Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

This research investigated translation strategies used in translating English relative clauses with the relativizers 'who,' 'which,' and 'that' into Thai. The data comprised 348 sentence pairs from two English novels and their Thai translations. It was hypothesized that the adopted translation strategies could be divided into two groups: literal…

This paper presents a Vygotskian research device that focuses on collaborative activities based on the manipulation of linguistic objects in a primary school classroom, with 8-9-year-old children. Through social exchanges among the different points of view, the children were engaged in a dynamic process of building and negotiating mathematical…

Language is infinitely productive because syntax defines dependencies between grammatical categories of words and constituents, so there is interchangeability of these words and constituents within syntactic structures. Previous laboratory-based studies of language learning have shown that complex language structures like hierarchical center…

Listeners interpret cues in speech processing immediately rather than waiting until the end of a sentence. In particular, prosodic cues in auditory speech processing can aid listeners in building information structure and contrast sets. Native speakers even use this information in combination with syntactic and semantic information to build mental…

The current research investigates interactions between lexical and structural processing in the construction and interpretation of transitive and dative sentence structures, and relates speakers' choice of structure in sentence production to STM processes and recent/long-term language experience conditioned on lexical information. Study 1…

Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

In noun phrase (NP) coordinate constructions (e.g., NP and NP), there is a strong tendency for the syntactic structure of the second conjunct to match that of the first; the second conjunct in such constructions is therefore low in syntactic information. The theory of uniform information density predicts that low-information syntactic…

This research shows the power of powerful metaphors in a language or linguistic perspective. It aimed at examining the important factors like reproduction of metaphors according to the theme of contestation, its duration, use of electronic media and problems associated with their forms, class and syntactic structures in a linguistic perspective.…

This study investigates the impact on L2 oral performance of participatory structure of strategic planning (individual vs. collaborative pair planning) and task complexity (simple vs. complex tasks) defined according to the number of elements involved. It also explores individual and collaborative planners' planning behaviours prior to simple vs.…

Although previous research has observed a facilitative influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition and processing of gender agreement in a second language (L2), particularly in language pairs with similar gender agreement marking, the question of whether knowledge of two languages with gender can confer an additional advantage for…

The Discontinuity Model (DM) described in this article proposes that adults can learn part of L2 morphosyntax twice, in two different ways. The same item can be learned as the product of generation by a rule or as a modification of a template already stored in memory. These learning modalities, which are often seen as opposed in language theory,…

Gifted children are described as very talented children who achieve more than their age mates in one or more domains (Steiner and Carr in Educ Psychol Rev 15(3):215-246, 2003). These children potentially share a cognitive advantage enabling them to excel in language, but also in other domains. In the present study we explored whether gifted…

The study explored the contribution of prior knowledge and reliance on L1 syntactic knowledge to L2 written sentence comprehension. Participants, 102 native Hebrew speakers at three education levels (junior high, high school, and postsecondary), answered questions in two sentence categories: Semantically plausible sentences that readers can…

During spoken language comprehension, listeners make use of both knowledge-based and signal-based sources of information, but little is known about how cues from these distinct levels of representational hierarchy are weighted and integrated online. In an eye-tracking experiment using the visual world paradigm, we investigated the flexible…