In Russian infinitives of impersonal verbs have a peculiar distribution: they are not acceptable in most syntactic contexts, but there are also syntactic contexts in which they are perfectly acceptable. Based on a qualitative analysis of data from corpora, the Internet and an acceptability survey, it is argued that the restrictions on impersonals…

Adult word recognition is influenced by prior exposure to phonologically or semantically related words ("cup" primes "cat" or "plate") compared to unrelated words ("door"), suggesting that words are organised in the adult lexicon based on their phonological and semantic properties and that word recognition implicates not just the heard word, but…

This paper presents and discusses the results of a research project in Education Sciences, which aimed at identifying and understanding the effects of in-service teacher education carried out in schools, on the educational practices of a school of the 1st Cycle of Basic Education (CBE). The training was organized with small project groups…

When two individual characters are introduced in discourse, it is often, but not always, possible to make anaphoric reference to them as a complex reference object via a plural pronoun. According to the Equivalence hypothesis, the circumstances under which such reference is possible depend on the equivalence of the characters. Various factors have…

Two subject-verb agreement error elicitation studies tested the hierarchical feature-passing account of agreement computation in production and three timing-based alternatives: linear distance to the head noun, semantic integration, and a combined effect of both (a scope of planning account). In Experiment 1, participants completed subject noun…

Verb-doubling, where a copy of the main verb occurs both before and after the direct object, is a structure commonly used in Chinese in sentences containing a frequency or duration phrase. In Cantonese, verb-doubling is highly optional and therefore problematic for existing syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic accounts of its distribution in…

Curricula authoring is a complex process, involving different actors and different kinds of knowledge. Learners aim at acquiring expertise about some topic of their own interest, and need to perceive that the curriculum they attend will lead them toward their goal; when this does not happen, they become demotivated. Learners are all different, not…

We report two visual-world eye-tracking experiments that investigated the effects of subjecthood, pronominalisation, and contrastive focus on the interpretation of pronouns in subsequent discourse. By probing the effects of these factors on real-time pronoun interpretation, we aim to contribute to our understanding of how topicality-related…

Is language processing universal? How do the specific properties of each language influence the way it is processed? In this study, we compare the neural correlates of morphological processing in Hebrew--a Semitic language with a rich and systematic morphology, to those revealed in English--an Indo-European language with a linear morphology. Using…

Sorting procedures are frequently adopted as an alternative to dissimilarity ratings to measure the dissimilarity of large sets of stimuli in a comparatively short time. However, systematic empirical research on the consequences of this experiment-design choice is lacking. We carried out a behavioral experiment to assess the extent to which…

The main point of our study was to examine the vocabulary knowledge of pupils in grades 3-6, and in particular the relative reading vocabulary disadvantage of hearing-impaired pupils. The achievements of 394 pupils with normal hearing and 106 pupils with a hearing impairment were examined on two vocabulary assessment tasks: a lexical decision task…

Purpose: To assess the utility of a wide range of language measures (phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics) for the identification of adults with developmental language impairment. Method: Measures were administered to 3 groups of adults, each representing a population expected to demonstrate high levels of language impairment, and to…

This Special Issue on Morphological Processing is based on the sixth MOrphological PROcessing Conference (MOPROC), which was kept in June 2009 in Turku, Finland. The issue contains 13 articles by leading scholars in the field of morphological processing. These articles investigate the role morphemes play in language comprehension, production and…

Healthy adults can identify spoken words at a remarkable speed, by incrementally analyzing word-onset information. It is currently unknown how this adult-level speed of spoken-word processing emerges during children's native-language acquisition. In a picture-word mismatch paradigm, we manipulated the semantic congruency between picture contexts…

This study examined teaching SP of English verbs through the data-driven learning (DDL) approach and its effect on learners' vocabulary choice appropriateness in the Persian English foreign language (EFL) context. In the present study, two male intact classes were selected. One of these two classes was randomly selected as a treatment group and…