Ideas about morphological complexity have been used to classify languages and to link complexity to language age and social structure. Creoles and sign languages are often framed as younger and structurally simpler than other languages. Concurrently, sign language morphology has been described as paradoxical, as both simple and complex. This paper is a critical examination of claims about morphological complexity and its relationship to language age and social structure. We show that the theoretical and empirical foundations of claims that sign language morphology is paradoxical are flawed. Specifically, argumentation and evidence supporting analogies between creole and sign language complexity adopt theoretically contested and ideologically problematic assumptions about creoles and uncritically apply them to sign languages. We identify four flaws in argumentation: (i) use of limited morphological data to generate claims about global complexity, (ii) association of binary language categories with categorical complexity differences, (iii) use of language age to motivate predictions about morphological complexity, and (iv) extrapolating from creole complexity to sign language complexity. Based on these flaws, we develop nine theoretical and practical recommendations for working with morphological complexity and discuss uncritical cross-disciplinary transfer of ideas.

Auditory verbal hallucinations are a common phenomenon in the general population, with many people without psychological issues reporting the experience. In the ‘White Christmas’ method to induce auditory hallucinations, participants are told that they will be played a portion of the song ‘White Christmas’ and are asked to report when they hear it. Participants are presented only with stochastic noise; still, a large proportion of participants report hearing the song. The experiments reported here investigate how masking relationships modulate verbal hallucinations in the White-Christmas effect. Specifically, we tested how the effect is modulated by different kinds of maskers (multi-talker babble versus spectrally matched speech-shaped stochastic noise) and different kinds of expectation of the speech being masked (expecting a ‘normal’ modal voice versus a whispered voice behind the masking). The White Christmas effect was replicated, and the rate of verbal hallucinations was higher for multi-talker babble than for spectrally-matched speech-shaped stochastic noise. In addition, a trend for a higher rate of hallucination for whispered voices was found. These results confirm the role of masking relations in the White Christmas effect and reinforce the similarity between the White Christmas effect and continuity illusions such as phoneme restoration.

While the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR) for languages was originally developed for the European context, its influence has extended to other regions. The present paper highlights this growing influence by reporting on revisions to grammar in South Korea’s National English Curriculum based on CEFR criteria and the related CEFR-based English Grammar Profile resource. Specifically focusing on Appendix 4 of the 2015 curriculum, which consists of example sentences of language forms for communication (e.g. Kate is from London), the revising process based on CEFR and the English Grammar Profile involved two steps: 1) adding grammatical categories for the example sentences, and 2) reorganizing the school level where the grammatical categories are recommended to be taught. The resulting changes were implemented in the 2022 Korean National English Curriculum, which began being applied nationwide to English education in 2024.

Although bilinguals use both auditory and visual cues, the cognitive cost of language switching in audiovisual contexts is unclear. We investigated the cost in Tibetan–Chinese bilinguals using a task with audiovisual, visual and auditory modalities. In Study 1, the audiovisual modality yielded the fastest reaction times, reflecting improved processing efficiency. ERP data revealed smaller positive amplitudes in the early window (200–350 ms) for audiovisual modality, indicating reduced neural demand, while only auditory modality showed significant divergence in the later window (350–700 ms). Moreover, audiovisual context, L2-to-L1 switching and early neural responses predicted switching behavior. Study 2 replicated the behavioral and ERP findings of Study 1 and demonstrated that auditory input and second-language processing exacerbated switch costs. These findings shed light on multisensory integration in language switching by demonstrating that audiovisual cues reduce switch costs, whereas auditory input and second-language processing exacerbate them, with implications for language education and cognitive interventions.

This study revisits the relationship between second-language (L2) learners’ ability to distinguish sounds in non-native phonological contrasts and to recognize spoken words when recognition depends on these sounds, while addressing the role of methodological similarity. Bilingual Catalan/Spanish learners of English were tested on the identification of two vowel contrasts (VI) of diverging difficulty, /i/-/ɪ/ (difficult) and /ɛ/-/æ/ (easy), in monosyllabic minimal pairs, and on their recognition of the same pairs in a word-picture matching task (WPM). Learners performed substantially better with /i/-/ɪ/ in VI than in WPM, and individual scores were only weakly correlated. By replicating previous findings through a more symmetrical design, we show that an account of prior work rooted in methodological dissimilarity is improbable and provide additional support for the claim that accuracy in sound identification does not guarantee improvements in word recognition. This has implications for our understanding of L2-speech acquisition and L2 pronunciation training.

What is the optimal level of questionnaire detail required to measure bilingual language experience? This empirical evaluation compares alternative measures of language exposure of varying cost (i.e., questionnaire detail) in terms of their performance as predictors of oral language outcomes. The alternative measures were derived from Q-BEx questionnaire data collected from a diverse sample of 121 heritage bilinguals (5–9 years of age) growing up in France, the Netherlands and the UK. Outcome data consisted of morphosyntax and vocabulary measures (in the societal language) and parental estimates of oral proficiency (in the heritage language). Statistical modelling exploited information-theoretic and cross-validation approaches to identify the optimal language exposure measure. Optimal cost–benefit was achieved with cumulative exposure (for the societal language) and current exposure in the home (for the heritage language). The greatest level of questionnaire detail did not yield more reliable predictors of language outcomes.

A growing literature explores the representational detail of infants’ early lexical representations, but no study has investigated how exposure to real-life acoustic-phonetic variation impacts these representations. Indeed, previous experimental work with young infants has largely ignored the impact of accent exposure on lexical development. We ask how routine exposure to accent variation affects 6-month-olds’ ability to detect mispronunciations. Forty-eight monolingual English-learning 6-month-olds participated. Mono-accented infants, exposed to minimal accent variation, detected vowel mispronunciations in their own name. Multi-accented infants, exposed to high levels of accent variation, did not. Accent exposure impacts speech processing at the earliest stages of lexical acquisition.

Situated at the junction of Cognitive Semantics and Experimental Phenomenology, this study investigates how participants perceive the structure of 18 perceptual dimensions of opposites across the visual, auditory, tactile, gustatory and olfactory sensory modalities. The structures include three components: two poles (high; low) and an intermediate (neither high nor low). Participants were asked to provide examples of contexts for each dimension for which they could experience the five sensory modalities and then describe their experiences of the structures with respect to whether the poles were experienced as a single property (Point), or a range of properties with or without a precise limit (Bounded Range or Unbounded Range respectively). For the intermediate region, they described if they experienced a single property (Point) or many (Range) or none (No Intermediates). The study centres on two main questions. Is the perceptual structure invariant across the sensory modalities? If not, how do the structures differ? The study shows that the overall structure of all dimensions was stable in at least two of the modalities, and many structures were stable across more than two modalities. Stability was particularly pertinent across the visual and tactile modalities, and the gustatory and olfactory modalities.