Much work on child sentence processing has demonstrated that children are able to use various linguistic cues to incrementally resolve temporary syntactic ambiguities, but they fail to use syntactic or interpretability cues that arrive later in the sentence. The present study explores whether children incrementally resolve filler-gap dependencies,…

Previous contrastive studies between the English gerund and its Spanish counterparts present serious limitations in the analysis of these constructions. The main objection is the absence of a cognitive approach. In addition, the traditional characterization of the English gerund seems to be inappropriate to determine its nature. We propose that in…

Theories of spoken production have not specifically addressed whether the phonemes of a word compete with each other for selection during phonological encoding (e.g., whether /t/ competes with /k/ in cat). Spoken production theories were evaluated and found to fall into three classes, theories positing (1) no competition, (2) competition among…

Across many languages from unrelated families, spoken-word recognition is subject to a constraint whereby potential word candidates must contain a vowel. This constraint minimizes competition from embedded words (e.g., in English, disfavoring "win" in "twin" because "t" cannot be a word). However, the constraint would be counter-productive in…

Metalinguistic awareness is the ability to identify, reflect upon, and manipulate linguistic units. It plays a critical role in reading development. The present study investigated Chinese- and English-speaking preschoolers' metalinguistic awareness development and the role of cognitive and linguistic abilities in its development. Forty-two…

In this dissertation I provide a principled, unified account of modality and causation in Serbian dative anticausatives using a typological, cognitive approach. This analysis is set within a larger claim that the causative and modal meanings crosslinguistically arise in the same morphosyntactic environments, indicating a shared conceptual base…

This dissertation examines two information-structural phenomena, Givenness and Focus, from the perspective of both syntax and pragmatics. Evidence from English, German and other languages suggests a "split" analysis of information structure--the notions of Focus and Givenness, often thought to be closely related, exist independently at…

Linguistic relativity, the idea that language affects the way that people think, and that people who speak different languages think differently, has implications for mathematics education because people use different languages to teach, learn and practice mathematics. This paper reviews research on linguistic relativity and number, looking at…

Many students in US community colleges often speak a language other than English (LOTE) at home. They find it difficult to complete college requirements, and many drop out. Struggling with the acquisition of academic English and the content of their courses, they exhibit low academic confidence and are easily frustrated. In an attempt to raise…

This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of linking adverbials in Korean students' essay writing in comparison with native English writing. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 105 essays that were produced by first-year university students in Korea. The control corpus was taken from the American LOCNESS…

This study explores the ability of Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) to comprehend metaphorical expressions in English and investigates whether the use of their first language (L1) conceptual and linguistic knowledge may facilitate the comprehension of these expressions. For this purpose, the study adopts a contrastive…

This article presents a case study which aims at analyzing the influence that the first language has on the learning of a foreign language. This research was conducted in an ESL classroom from a Language Center in England and was carried out with a Saudi Arabian student during a two-month period. In order to conduct this research, theoretical…

This study introduced the specific purpose translation teaching to Indonesian undergraduate students at Universitas Al-Azhar Medan, Indonesia. The courses were attended by the Business and Economics students who are new to translation. As parallel corpus, bilingual contract documents in Indonesian and English were chosen to help the students to…

Recent years have seen a surge of interest in "increments" among students of conversational interaction. This article first outlines "incrementing" as an analytical problem (i.e., as turn constructional unit [TCU] extensions) by tracing its origins back to Sacks, Schegloff, and Jefferson's (1974) famous turn-taking article. Then, the article…

The development of speech-act theory has provided the hearers with a better understanding of what speakers intend to perform in the act of communication. One type of speech act is apologizing. When an action or utterance has resulted in an offense, the offender needs to apologize. In the present study, an attempt was made to compare the apology…