This paper presents an empirical study of how different "wh"-words behave in English speakers' L2 Chinese "wh"-questions. Our results indicate that L2 Chinese "wh"-questions are specified by the Chinese "wh" -particle ne and that there is neither variability nor L1 transfer in this aspect of L2 grammars as no "wh"-movement is found in English…

In the last two decades, La Heij and colleagues have presented accounts of a number of context effects in Stroop-like word-production tasks. Roelofs (2007 this issue) criticises various aspects of our proposals, ranging from the number of processing stages assumed to details of simulation results. In this reply we first argue that we do not…

This article describes how English and Japanese children interpret empty categories in Verb Phrase Ellipsis contexts as in (1):(1) The penguin [sat on his chair] and the robot did [delta], too. To obtain an adultlike interpretation of (1), English children have to do two things. First, they need to find a suitable antecedent for the empty verb…

Many students believe that math is something one learns about, but they do not understand that it is a tool for learning about other concepts. Mathematics is a language used to describe the relationship between objects, events, and time. Learning math requires that a student interacts with a system of symbols just as a person interacts with…

The authors address the need to teach students to become more word aware by focusing on metasemantic awareness, alongside morphological and syntactic awareness, as a basis for developing metacognition about words. They extend the concept of a definition map to other forms of vocabulary learning and provide several helpful graphic organizers.…

Purpose: This study examined the independent and combined effects of two sources of linguistic knowledge (alphabet cues and semantic predictability) on the intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. The study also examined the extent to which each source of knowledge accounted for variability in intelligibility gains. Method: Eight speakers with…

This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words "one," "two," and "three." First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use.…

The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the…

This paper uses a corpus approach to investigate disciplinary variation in the construction of stance using nouns which are followed by "that" and a complement clause, "e.g. the argument that the Justices exhibit strategic behaviour..." Two corpora of theses written in English are examined: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…

Vietnamese has a group of semantically amorphous indefinite words and phrases whose meanings appear to be refined according to the particular syntactic or pragmatic context in which they are embedded. In appropriate environments, they are the functional equivalents of the English "who, someone, anyone, whoever, everyone." Analysis of the…

Studies have investigated and proposed different potential influences on children's initial mappings of object words to referents. Each proposal is a variant on the idea that children use one source of evidence about the structure of word meanings or of grammar to discover other forms of structure, and in doing so they "bootstrap" their…

Linguistics is the empirical study of language; linguistic philosophy is an approach to understanding the underlying nature of the phenomena that linguists study. The discussion here of linguistic philosophy is designed for linguists, but presupposes no prior acquaintance with either the philosophy of language or linguistic theory. It is concerned…

The structures of quantifier phrases in Thai are studied in the X-Syntax framework. Syntactic and semantic arguments are provided to prove that this model remedies the deficiency of traditional and early transformational grammar as it provides insightful analyses based on distinctions between intermediate level nodes that display internal…

This paper discusses Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), which is a structuralist-formalist theory of grammar. RRG grew out of an attempt to answer two fundamental questions: (1) what would linguistic theory look like if it were based on the analysis of Lakhota, Tagalog, and Dyirbal, rather than on the analysis of English?; and (2) how can the…

This study examined word meanings in the single word period of language learning. Ten children were seen for 5 hours each month from the time they started learning language until their median length of utterance was 2.5 words. All the children's utterances, and the extralinguistic contexts of the utterances, such as objects and movements, were…