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        <title>Frontiers in Language Sciences | New and Recent Articles</title>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/language-sciences</link>
        <description>RSS Feed for Frontiers in Language Sciences | New and Recent Articles</description>
        <language>en-us</language>
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        <pubDate>2026-08-08T01:47:44.787+00:00</pubDate>
        <ttl>60</ttl>
        <item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1846406</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1846406</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Convergent representations of linguistic constructions in human and artificial neural systems]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-06T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Pegah Ramezani</author><author>Thomas Kinfe</author><author>Andreas Maier</author><author>Achim Schilling</author><author>Patrick Krauss</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Understanding how the brain processes linguistic constructions is a central challenge in cognitive neuroscience and linguistics. Recent computational studies have shown that artificial neural language models spontaneously develop internally differentiated representations of Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs), generating specific predictions about when and how construction-level information should emerge during language processing. The present study tests these predictions in human neural activity using electroencephalography (EEG). Data were recorded from 12 native English speakers, with 11 participants retained for all reported analyses after preprocessing. Construction-related activity was analyzed using time-frequency analysis, statistical feature extraction, and machine learning classification. The results reveal construction-specific neural signatures that emerge primarily at sentence-final positions, where argument structure information becomes fully disambiguated, and are most prominent in the alpha frequency band. Pairwise classification further demonstrated reliable differentiation between specific construction pairs, particularly ditransitive and resultative constructions, while other pairs exhibited overlapping neural signatures. Importantly, the temporal emergence and similarity structure of these neural effects closely mirror patterns previously observed in recurrent and transformer-based language models, in which constructional representations arise during integrative stages of processing. Together, these findings provide converging evidence that linguistic constructions are neurally encoded as distinct form-meaning mappings, supporting core assumptions of Construction Grammar and suggesting that both biological and artificial learning systems converge on similar representational solutions during predictive language processing. More broadly, this convergence is consistent with the idea that learning systems may discover stable regions within an underlying representational landscape - recently referred to as a Platonic representational space - that constrains which linguistic abstractions emerge as cognitively and computationally efficient forms.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1880735</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1880735</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Overaccommodating language toward older adults: an interpretation based on theories of communication accommodation and system justification]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-08-05T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Perspective</category>
        <author>Maria Àngels Viladot</author><author>Howard Giles</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Prior research on so-called “elderspeak” or patronizing talk directed at older adults—often interpreted by communication accommodation theory (CAT) as a classic example of “overaccommodation”—has shown that such communicative behaviors are viewed negatively by recipients and observers. However, we provide evidence suggesting that these evaluations are by no means uniform and may vary across contexts. To account for this variability, we draw on system justification theory to argue that attributions and evaluations of unfavorably delivered messages may, nonetheless, be accepted insofar as they align with internalized social norms and contribute to maintaining a coherent representation of the social order. We argue that this theoretical position, aligned with CAT, offers a more innovative and comprehensive way of understanding how intergenerational communication may reproduce age-based inequalities.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1845613</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1845613</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Lonely wallets: differences in comprehending anthropomorphic language in Japanese and English]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-30T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Franklin Chang</author><author>Tomoko Tatsumi</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Japanese speakers appear to use anthropomorphic language in a way that is different from English speakers (e.g., my wallet is lonely). Some of these expressions are not conventionalized, yet seem to be spontaneously produced. To test whether these types of anthropomorphic forms are readily understood, we presented English and Japanese readers with stories where the fourth sentence was either an anthropomorphic sentence or a literal sentence. In two experiments, English speakers found the anthropomorphic sentences to be more difficult to process than the literal sentences, but there was no difference in difficulty for the Japanese readers. The results are not explained by existing comprehension or personification theories but instead suggest that culture-specific conceptual factors can change comprehension processes in English and Japanese.