Background: Verbal fluency tasks are included in a broad range of aphasia assessments. It is well documented that people with aphasia (PWA) produce fewer items in these tasks. Successful performance on verbal fluency relies on the integrity of both linguistic and executive control abilities. It remains unclear if limited output in aphasia is…

Conditional sentences are made of two clauses namely "if-clause" and "main clause". Conditionals have been noted by scholars and grammarians as a difficult area of English for both teachers and learners. The two clauses of conditional sentences and their form, tense and meaning could be considered the main difficulty of…

We examined the relationship between inference making, vocabulary knowledge, and verbal working memory on children's reading comprehension in 62 6th graders (aged 12). The effect of vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension was predicted to be partly mediated by inference making for two reasons: Inference making often taps the semantic…

This article examines the fundamental disconnect between discourses of accountability in education policy and their interpretation on the ground by parents. Based on data from two sites in Baltimore--district-led teacher training and a community facing school restructuring--I argue that both parents and education professionals consider…

Theories of visual narrative understanding have often focused on the changes in meaning across a sequence, like shifts in characters, spatial location, and causation, as cues for breaks in the structure of a discourse. In contrast, the theory of visual narrative grammar posits that hierarchic "grammatical" structures operate at the…

Purpose: Some psycholinguistic theories of stuttering propose that language production operates along a different time course in adults who stutter (AWS) versus typically fluent adults (TFA). However, behavioral evidence for such a difference has been mixed. Here, the time course of semantic and phonological encoding in picture naming was compared…

Although the mapping between form and meaning is often regarded as arbitrary, there are in fact well-known constraints on words which are the result of functional pressures associated with language use and its acquisition. In particular, languages have been shown to encode meaning distinctions in their sound properties, which may be important for…

Language and culture endow humans with access to conceptual information that far exceeds any which could be accessed by a non-human animal. Yet, it is possible that, even without language or specific experiences, non-human animals represent and infer some aspects of similarity relations between objects in the same way as humans. Here, we show that…

Curriculum reconceptualists seek to reshape the field of curriculum studies. Unlike traditional curricularists, they reprobate the technical approach of curriculum development because of its pure functional and managerial tendency. Reconceptualists look at curriculum from various philosophy-saturated perspectives. One of their claims is…

The paper studies a genesis of the ship image in the Russian literature and folklore, an idea of "other kingdom" in the Russian literature poetics of the 19-20 centuries. An emphasis is put on the issues related to the metaphor of a ship, a boat in the artistic world of Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and in the poetry of the early 20th…

The present semantic priming study explores the integration of newly learnt L2 German words into the L2 semantic network of German advanced learners. It provides additional evidence in support of earlier findings reporting semantic inhibition effects for emergent representations. An inhibitory mechanism is proposed that temporarily decreases the…

The present study explored the origins of word learning in early infancy. Using event-related potentials (ERP) we monitored the brain activity of 3-month-old infants when they were repeatedly exposed to several initially novel words paired consistently with each the same initially novel objects or inconsistently with different objects. Our results…

National concern regarding the social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people is now strongly reflected in a wide range of Australian policy initiatives. A considerable number of these target schools and point firmly to the role education is perceived to play in promoting student wellbeing. Given that wellbeing can be difficult to…

A review of the literature suggests that grammar instruction delivered within the context of writing instruction may impact students' writing development (Fearn & Farnan, 2007; Myhill, Jones, Lines, & Watson, 2012), but there have been few studies that suggest how this occurs. This study followed a group of 17 teachers throughout 3 classes…

Singapore's language-in-education policies have always prescribed that only a standard variety of English be allowed in teaching and learning. This view of upholding a standard has been pervasive not only in education but also throughout Singapore's society. In this article, we review Singapore's language policy, emphasizing the functional…