In this dissertation, I investigate specificational copular clauses (Higgins 1973). My aim is to not only propose an analysis for how such specificational copular clauses are derived but also to use such constructions as a testing ground for evaluating and/ or revising different aspects of linguistic theory. The language I primarily use towards…

This study focuses on teaching Chinese for Special Purposes (CSP) and explores how terminology used in Chinese commercial contracts can be taught using a contrastive terminology analysis. Firstly, we outline the contextual differences that exist between commercial contracts drafted in Chinese and those drafted in English. Secondly, we describe the…

The aim of this study is to reveal the effect of the engineering design-based teaching process in primary school science course of classroom teacher canditates perceptions about the disciplines of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematic). The study, pre-posttest single-group experimental design was used. The study group consisted of…

Recently, both sociology of science and policy research have shown increased interest in scientific uncertainty. To contribute to these debates and create an empirical measure of scientific uncertainty, we inductively devised two systems of classification or ontologies to describe scientific uncertainty in a large corpus of food safety risk…

This paper investigates the representation of social values and their ontogenetic development in English as a foreign language textbooks in Hong Kong. Adopting a social semiotic approach, it considers social values in textbooks as semantic categories which are constructed by complex semiotic discursive resources, and develops an explicit framework…

Although researchers argue that studying semantically related words simultaneously (semantic clustering) inhibits vocabulary acquisition, recent studies have yielded inconsistent results. This study examined the effects of semantic clustering while addressing the limitations of previous studies (e.g., confounding of semantic relatedness with other…

Disagreements arise on the differences of semantic processing of different ambiguous words in the perspective of psycholinguistics. This paper compares the differences of the semantic processing of different types of ambiguous words of Chinese English learners by using a multiple semantic priming experiment with short. The results demonstrate the…

Everyday activities are replete with contextual cues for infants to exploit in the service of learning words. Nelson's (1985) script theory guided the hypothesis that infants participate in a set of predictable activities over the course of a day that provide them with opportunities to hear unique language functions and forms. Mothers and their…

Metaphor development in conjunction with verbal intelligence and linguistic competence in middle childhood and at the transition to early adolescence was investigated. 298 individuals between seven and ten years (chronological age) who attended grades two-four (mental age) were tested for metaphor processing by the Metaphoric Triads Task, for…

Background: Connectives, such as "because" or "although," explicitly indicate how to semantically link individual segments of a text. Knowledge of connectives has been shown to significantly contribute to variance explanation in comprehension of English and Dutch texts, particularly amongst monolingual students and students…

Purpose: Preschoolers born preterm are at an increased risk for the development of language impairments. The primary objective of this study was to document the expressive language skills of preschoolers born preterm through 2 assessment procedures, language sample analysis, and standardized assessment. A secondary objective was to investigate the…

This study examines whether an e-book with a dictionary could support parents' mediation of new words during shared book reading, more than the child's independent reading of an e-book with and without a dictionary. The participants included 128 kindergartners and 64 mothers who were randomly divided into four groups: independent reading of the…

Two key areas of language development include semantic and phonological knowledge. Semantic knowledge relates to word and concept knowledge. Phonological knowledge relates to how language parameters combine to create meaning. We investigated signing deaf adults' and children's semantic and phonological sign generation via one-minute tasks,…

While most typically developing (TD) participants have a coarse-to-fine processing style, people with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to be less globally and more locally biased when processing visual information. The stimulus-specific spatial frequency content might be directly relevant to determine this temporal hierarchy of visual…

Four 5-year-old children with receptive language within normal limits and who required augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) received instruction in producing six different semantic--syntactic structures (three treatment and three generalization targets). Participants accessed single-meaning graphic symbols using an AAC app on an iPad…