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1799931</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1799931</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Monitoring oral language development in young children: psychometric evaluation of a learning progress assessment]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-29T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Melanie Besca</author><author>Marco Ennemoser</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionLearning Progress Assessments (LPA) are widely used to monitor individual progress in various domains, enabling the continuous adjustment of interventions as needed. Although LPAs are well-established in areas such as reading and mathematics, there is a lack of tools specifically designed to assess oral language development and in early childhood education. To address this gap, two studies were conducted to provide initial evidence for the psychometric properties of a newly developed LPA. This tool aims to assess progress in oral language development in monolingual and multilingual kindergarten children aged 4–6 years.MethodsSince progress assessments rely on the use of multiple test versions, 11 parallel tests were developed based on the sentence repetition task. In the first study, a cross-sectional design was used, where 87 children completed the parallel tests within 2 weeks. In the second study, a longitudinal design was applied, involving 88 children who completed the parallel tests at 4-week intervals over a period of 6 months.Results and DiscussionThe results from the studies indicated that the parallel tests had similar levels of difficulty and provided reliable and valid global measures of children's language abilities. Confirmatory factor analyses supported the LPA's one-dimensional structure. Moreover, repeated-measures analyses and a latent growth curve model provide initial evidence of the LPA's sensitivity to change, particularly for children with lower initial language abilities.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1707568</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1707568</link>
        <title><![CDATA[An experimental and computational study of an Estonian single-subject word naming experiment]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-28T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Kaidi Lõo</author><author>Arvi Tavast</author><author>Maria Heitmeier</author><author>R. Harald Baayen</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This study reports a large-scale single-subject experiment combining the word naming task with eye-tracking. Response variables (first fixation duration, total fixation duration, number of fixations, word naming latency, and spoken word duration) were subjected to statistical analyses with generalized additive models (GAMs). We compared GAMs with classical lexical predictors such as word frequency and inflectional paradigm size with GAMs that were given predictors derived from computational implementations of the discriminative lexicon model (DLM) for the lexical route in the word naming task, using word embeddings to represent words' meanings. With the exception of word length, lexical measures and DLM-based measures were found not to predict initial fixation duration and total number of fixations. DLM-based measures were statistically well supported as predictors of total fixation duration, naming latency, and spoken word duration. GAMs with classical predictors provided more precise fits for the first two response variables, but a GAM with DLM-based predictors provided a superior fit to the spoken word durations. These results support the possibility that in the naming task, word meaning is involved. The GAMs for spoken word duration and response latency revealed a novel phenomenon, namely that when the lexical route is not functioning, due to the mapping from meaning to form being unsuccessful, response latencies increase, spoken word durations decrease, and the speaker likely resorted to naming with the non-lexical grapheme-to-phoneme naming route.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1840898</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1840898</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Who said it—and did it fit the speaker's age? How age-typicality of named objects improves source memory]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-22T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Brief Research Report</category>
        <author>Christiana Chaidaridou</author><author>Sara D. Beck</author><author>Andrea Weber</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Memory for who said what can help native and non-native listeners identify critical information for use in conversations. In this study, source memory for object-speaker associations was tested for listeners differing in language background and nativeness. Native and non-native participants of German first heard the voice of a child and an adult speaker name photographs of objects with age-typical characteristics (e.g., a board book for children vs. a standard hardcover novel) before they had to indicate who had previously named each object. Speakers either consistently named objects typical for their age group, or they randomly named objects from both age groups. Both listener groups associated objects with speakers successfully and showed better source memory in the age-consistent condition over the random condition. Critically, non-native listeners performed comparably to native listeners and benefited equally from age-typical patterns, suggesting that stereotypical knowledge about age can facilitate source memory encoding and retrieval even when processing a second language. The results confirm the role of source memory representations in communication and suggest that memory for object-speaker associations based on salient social categories like age remains robust in non-native listening.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1784593</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1784593</link>
