.073). We attribute this either to redundancy effects causing a smaller than expected overall improvement in performance, or differences in prior knowledge for each patent. Overall, this approach offers a novel method for investigating and measuring information comprehensibility in engineering design; however, its effectiveness in enhancing information comprehensibility remains unvalidated.

The cognate facilitation effect, a classic example of cross-language interaction in the bilingual lexicon, has mostly been studied in adults. We examined the extent to which such effects occurred in simultaneous bilingual children’s word processing, to what extent these were modulated by language dominance, and to what extent this differed between comprehension and production tasks. Simultaneous bilingual Dutch-Greek children, ranging from Dutch-dominant to Greek-dominant, performed auditory lexical decision and picture-naming tasks in an online experiment. Cognate facilitation effects emerged in both tasks but manifested themselves differently. In lexical decision, there was an interaction effect with language dominance in accuracy, while in picture naming there was a main effect in reaction times. These findings suggest that, similar to what has been found for adults, simultaneous bilingual children have an integrated lexicon, in which both languages are interactively connected. Effects may differ as a combined result of factors such as comprehension versus production and individual differences in language dominance. Importantly, despite such differences, our results show that cognate effects emerge across tasks and across a range of individual children’s language dominance, indicating that shared representations within the bilingual lexicon are accessed during both word comprehension and production.

Metaphors are key to how children conceptualise the world around them and how they engage socially and educationally. This study investigated metaphor comprehension in typically developing Arabic-speaking children aged 3;01-6;07. Eighty-seven children were administered a newly developed task containing 20 narrated stories and were asked to point at pictures that best illustrated the metaphoric expression. The results were examined through a mixed ANCOVA, testing the effects of chronological age, metaphor type (primary, perceptual) and metaphor conventionality (conventional, novel) on metaphor comprehension. Children could understand some metaphors just after their third birthday, and their comprehension increased with age. Children’s performance was somewhat better on primary than perceptual, and much better on conventional than novel metaphors. These findings are discussed in light of conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 2008) and structure mapping theory (Gentner & Markman, 1997), confirming differences in the acquisition of different metaphor types.

This study reports on the feasibility of using the Test of Complex Syntax- Electronic (TECS-E), as a self-directed app, to measure sentence comprehension in children aged 4 to 5 ½ years old; how testing apps might be adapted for effective independent use; and agreement levels between face-to-face supported computerized and independent computerized testing with this cohort. A pilot phase was completed with 4 to 4;06-year-old children, to determine the appropriate functional app features required to facilitate independent test completion. Following the integration of identified features, children completed the app independently or with adult support (4–4;05 (n = 22) 4;06–4;11 months (n = 55) and 5 to 5;05 (n = 113)) and test re-test reliability was examined. Independent test completion posed problems for children under 5 years but for those over 5, TECS-E is a reliable method to assess children’s understanding of complex sentences, when used independently.

To test effects of German on anticipation in Vietnamese, we recorded eye-movements during comprehension and manipulated i) verb constraints (different vs. similar in German and Vietnamese) and ii) classifier constraints (absent in German). In each of two experiments, participants listened to Vietnamese sentences like “Mai mặc một chiếc áo.” (‘Mai wears a [classifier] shirt.’), while viewing four objects. Between experiments, we contrasted bilingual background: L1 Vietnamese–L2 German late bilinguals (Experiment 1) and heritage speakers of Vietnamese in Germany (Experiment 2). Both groups anticipated verb-compatible and classifier-compatible objects upon hearing the verb/classifier. However, when the (verb) constraints differed (e.g., Vietnamese: mặc ‘wear (a shirt/#earrings)’ – German: tragen ‘wear (a shirt/earrings)’), the heritage speakers were distracted by the object (earrings) compatible with the German (but not the Vietnamese) verb constraints. These results demonstrate that competing information in the two languages can interfere with anticipation in heritage speakers.

This paper presents a language, Alda, that supports all of logic rules, sets, functions, updates, and objects as seamlessly integrated built-ins. The key idea is to support predicates in rules as set-valued variables that can be used and updated in any scope, and support queries using rules as either explicit or implicit automatic calls to an inference function. We have defined a formal semantics of the language, implemented a prototype compiler that builds on an object-oriented language that supports concurrent and distributed programming and on an efficient logic rule system, and successfully used the language and implementation on benchmarks and problems from a wide variety of application domains. We describe the compilation method and results of experimental evaluation.

Bilinguals experience processing costs when comprehending code-switches, yet the magnitude of the cost fluctuates depending on numerous factors. We tested whether switch costs vary based on the frequency of different types of code-switches, as estimated from natural corpora of bilingual speech and text. Spanish–English bilinguals in the U.S. read single-language and code-switched sentences in a self-paced task. Sentence regions containing code-switches were read more slowly than single-language control regions, consistent with the idea that integrating a code-switch poses a processing challenge. Crucially, more frequent code-switches elicited significantly smaller costs both within and across most classes of switch types (e.g., within verb phrases and when comparing switches at verb-phrase and noun-phrase sites). The results suggest that, in addition to learning distributions of syntactic and semantic patterns, bilinguals develop finely tuned expectations about code-switching behavior – representing one reason why code-switching in naturalistic contexts may not be particularly costly.