What are the constraints, cues, and mechanisms that help learners create successful word-meaning mappings? This study takes up linguistic disjunction and looks at cues and mechanisms that can help children learn the meaning of "or." We first used a large corpus of parent-child interactions to collect statistics on "or" uses.…

Purpose: This study examined how speakers adapt to fundamental frequency (f[subscript o]) errors that affect the use of prosody to convey linguistic meaning, whether f[subscript o] adaptation in that context relates to adaptation in linguistically neutral sustained vowels, and whether cue trading is reflected in responses in the prosodic cues of…

Negative yes-no (polar) questions in Colloquial Arabic (CA) are formed by intonation without adding yes-no question particles, in which case, a statement is uttered with a rising intonation, whether this polar question is negative or affirmative. This case is more common in CA than written MSA. Sometimes, the same negative polar question is…

Cross-linguistic studies found that reading comprehension correlates with oral reading prosody. The study examined whether text difficulty would be involved in oral reading prosody in orthographically deep languages like Mandarin. One hundred and three fourth-grade children were recruited in Taipei, Taiwan. Their oral reading prosody was elicited…

Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact…

Lexical access is highly contextual. For example, vowel (rime) information is prioritized over tone in the lexical access of isolated words in Mandarin Chinese, but these roles are flipped in constraining contexts. The time course of these contextual effects remains unclear, and so here we tracked the real-time eye gaze of native Mandarin speakers…

The purpose of this research was to investigate the representation of black students in contemporary American English. Two questions were addressed, what is the semantic prosody of Black students, and what are the semantic roles for Black students. All the concordance lines containing the phrase Black students were downloaded from the Corpus of…

This study examined how Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with and without a history of late talking (LT) process familiar monosyllabic words with unexpected lexical tones, focusing on both phonological and semantic violations. This study initially enrolled 64 Mandarin-speaking toddlers: 31 with a history of LT (mean age: 27.67 months) and 33 without…

Collaborative learning has numerous benefits such as enhancing learners' critical thinking, developing social skills, and improving learning gains. While engaging in this interactive process, learners' satisfaction toward their partners plays a crucial role in defining the success of the collaboration. However, detecting learners' satisfaction…

This study describes the prosodic and functional patterns of the particle "t?ayb[superscript 2]" in Spoken Saudi Arabic (SSA; the variety of Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia) through phonetic and conversational analysis. This particle, literally meaning "good/well/okay," is one of the most common spoken particles used in SSA. Data…

This paper seeks to outline and describe the features of Ewe causative verbs and how they encode causative events. It explores the sub-lexical analysis of verbs' meanings since they form the basis of the classification of causal relations that allow us to explore the different imports between (sub-)events and how these events are structured, and…

This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…

The Mayan language Mam uses complex predicates to express events. Complex predicates map multiple semantic elements onto a single word, and consequently have a blend of lexical and phrasal features. The chameleon-like nature of complex predicates provides a window on children's ability to express phrasal combinations at the one-word stage of…

Pitch perception plays a more important role in emotional communication in English than in Korean. Interpreting the semantic aspects of pitch levels therefore presents a challenge for Korean learners of English. This study investigated how 49 Korean learners of English perceived 20 English emotional utterances. Participants were asked to complete…

To date, there have been relatively few studies of semantic prosody in languages other than English. This study primarily aims to implement the two major approaches to semantic prosody in the literature on the Thai language for the first time in order to set out the parameters for subsequent research in this area. Three Thai words were selected…