        <title><![CDATA[The cognition of dialect variation: evaluating the relationship to bilingualism]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-16T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Perspective</category>
        <author>Zachary K. Maher</author><author>Janet G. van Hell</author>
        <description><![CDATA[In recent decades, there have been considerable advances in the area of bilingual cognition, but research on cognition across dialects remains limited. Here, we consider how the intuitive link between these experiences of linguistic diversity could drive empirical and theoretical work on the cognitive basis of dialect production. We begin with descriptive evidence to motivate contrasting hypotheses: the Difference Threshold Hypothesis, which argues for a qualitative difference between bilingual and bidialectal cognition; and the Linguistic Continuum Hypothesis, which argues that bidialectalism and bilingualism represent the same phenomenon across different degrees of linguistic overlap. To differentiate these hypotheses at the level of individual cognition, we argue that (1) research must expand beyond the lexical level to consider phonological and morphosyntactic differences across codes and (2) extra consideration is warranted for cases of bilingualism with apparent dense code-switching, which more closely approximates “bidialectal” practices.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1827262</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1827262</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Proficiency, phonological context, and distributional control in Arabic L1 learners' English stop voicing]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-09T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Hesham Aldamen</author><author>Mutasim Al-Deaibes</author><author>Rami Alsharefeen</author><author>Mohamad Almashour</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Arabic and English differ in how they organize stop voicing along the voice onset time (VOT) continuum. Jordanian Arabic typically contrasts prevoiced /b/ with short-lag voiceless stops, whereas General American English uses short-lag /b/ and long-lag aspirated /p/ in stressed singleton onsets, with aspiration suppressed after /s/. Within the revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r), such learning should appear not only as shifts in mean VOT but also as changes in dispersion, overlap, perceptual boundary location, and context-sensitive control. Sixty-five adults participated: 45 Jordanian Arabic L1 learners of English and 20 General American English controls. Learners completed an institutional English placement test that excluded speaking or pronunciation, and all participants produced real-word English stimuli containing singleton /b/, singleton /p/, and /sp/ cluster /p/. Participants also completed VOT identification and context-naturalness perception probes. VOT was measured from unaltered waveforms in Praat, with strong inter-rater reliability. Learners distinguished /b/ and /p/ in production, but their singleton /p/ VOT remained shorter and more variable than that of controls. Higher proficiency predicted longer singleton /p/ VOT, reduced within-speaker dispersion, reduced /p/-/b/ distributional overlap, lower perceptual /b/-/p/ boundary values, and stronger suppression of aspiration in /sp/ clusters. Learners nevertheless continued to rate overaspirated /sp/ tokens as relatively natural, indicating residual difficulty with context-conditioned aspiration. The findings support a distribution-sensitive account of L2 stop learning: proficiency-related development is reflected in the tightening and separation of VOT distributions and in emerging phonological control, not in mean category placement alone.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1751663</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1751663</link>
        <title><![CDATA[The interplay of prominence-lending factors and language production in children]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Sarah Dolscheid</author><author>Martina Penke</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Several factors influence how adult speakers produce an utterance and which element they choose to start with. For example, German-speaking adults are more likely to begin an utterance with an element if it is (a) in their focus of attention, (b) animate rather than inanimate, and (c) on the left side of a picture rather than the right. However, while such prominence-lending factors affect adult language production, little is known about their effect on child language production. The current study addresses this issue by testing German preschoolers in picture-based language production tasks while measuring gaze patterns via eye-tracking. Specifically, we examined the effect of three factors known to affect adult language production—attentional cueing, animacy, and position in a visual display. To assess how children respond to these manipulations, we zoomed in on two syntactic structures for which children demonstrate varying degrees of proficiency: conjoined noun phrases and transitive sentences. Our results revealed no effects of animacy and position, but significant effects of attention on child