Children's knowledge of referential dependency involved in the interpretation of reflexives has been investigated mainly from a purely syntactic perspective. However, syntax alone is insufficient to account for various kinds of referential dependencies, as many of them require discourse interpretations. To fill this gap, the present study…

The meanings of natural language utterances depend heavily on context. Yet, what counts as context is often only implicit in conversation. The utterance "it's warm outside" signals that the temperature outside is relatively high, but the temperature could be high relative to a number of different "comparison classes": other…

Purpose: The aim of the study was to determine the ability of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) to infer word class and meaning from text and to document variations by word class (noun, verb, adjective) and modality (listening, reading). We also asked whether the children could integrate global cues across the entire passage as…

An eye-tracking experiment was conducted with speakers of Dutch (N = 84, 36 male), a language that falls between grammatical and natural-gender languages. We tested whether a masculine generic pronoun causes a male bias when used in generic statements--that is, in the absence of a specific referent. We tested two types of generic statements by…

Learning in any domain depends on how the data for learning are represented. In the domain of language acquisition, children's representations of the speech they hear determine what generalizations they can draw about their target grammar. But these input representations change over development as a function of children's developing linguistic…

This study is intended to help English foreign language learners avoid a type of syntactic ambiguity in sentences resulting from prepositional phrases (PPs). The students are guided to make use of the features of both adverbials and adjectivals in resolving this type of ambiguity. The movability of adverbials and the use of relative clauses…

This study aims to investigate adult L2 speakers' use of different types of information in the comprehension of pragmatic inferences by examining L1-Mandarin Chinese L2-English speakers' sensitivity to cues "all" and "any" in scalar implicature (SI) computation for "some." This article and our experimental setup does…

Scalar implicatures involve inferring the use of a less informative term (e.g. some) to mean the negation of a more informative term (e.g. not all). A growing body of recent research on the derivation of scalar implicatures by adult second language (L2) learners shows that while they are successful in acquiring the knowledge of scalar…

Scope ambiguity arises when a sentence contains scope-bearing logical operators like quantifiers and negation (Fox, 2003). For instance, in English, the sentence 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' can be interpreted as either 'None of the horses jumped over the fence' (surface scope) or 'Not all of the horses jumped over the fence' (inverse…

Lexical inference through reading is considered an important method for vocabulary building; however, empirical research has not consistently offered strong evidence of the application of lexical inference in second language vocabulary learning. A recently burgeoning line of research focuses on second language (L2) lexical inference of compounds…

In second language teaching and learning, making errors is inevitable as language learning requires a lot of cognitive effort and concentration on the part of learners. Understanding the types and frequencies of student errors is, therefore, an important issue for ESL and EFL teachers to determine how students can be helped to improve their skills…