According to Chen's (2013) Linguistic Savings Hypothesis (LSH), our native language affects our economic behavior. We present three studies investigating how cross-linguistic differences in the grammaticalization of future-time reference (FTR) affect intertemporal choices. In a series of decision scenarios about finance and health issues, we let…

This article investigates the relationship between third person singular present tense agreement morphemes, copula "is" and verb-"s", at 2;00 and 2;03. Language samples from 60 children at 2;00 were analyzed for the productivity of copula "is" as measured by the number of different morphemes preceding "is"…

This study aims to investigate the predictive power of personality traits for EFL students' preference for isolated or integrated form-focused instruction (FFI). Participants were 160 Iranian EFL university students. Results indicated that students' personality traits, as measured by Costa and McCrae (Revised NEO Personality inventory (NEO-PI-R)…

This longitudinal study considers the contributions of language awareness to children's learning to read and spell. The aim of the study was to examine whether the connection between phonemic awareness and literacy in Greek is constant over time even when appropriate controls are taken into account. I examined this hypothesis with Greek Cypriot…

Automated essay scoring (AES) generally computes essay scores as a function of macrofeatures derived from a set of microfeatures extracted from the text using natural language processing (NLP). In the "e-rater"® automated scoring engine, developed at "Educational Testing Service" (ETS) for the automated scoring of essays, each…

A body of studies, which are mostly based on parental reports, have documented gender differences in early language proficiency, and girls tend to outperform boys in both language production and language comprehension. In this study, staff in Norwegian Early Childhood Education and Care institutions observed language comprehension, word…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…

The goal of this study was to examine how selected pressure points or areas of vulnerability are related to individual differences in reading comprehension and whether the importance of these pressure points varies as a function of the level of children's reading comprehension. A sample of 245 third-grade children were given an assessment battery…

Pedagogical agents (PAs) are lifelike characters in virtual environments that help facilitate learning through social interactions and the virtual real relationships with the learners. This study explored whether and how PA gesture design impacts learning and agent social acceptance when used with elementary students learning foreign language…

This study aims to examine the relationship between reading comprehension and lexical and grammatical knowledge among English as a foreign language students by using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN). There were 825 test takers administered both a second-language reading test and a set of psychometrically validated grammar and vocabulary tests.…

In the last 50 years, researchers have debated over the lexical or grammatical nature of children's early multiword utterances. Due to methodological limitations, the issue remains controversial. This corpus study explores the effect of grammatical, lexical, and pragmatic categories on mean length of utterances (MLU). A total of 312 speech samples…

Two groups of 12-year-old ethnic minority (EM) users of alphasyllabary (66 Tibetan and 45 Yi) were compared with 42 Han Chinese students in comprehending Chinese narrative and expository texts, each with inferential questions requiring short open-ended written answers. Three constructs (verbal working memory, orthographic and sentential…

This study examined the effect of type of podcasts and learning styles on speaking, listening, and confidence when college used podcasts for learning Chinese. It focused on college students enrolled in a beginning-level Chinese course at a large university in the southeastern United States. Findings indicated that listening to grammar podcasts…

This dissertation investigates how discourse-pragmatics informs children's choice of referential forms. Three studies utilizing naturalistic data examine the role that six discourse-pragmatic features play in the acquisition of referential forms in a non-null subject language, English. The influence of child-directed speech on development is also…

This paper compares two alternative scoring methods--multiple regression and classification trees--for an automated speech scoring system used in a practice environment. The two methods were evaluated on two criteria: construct representation and empirical performance in predicting human scores. The empirical performance of the two scoring models…