language production. Children were more likely to first fixate on a character that had been visually cued and were also more likely to name that character first when producing conjoined noun phrases. Furthermore, initial fixations predicted the order in which children mentioned elements, suggesting a tight link between visual attention and language production. However, visual attention exclusively affected the linearization of nouns in simple conjoined noun phrases but not the selection of starting points in children's production of transitive sentences. These findings show that children's tendency to verbalize what is in their focus of attention is influenced by syntactic complexity. Specifically, even when children's focus of attention was on the patient character, they nonetheless adhered to their preferred active SVO sentence structure. Furthermore, children's sentence planning strategies as reflected by speech-onset-times and the number of disfluencies were likewise immune to prominence-lending factors. Thus, unlike adults in comparable experiments, our findings seem to suggest that children did not show a radically linear incremental word-by-word sentence planning strategy that proceeds from the element in the focus of attention.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1864222</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1864222</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Sound iconicity in the transition from protosign to protospeech]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-07T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Peter Gärdenfors</author><author>Axel Ekström</author>
        <description><![CDATA[So-called “gesture-first” accounts of language origins suggest that human language began with gestural communication, including movements of the hand and face. However, a prevailing problem for such theories has been to explain how language moved “from hand to mouth”—that is, how vocal communication may have gradually replaced gestural communication, to become the predominant mode of language. Here, we present a mechanism by which this transition may have been possible. We specify several intrinsically iconic aspects of vocal behavior, related to embodied cognitive processes. We argue that, making use of pre-existing relationships between sound and non-sound (including physical movement and internal physiological states), vocal iconicity may have paved the way for a shift from gesturing together with a relatively inflexible vocal systems to flexible, open-ended spoken language with gestural complement.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1808320</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1808320</link>
        <title><![CDATA[When, How, and for Whom? A narrative review contextualizing bilingual effects in ADHD]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-07-03T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Review</category>
        <author>Mary-Kate Murphy</author><author>Stephanie Durrleman</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common neurodevelopmental disorders, characterized by symptoms of (i) inattention, (ii) hyperactivity-impulsivity or (iii) both. Atypical patterns of attention are a common phenotype in this population. To date, research on bilingualism in ADHD has not reached a consensus regarding the impact of bilingualism on executive functions (EFs) and ADHD-related behavior. This review focuses primarily on bilingualism in ADHD and highlights how outcomes within the ADHD literature, considering child, adolescent and adult populations, may vary systematically according to contextual moderators. First, socioeconomic status (SES) should be carefully controlled for, as it independently affects EFs, receptive vocabulary and attention abilities. Second, detailed profiling of language background is required to better interpret reaction time and accuracy findings, allowing performance differences to be linked to variables such as context of language usage, frequency of use, or number of languages acquired. Furthermore, implementation of tools such as the Q-BEx and LEAP-Q questionnaires is encouraged to precisely profile one's language background and capture language-experience variables, thus clarifying the role of bilingualism in cognitive performance in ADHD. Third, linguistic distance (LD) potentially imposes dynamic effects on EFs for bilinguals with ADHD with the literature showing bilingual advantages in EFs given one's proficiency and distance between languages. Co-occurring Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is acknowledged given the comorbidity's prevalence rates in ADHD groups, as well as the fact that it has been associated with additional challenges in language and/or social skills. For future research, hypotheses regarding effects of bilingualism in ADHD groups with comorbid ASD are presented. Additionally, the incorporation of longitudinal studies in bilingual ADHD research is emphasized given that cross-sectional study designs can overlook outcomes related to EFs or ADHD-related behavior and diagnosis at different developmental time-points. Together, these insights call for a shift from global comparisons toward context-sensitive approaches that capture the diversity of bilingual experience in ADHD.