John W. Schwieter

As digital advancements reshape communication, researchers need interdisciplinary methods to understand the cognitive processes involved. This essential reference for advanced students and researchers provides a comprehensive introduction to innovative research methods in cognitive translation and interpreting studies (CTIS). International experts...

In everyday conversation, bilingual individuals switch between their languages not only in reaction to monolinguals with different language profiles but also voluntarily and naturally. However, whether and how various switching contexts dynamically modulate domain-general cognitive control is still unclear. Using a cross-task paradigm in which a fl...

The present study used immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) technology to simulate a real-life environment and examined its impact on novel word learning and lexicalization. On Days 1-3, Chinese-speaking participants learned German words in iVR and traditional picture-word (PW) association contexts. A semantic priming task was used to measure word lexic...

Full text available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0911604424000423?via%3Dihub

Research on the cognitive neural mechanisms of language control often overlook the role of rewards. To investigate how reversal rewards affect bilingual language switching during observational learning, we conducted a dual-brain electroencephalography (EEG) study. Participants, classified as direct learners or observers, performed a voluntary langu...

Prosody refers to stress and intonation patterns in a language. Previous studies have found that prosodic sensitivity (PS) and executive functions can affect reading comprehension in first (L1) and second languages (L2). The current study examined these factors among a group of L1 Mandarin speakers learning L2 English who participated in a series o...

Repeated exposure to word forms and meanings improves lexical knowledge acquisition. However, the roles of domain-general and language-specific brain regions during this process remain unclear. To investigate this, we applied intermittent theta burst stimulation over the domain-general (group left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) and domain-specific...

Psycholinguistic approaches to examining bilingualism are relatively recent applications that have emerged in the 20th century. The fact that there are more than 7,000 current languages in the world, with the majority of the population actively using more than one language, offers the opportunity to examine language and cognitive processes in a way...

Companionship refers to one’s being in the presence of another individual. For adults, acquiring a new language is a highly social activity that often involves learning in the context of companionship. However, the effects of companionship on new language learning have gone relatively underexplored, particularly with respect to word learning. Using...

Full text available at: https://www.aieti.eu/enti/psycholinguistics_ENG

Individuals learn the meaning of words mainly through feedback from others at early stages, but confusing feedback may cause disturbances in establishing lexical form-to-meaning mappings. To date, little is known about how these mappings are preciously established as language learning experiences and proficiency increase. To this end, we asked part...

Aims and Objectives: Translation ambiguous words are lexical items with one-to-many equivalents in another language. Some of these equivalents are more dominant (i.e., more frequently used) than others. The aim of the present study is to explore non-target language activation of translation ambiguous words among Chinese-English bilinguals. Methodo...

Expectation States Theory suggests that social status carries emotions, with higher statuses producing positive emotions and lower statuses leading to negative emotions. However, the theory is broad and lacks empirical evidence. This study investigated whether positive and negative evaluations from positions of higher and lower social hierarchies a...

The relationship between language switching and task switching has been well studied in bilingualism literature. This study employs two novel experiments involving magnitude-parity switching and transparency-orientation switching and examines the costs associated with these task switches compared to language switching. Switching costs and the reduc...

Domain-general conflict control refers to the cognitive process in which individuals suppress task-irrelevant information and extract task-relevant information. It supports both effective implementation of cognitive conflict control and emotional conflict control. The present study employed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and adopted a...

Compound words consist of two or more words which combine to form a single word or phrase that acts as one. In English, the head of compound words is usually, but not always, the right-most root (e.g., “paycheck” is a noun because the head, “check,” is a noun). The current study explores the effects of head position on language control by examining...

In this behavioral and electrophysiological study, we compare novel word learning, particularly lexical form acquisition, in an immersive virtual reality (VR) context with a picture-word (PW) association context. We also test whether inhibitory control and age of second language acquisition (L2 AoA) have modulating effects. Chinese speakers of L2 E...

When bilinguals switch between their two languages, they often alternate between words whose formation rules in one language are different from the other (e.g., a noun-verb compound in one language may be a verb-noun compound in another language). In this study, we analyze behavioral performance and electrophysiological activity to examine the effe...

The Cognitive Neuroscience of Bilingualism presents an introduction to the neural bases and cognitive processes of the bilingual brain. It covers foundational knowledge required for study in the area of bilingualism, including prominent theories and research methodologies, and the state of research in relevant fields of psycholinguistics, cognitive...

