We often come across examples of vague reference in English learning, especially college English learning. On entering college, students tend to feel at a loss since their vocabulary is required to be enlarged rapidly and a variety of reference patterns are included in their learning materials which mostly come from American and European original…

This dissertation proposes a novel analysis of the syntax and semantics of Comparative Correlative sentences in English such as "the bigger they are, the harder they fall or the faster we drive, the sooner we'll get there." The analysis is cast in a framework that distinguishes between argument structure and word order, called…

Landau (2000) distinguishes between P(artial) C(ontrol) and E(xhaustive) C(ontrol): PC predicates like hope admit a subset relation between controller and controllee (e.g., "Kim hoped to gather at noon." [controllee = Kim and contextually salient others]); EC predicates like "try" do not (*"Kim tried to gather at…

The hypothesized role of Broca's area in sentence processing ranges from domain-general executive function to domain-specific computation that is specific to certain syntactic structures. We examined this issue by manipulating syntactic structure and conflict between syntactic and semantic cues in a sentence processing task. Functional…

Models of speaking distinguish producing meaning, words and syntax as three different linguistic components of speaking. Nevertheless, little is known about the brain's integrated neuronal infrastructure for speech production. We investigated semantic, lexical and syntactic aspects of speaking using fMRI. In a picture description task, we…

Through the presentation of two bilingual reader profiles, this article will illustrate how miscue analysis can act as a culturally relevant assessment tool as it allows for the study of reading across different spoken and written languages. The research presented in this article integrates a socio-psycholinguistic perspective to reading and a…

Research in psycholinguistics and in the cognitive neuroscience of language has suggested that semantic and syntactic processing are associated with different neurophysiologic correlates, such as the N400 and the P600 in the ERPs. However, only a handful of studies have investigated the neural basis of the syntax-semantics interface, and even…

This article examined the integration of semantic and morphosyntactic information by Korean learners of English as a second language (L2). In Experiment 1, L2 learners listened to English active or passive sentences that were either plausible or implausible and translated them into Korean. A significant number of Korean translations maintained the…

Currently influential models of writing processes, such as Flower and Hayes (1980) and Hayes (1996) do not attend explicitly to metalinguistics--writers' ability to monitor and control linguistic skills. Dimensions of metalinguistic ability--metaphonology, metasyntax, metasemantics, metapragmatics, and metatext--arguably are central to the writing…

This dissertation contains three studies that investigate whether attested patterns of constituent order distribution and change in the world's languages can be attributed, in part, to cognitive preferences for some constituent orders over others. To assess these preferences, seven experiments employed an "elicited pantomime" task.…

As is well known, the Insular Celtic languages (Irish, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Breton and the now-extinct Manx and Cornish) utilize a class of verbal abstracts known as "verbal nouns" to perform the functions that are fulfilled in other Indo-European languages by infinitives and supines. Yet in many ways the Celtic verbal noun remains somewhat of an…

When people describe motion events, their path expressions are biased toward inclusion of goal paths (e.g., into the house) and omission of source paths (e.g., out of the house). In this paper, we explored whether this asymmetry has its origins in people's non-linguistic representations of events. In three experiments, 4-year-old children and…

Prosody plays a variety of roles in infants' communicative development, aiding in attention modulation, speech segmentation, and syntax acquisition. This study investigates the extent to which parents also spontaneously modulate prosodic aspects of infant directed speech in ways that distinguish semantic aspects of language. Fourteen mothers of…

This article makes use of Perfetti's Lexical Quality Hypothesis as a perspective for thinking about vocabulary instruction in terms of semantics (meaning), phonology (pronunciation), orthography (spelling), morphology (meaningful word parts), and syntax (how words function in sentences). Examples are presented of how these aspects of vocabulary…

This article introduces a way of seeing miscue analysis data through a "spider chart", a readily available digital graphing tool that provides an effective way to visually represent readers' complex coordination of interrelated cueing systems. A spider chart is a standard feature in recent spreadsheet software that puts a new spin on miscue…