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1796672</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1796672</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Lexical organization in typically developing children and children with Down syndrome: a structural network analysis]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-18T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Rosa Rubí</author><author>Alberto Falcón</author><author>Natalia Arias-Trejo</author><author>Asela Reig</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Lexical network analysis provides a powerful framework for examining how words are organized in the mind, as well as the semantic, categorical, and associative links that structure the mental lexicon. This study investigates the organization, structural properties, and types of lexical relations present in individual lexical networks of typically developing children and children with Down syndrome. Lexical relations were examined using network-based structural analyses derived from co-occurrence patterns, and measures of density, centrality, modularity, hubs, semantic clustering, and word-type distributions were computed, together with the analysis of taxonomic and thematic relations. The results reveal significant differences between the two populations, despite comparable vocabulary sizes. These differences are discussed in terms of variation in the mechanisms underlying lexical acquisition and organization, as well as the role of experience in psycholinguistic development. Overall, this study provides empirical evidence on early lexical organization in typical development and Down syndrome, with implications for theories of language development and for educational and therapeutic approaches aimed at strengthening vocabulary.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1785036</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1785036</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Sensitivity to ideophones by child non-native speakers increases with age]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-17T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Brief Research Report</category>
        <author>Antonio Benítez-Burraco</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Sound-symbolic effects have been claimed to facilitate word learning, because of the motivated relationship between form and meaning. According to some views, such effects result from human-specific perceptive and cognitive biases and can be thus universal. This paper tests the sensibility to ideophones (a type of sound-symbolic words) by children acquiring Spanish, a language lacking this word class. Results show that younger children are mostly insensitive to sound-symbolic effects as found in ideophones, but that this sensibility emerges and improves with age. Also, children were found to perform better in tasks involving verbal responses compared to visual tasks. By contrast, no effect of sex or the type of ideophone on success rates was observed. Overall, these results support the view that although we might be endowed with a special sensitivity to sound-symbolic effects, this sensitivity does not provide a very large advantage when learning a language and/or a minimal amount of exposure to the phenomena to be acquired is necessary to put it effectively into use.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1867211</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1867211</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Rendering the German modal particle denn in Turkish: a translation-oriented analysis of literary texts]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-10T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Salih Özenici</author><author>Kemal Demir</author>
        <description><![CDATA[IntroductionGerman modal particles pose a major challenge for translation because their meanings are primarily discourse-pragmatic, interactional, and context-dependent rather than lexical or propositional. This study examines how the German modal particle denn is rendered in Turkish learner translations of literary texts and why it is frequently omitted.MethodsThe empirical material was drawn from Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg. A corpus search yielded 848 occurrences of denn. After excluding homonymous and non-modal uses, 200 modal-particle occurrences were identified, from which 29 examples were selected according to their pragmatic functions. Fifteen Turkish-speaking students of German Language and Literature at approximately B2 level translated these examples into Turkish, resulting in 435 translation units. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five participants. The translations were coded according to four strategies: omission/zero correspondence, functional substitution/transposition, paraphrase, and literal translation.ResultsOmission was the dominant strategy, occurring in 333 cases (76.55%), while functional substitution/transposition occurred in 102 cases (23.45%). No cases of paraphrase or literal translation were identified. Functional substitutions were realized through Turkish particles, adverbs, connectors, interjections, and pragmatic formulas, especially ki, peki, zaten, gerçekten/gerçekten de, and bu yüzden.DiscussionThe interview data indicate that omission was linked to insufficient pragmatic awareness, perceived structural differences between German and Turkish, the perception of denn as optional, simplification strategies, and a lack of explicit translation strategies. The study shows that translating denn requires pragmatic awareness and context-sensitive translation competence rather than direct lexical equivalence.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1799496</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1799496</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Cue weighting in the perception and production of English stop voicing by Arabic-speaking learners: phonological context and immediate post-instruction adjustment]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-08T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Hesham Aldamen</author><author>Mutasim Al-Deaibes</author><author>Rami Alsharefeen</author><author>Mohamad Almashour</author>