In real-life communication, individuals use language that carries evident rewarding and punishing elements, such as praise and criticism. A common trend is to seek more praise while avoiding criticism. Furthermore, semantics is crucial for conveying information, but such semantic access to native and foreign languages is subtly distinct. To investi...

Sleep-dependent consolidation is important for novel word learning, but previous studies have neglected the potential modulating role of learning environments. The present study examines sleep-dependent consolidation effects by comparing learning in a virtual reality (VR) environment and in a traditional picture-word (PW) environment. Two groups of...

The present study uses functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) to examine the overlapping and specific neural correlates of contextualized emotional conflict control and domain-general conflict control. During a performance on emotional and domain-general conflict tasks, conjunction analyses showed that neural areas distributed in the frontopari...

For multilinguals, acquiring and processing language is similar to other cognitive skills: they are grounded in mechanisms of sensory processing and motor control (Paradis, 2019). Recent clinical and experimental research on multilingualism have introduced innovative neuroimaging measures and psychological methods that have significantly shed light...

Studies have shown that there are overlapping neural bases for cognitive and affective conflict control, but whether the neural activity patterns caused by the two types of conflict are similar remains to be explored. The present study utilizes electroencephalogram (EEG) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to temporally and spatially a...

Aims: Cross-language interference studies of language control mainly focus on the lexical level, whereas language control may occur at the smallest unit phonemic level of language. In the present study, we examined the role of language control during cross-language phoneme processing. Design: Participants used one language to name pinyin or alphabe...

In this paper, we examine the effects of learning environment on second language (L2) gender agreement. English speakers learning L2 Spanish participated in a self-paced reading task and a picture selection task prior to and after a short-term study abroad experience. The results from the self-paced reading task showed that their reliance on the ma...

Previous studies have debated whether the ability for bilinguals to mentally control their languages is a consequence of their experiences switching between languages or whether it is a specific, yet highly-adaptive, cognitive ability. The current study investigates how variations in the language-related gene FOXP2 and executive function-related ge...

Self‐positivity bias is a common psychological phenomenon in which individuals often associate positive information with themselves. However, little is known about how self‐positivity bias is modulated by different language contexts (e.g., a first vs. second language). To this end, we analyzed behavioral and electrophysiological data to examine whe...

Human communication not only involves the need to switch between the modalities of speaking and listening, but for bilinguals, it can also involve switching between languages. It is unknown as to whether modality and language switching share underlying control mechanisms or whether one type of switching affects control processes involved in the oth...

Research has shown that several variables affect language control among bilingual speakers but the effect of affective processing remains unexplored. Chinese–English bilinguals participated in a novel prime-target language switching experiment in which they first judged the affective valence (i.e., positive or negative) of auditorily presented word...

Unlabelled: Bilingual adaptive control mechanisms appear to be linked to congenital genetic factors such as dopamine (DA) genes. However, it is unclear as to whether acquired cognitive exercise can vanquish innate influences that allow bilingual executive advantages to be shown in other cognitive areas. In the present study, we examine the relatio...

Professor Michael H. Long (1945-2021) was one of the most influential scholars in the field of second language acquisition. This volume presents a set of chapters that honour some of his key contributions in language teaching and learning. Following a bibliometric analysis of the impact of his research to the field, the volume spans topics such as...

For bilinguals, speaking and listening are assisted by complex control processes including conf lict monitoring and inhibition. However, the extent to which these processes adapt to linguistic and situational needs has been examined separately for language production and comprehension. In the present study, we use a dual-EEG to record the carry-ove...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The Culture and Second Language Learning in Migrants Research Topic contributed towards our understanding of how culture is an integral component of second language learning, acquisition, and performance. Across articles, numerous sophisticated and rigorous methodologies were used to answer very diverse sets of research questions. Together, this co...

Working memory (WM) is our limited-capacity storage and processing (memory) system that permeates essential facets of our cognitive life such as arithmetic calculation, logical thinking, decision making, prospective planning, language comprehension, and production. Since the very inception of WM in the early 1960s (Miller et al., 1960), its role in...

According to George Miller (1956), a pioneer of the ‘cognitive revolution’ and proponent of the buzzword concept of the “magical number seven,” cognitive science in the modern sense had only started in the 1950s and gradually took shape in the mid-1970s. Based on Miller’s (2003) historical account, cognitive science as a scientific field of study w...

Working memory (WM) is our limited-capacity storage and processing (memory) system that permeates essential facets of our cognitive life such as arithmetic calculation, logical thinking, decision-making, prospective planning, language comprehension, and production. Since the very inception of WM in the early 1960s (Miller et al., 1960), its role in...

This chapter explores the dynamic relationship between working memory (WM) and grammar development across adult L2 learning. For over twenty years, WM has received considerable attention in research on adult second language (L2) development. One reason for this is that L2 learning requires both processing and storage to comprehend input and to extr...

The capacity for temporary storage and manipulation of information, i.e., working memory (WM), was first reported to be related to vocabulary acquisition over 30 years ago (Daneman & Green, 1986, for general WM capacity; Gathercole & Baddeley, 1989 and Service, 1989, for phonological WM). Although a relationship with L2 vocabulary knowledge has bee...

This chapter presents the hypothesis that working memory and language evolved in tandem. It reviews the evolutionary origins of each of the components of Baddeley’s working memory model and their role in the evolution of language. The chapter reviews the gradualist position that language did evolve slowly from aurally directed early primate calls a...

The phonological component of the working memory system is specialized in maintaining a sequence of verbal items (digits, letters, words, pseudowords) over a very short period of time. Therefore, a central issue has been why we are provided with such ability, and what is its functional role. A series of studies on healthy people, on children learni...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The last 50 years have witnessed an exponential growth and significant progress in working memory and language sciences research independently and jointly, though a generalizable theory or model that transcends disciplines is still absent from the literature. Drawing on multidisciplinary insights from cognitive science and emerging patterns from la...

The multicomponent model of working memory developed during the period when psycholinguistics was dominated by Chomsky’s transformational grammar and its potential implications. The original model had assumed a limited capacity attentional control system, the central executive, aided by temporary verbal storage from the phonological loop and visuos...

This chapter examines variation patterns across the world's grammars in relation to working memory (WM) models in psycholinguistics. It distinguishes: (1) constrained capacity proposals in which certain limits in WM are used to explain why some grammatical phenomena are (or are supposed to be) nonoccurring; (2) more versus less WM proposals where g...

Working memory based limitations have increasingly been proposed as a way of explaining differences between native (L1) and non-native (L2) sentence processing. However, while there has been increasing interest in the role that working memory may play in L2 sentence processing, different approaches to L2 processing rely on different conceptualisati...

This chapter focuses on how working memory develops in children who are born deaf. It includes studies of deaf users of spoken and signed languages from within the medical and social models of deafness. It also reviews how differences in working memory capacity have been explained between deaf and hearing children. It reviews the role of auditory f...

Several children in a typical classroom experience persistent learning difficulties that are likely to reflect weak cognitive skills (Holmes et al., 2020). In some cases, these are related to poor working memory. In this chapter, we discuss how limited working memory resources constrain classroom learning, focusing on the impact of poor working mem...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) show significant difficulties mastering language yet exhibit normal-range nonverbal intelligence, normal hearing and speech, and no neurological impairment. Deficits in sentence comprehension represent a major feature of school-age children’s language profile. So do memory limitations, including d...

This chapter reviews research on the efficacy of training Working Memory (WM) in an educational context. We begin with a brief description of WM, its relation to classroom constructs, an overview of WM training programs, followed by classroom recommendations pertaining to several case studies. We characterize WM training programs into two categorie...

Working Memory (WM) is a central structure maintaining information at short term in face of temporal decay and interference for its processing in ongoing tasks. As a consequence, WM is strongly involved in learning, especially in learning first or second languages. The Time-Based Resource Sharing (TBRS) model describes the functioning and developme...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Working memory (WM) deficits are fundamental problems of children with average intelligence but with specific learning disorders in reading and/or math. Depending on the task, these deficits manifest themselves as a domain-specific storage constraint (i.e., the inefficient accessing and availability of phonological representations, e.g., numbers, p...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Working memory’s limited capacity places significant constraints on people's ability to hold information while processing. However, skilled readers are able to effectively encode important information into long-term memory during comprehension. This chapter describes the long-term working memory theory (LT-WM), originally developed to explain how e...

According to some researchers, different languages foster specific habits of processing information, which may be retained beyond the linguistic domain. In left-branching languages, for instance, the head is usually preceded by its dependents, and real-time sentence comprehension may require a different allocation of attention as compared to right-...

To conceptualize the communicative role of working memory (WM), the Ease-of-Language Understanding (ELU) model was proposed (e.g., Rönnberg, 2003; Rönnberg et al., 2008, 2013, 2019, 2020). The model states that ease of language understanding is determined by the speed and accuracy with which the signal is matched to existing multimodal language rep...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The relationship between working memory (WM) and second language (L2) reading comprehension has received considerable attention for nearly three decades. Although studies in this line of research generally report a small to moderate relationship between WM and L2 reading comprehension, comparison of studies remains challenging due to the lack of sp...