        <description><![CDATA[This study revisits English stop voicing in Arabic-speaking learners through a design that combines perception, production, phonological context, and a brief instructional manipulation within the same participants. Forty participants took part: 30 Arabic-speaking learners (10 Novice-High, 10 Intermediate-High, and 10 Advanced) and 10 native English controls. Learners completed perception and production pretests, a live standardized mini-lesson, and immediate posttests in the same session; controls completed a matched interval without instruction. Perception cue weighting was estimated with participant-by-time logistic coefficients for voice onset time (VOT), onset F0, and vowel duration. Production analyses were separated into singleton /p/-/b/ contrasts and /sp/ aspiration suppression so that laryngeal category and context were not conflated. Learners underweighted VOT at pretest relative to native controls, with the largest gap in the novice group, and the learner groups showed immediate posttest increases in VOT weighting. Secondary-cue reliance was also proficiency-sensitive: novice and intermediate learners entered with heavier duration weighting, which declined after instruction. In production, learners produced smaller singleton VOT contrasts than native controls and showed persistent difficulty suppressing aspiration in /sp/ onsets, especially at lower proficiency levels. Immediate posttest adjustment was strongest in the same learners who had shown the weakest pretest control. Participant-level correlations linked change in perceptual VOT weight to change in both /sp/ suppression and singleton voiceless VOT. The results are consistent with gradient, shared phonetic restructuring, but the single-session design warrants a cautious interpretation of instruction as short-term adjustment rather than durable learning.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1756514</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1756514</link>
        <title><![CDATA[LLMs replicate metaphor norms based on word co-occurrence but struggle with topic-vehicle mappings]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-04T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Brief Research Report</category>
        <author>Laura Pissani</author><author>Mayank Jobanputra</author><author>Vera Demberg</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Normed linguistic stimuli are fundamental in psycholinguistics because they capture lexical and semantic properties that influence comprehension. However, generating these norms at scale is challenging, often leading researchers to rely on ad hoc norms collected from small samples, which can introduce inconsistencies and limit cross-study comparisons. In the present study, we investigated how large language models (LLMs) can support psycholinguistic research by prompting eight current LLMs to norm 300 English two-word metaphor combinations, such as sharp mind. We selected the dimensions of familiarity, aptness, concreteness, metaphoricity, and constituency, as these tap distinct cognitive processes and may provide insight into which aspects LLMs capture accurately and which they do not. We varied stimulus presentation (in context vs. in isolation) and response format (categorical vs. numerical) to examine which manipulation yields norms most closely aligned with human ratings. We then assessed the reliability and validity of model responses and used them to replicate existing analyses of metaphor comprehension. Overall, LLM-generated norms aligned best with familiarity and metaphoricity, which rely on word co-occurrence. In contrast, aptness, concreteness, and constituency—which require reasoning about the relationship between the topic (e.g., mind) and the vehicle (e.g., sharp)—proved more challenging for LLMs.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1726645</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1726645</link>
        <title><![CDATA[The acquisition of possessive agreement in L3 German: L2 English proficiency, not L1 Polish, predicts cross-linguistic influence]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-06-04T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Brief Research Report</category>
        <author>Kamil Długosz</author><author>Megan Brown-Bousfield</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Adult language learners frequently struggle with possessive pronouns, and classroom evidence confirms these difficulties for learners of German. This study examines the acquisition of possessive agreement in L3 German by L1 Polish-L2 English speakers, focusing on third-person singular pronouns. The primary aim is to determine whether difficulties with possessive agreement arise from structural differences between Polish and German, and to explore the role of developing proficiency in L2 English, a language that is invariably part of the Polish education system, in the acquisition process. Using a subtractive language group design, L3 learners were compared with L1 English-L2 German learners to isolate the effect of Polish. Participants completed an untimed acceptability judgement task comprising felicitous and infelicitous items, further manipulated for possessor gender and for gender match between the possessor and the possessee noun. The results show that both groups performed similarly, indicating no non-facilitative influence from L1 Polish. Moreover, higher general L2 English proficiency predicted better performance in L3 German, suggesting proficiency-dependent facilitation from structurally similar English. Finally, participants' accuracy for infelicitous items was below chance, confirming that possessive agreement constitutes an inherently challenging domain in adult language learning.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1815571</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1815571</link>