We view working memory as a general resource in which attention can be allocated to any type of information and stimulus input. One vital skill that requires the use of working memory is the comprehension and production of language. In this chapter, we outline the basis of the embedded-processes model of working memory. We then discuss how the diff...

This chapter addresses the role of verbal working memory (WM) in language production and comprehension, focusing on data from brain-damaged individuals, while also drawing on related findings from healthy adults. The perspective on WM is the domain-specific model which includes WM buffers that are specific to phonological and semantic information a...

Cognitive load theory is an instructional theory based on our knowledge of evolutionary psychology and human cognitive architecture. It can be used to provide instructional guidelines for the acquisition of all aspects of a second language by adults and some aspects, primarily reading and writing, of a first language by both children and adults. Th...

Working memory and language are tightly intertwined cognitive systems. Working memory enables language acquisition and vocabulary expansion; it supports both language comprehension and language production. Language, on the other hand, provides key representations that support efficient and robust encoding and maintenance of information in working m...

Working memory (WM) training explores whether and how repeated practice on working memory tasks might generalize to a variety of outcome measures. Although this field of research is part of the growing literature in cognitive sciences, it has spawned contentious debates. The controversies are largely driven by inconsistent findings and commercial i...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Research on working memory and language has followed two quite divergent paths. The first line of inquiry examines questions relating to the components and organization of working memory – whether there are specialized buffers, the nature of the link to long-term memory, and so on. For the most part, studies of this type have little to say about th...

This chapter starts by providing brief accounts of both first and second language speaking, and then surveys empirical work, measurement issues, and theory on the use of second language speaking tasks – the sort of tasks, often with real-world connections, used in communicative language classrooms to nurture second language development and performa...

The role of working memory in language learning has received considerable attention, but several pertinent issues remain. One of these concerns the directionality of the relationships between working memory and language learning. Another issue relates to different types of processing and working memory components involved in learning different aspe...

Working memory, as a cognitive function, needs to be understood within the context of the mind as a whole, in other words within a general framework that can connect it to related research and theory. In this chapter we present one such broad view of the mind, the Modular Cognition Framework (MCF), and apply it to the study of working memory, empha...

Drawing on work from cognitive psychology, a vast body of research has examined the role of working memory (WM) in second-language (L2) development, processing, and use (e.g., Linck et al., 2014). Our ability to discern such relationships, however, may be obscured by the different measures of WM that are adopted and employed by L2 researchers. Ther...

We start with a brief review of evidence that verbal working memory (WM) involves a limited capacity phonological loop capable of retaining verbal sequences for a few seconds in immediate serial recall, vocabulary acquisition, speech production, and language comprehension. The challenge of explaining how such a system handles information about seri...

A distinguishing feature of the cognitive process of speech planning is its flexible balancing of speed, quality, and effort. Utterance planning strategies can vary adaptively depending on speaker goals and circumstances. For example, when speed is a priority, the planning process might sacrifice the quality of an utterance by engaging in more incr...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

Working memory is a complex construct and neurological function that includes short-term auditory and visual-spatial storage, information processing, and executive awareness and regulation. An in-depth assessment of working memory should test these diverse components with contemporary standardized measures. Informal procedures, such as interviews a...

The construction of a coherent text mental representation demands multiple comprehension processes such as the activation and maintenance of the most important ideas of the text, the retrieval of related information from long-term memory, the generation of information that has not been explicitly mentioned (e.g., inference making), the detection of...

Bringing together cutting-edge research, this Handbook is the first comprehensive text to examine the pivotal role of working memory in first and second language acquisition, processing, impairments, and training. Authored by a stellar cast of distinguished scholars from around the world, the Handbook provides authoritative insights on work from di...

The present study measured event-related potentials (ERP) and behavioral performance to examine whether inhibitory control is involved in voluntary language switching, and if so, to explore the differences in inhibitory control between voluntary and mandatory language switching. Unbalanced Chinese-English bilinguals completed two picture naming tas...

The extent to which bilingual language control (BLC) is related to domain-general executive control (EC) remains unclear. The present study applied activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analyses to identify commonalities and distinctions in the brain regions across domains reported in neuroimaging studies. We specifically compare results from...

A growing body of research suggests that the language in which bilinguals make decisions affects the rationality of such decisions. Furthermore, bilinguals constantly confront cross‐language interference that requires complex language control processes to resolve this competition. However, the relationship between language control and decision‐maki...