        <title><![CDATA[The effects of glosses on English L2 incidental vocabulary learning through reading: a meta-analysis]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-05-29T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Systematic Review</category>
        <author>He Sirong</author><author>Azianura Hani Shaari</author><author>Ng Lay Shi</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Glossing has been extensively employed and researched as a tool for vocabulary learning, with numerous studies investigating how it aids second language incidental vocabulary learning by directing learners' attention to the connection between word forms and their meanings. Nevertheless, findings across studies have been mixed, highlighting the need for a comprehensive and systematic synthesis. In response, the present study conducted a meta-analysis of 26 empirical studies on English as a second or foreign language to provide a quantitative synthesis of how glossing affects incidental English vocabulary learning through reading across varied learning conditions, and to examine variables that may moderate its effectiveness within the Involvement Load Hypothesis Plus (ILH+) framework. The results showed that (1) glossing was associated with a significant facilitative effect on L2 incidental vocabulary learning, although this pooled estimate should be interpreted as a broad average across highly heterogeneous study conditions rather than as a uniformly robust general effect; (2) different operationally defined glossing subgroups were associated with varying effect-size estimates, with interactional and experimental contrasts showing relatively larger estimates and positional and modality-based contrasts showing relatively smaller estimates; and (3) input frequency, test length, treatment duration, and vocabulary knowledge type emerged as significant moderators.Systematic review registrationhttps://www.crd.york.ac.uk/PROSPERO/view/CRD420251237727, identifier: CRD420251237727.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1806497</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1806497</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Comprehensibility of gender-fair language among foreign language learners of German: an experimental study]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-05-28T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Original Research</category>
        <author>Sofie Decock</author><author>Lisa Zacharski</author><author>Griet Boone</author><author>Evelyn C. Ferstl</author>
        <description><![CDATA[In public and academic debates, the gender star has been criticized for potentially hindering text comprehensibility and imposing an additional burden on learners of German by complicating an already complex language. We investigated in an experiment whether the use of the gender star (e.g., Student*innen) complicates text comprehensibility compared to masculine generics for learners of German. Participants were 80 Flemish students studying German as a foreign language. They were asked to read 13 short news articles, of which ten texts served as experimental items in either gender star or masculine form. Participants' accuracy in answering content questions, subjective ratings of text comprehensibility and sentence difficulty, and their full-text reading times were assessed. Additionally, we collected data on participants' proficiency in German, prior knowledge of, and attitudes toward gender-fair German. Our results suggest that the gender star does not pose a strong hindrance to text comprehensibility for Flemish students learning German: while proficiency in German had a significant effect on content question accuracy and sentence difficulty as well as subjective comprehensibility ratings, this effect was independent of gender form.]]></description>
      </item><item>
        <guid isPermaLink="true">https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1851229</guid>
        <link>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2026.1851229</link>
        <title><![CDATA[Adaptive trait package for mind reading and language]]></title>
        <pubdate>2026-05-25T00:00:00Z</pubdate>
        <category>Perspective</category>
        <author>Dieter Hillert</author>
        <description><![CDATA[Human language likely emerged from pre-symbolic social cognition rather than from a sudden, language-specific innovation. Across social animals and human infants, gaze following, affective attunement, and intention reading point to early forms of mind reading that precede explicit theory of mind and symbolic communication. In development, language and theory of mind appear to support each other: prelinguistic social cognition scaffolds later belief reasoning, while growing linguistic competence enables more flexible representations of others' mental states. In evolution, this trajectory may be explained by a neural threshold hypothesis, according to which quantitative increases in hominin brain size and connectivity yielded qualitatively new computational capacities. On this view, Homo erectus may have marked a critical transition, with expanded working memory, hierarchical integration, and social inference supporting rudimentary symbolic thought and early language. Rather than attributing language to a single mutation or an isolated neural mechanism, this account proposes that it emerged from an interacting trait package, a synthesis shaped by ecology, energetics, development, and social behavior. Modern language is therefore best understood as a culturally elaborated expression of a deeper neurobiological capacity rooted in early hominin evolution.]]></description>
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