English-speaking children with specific language impairment (SLI) appear to have special difficulty in the use of who-object questions (e.g., Who is the girl chasing?). It has been argued that problems related to grammatical movement may be responsible for this difficulty. However, it is also possible that the lower frequency of who-object…

Coherence relations are typically taken to link two clauses or larger units and to be signaled at the text surface by conjunctions and certain adverbials. Relations, however, also can hold within clauses, indicated by prepositions like despite, due to, or in case of, when these have an internal argument denoting an eventuality. Although these…

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that it preferentially refers to the most salient entity in a discourse, whereas that preferentially refers to a conceptual composite. In Experiment 1, eye movements were monitored as participants followed spoken instructions such as, Put the cup on the saucer. Now put it/that.... The preferred referent…

There is disagreement within both linguistics and psycholinguistics concerning the use of unaccented third person pronouns to refer to implicit referents. Some researchers (e.g., Erku & Gundel, 1987) argue that it is impossible or highly marked, while others (e.g., Yule, 1982) maintain that it is not only acceptable but commonly used in normal…

The analysis considers two key questions relating to pupil progress. First, whether the "route" or pattern of "steps" a pupil takes between Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 matters in terms of their performance in the Key Stage 2 assessments. Secondly, whether such progress is influenced by the primary school a pupil attends. The…

Parent report instruments adapted from the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories (CDI) examined vocabulary development in children aged 0 ; 8 to 2 ; 6 for two Chinese languages, Mandarin (n = 1694) and Cantonese (n = 1625). Parental reports suggested higher overall scores for Mandarin- than for Cantonese-speaking children from…

This article demonstrates how evidence related to performance in computer mediated communication (CMC) can be used as a vehicle for researching pupils' thinking about using and learning a foreign language. The analysis is based on a qualitative study of pupils from two contrasting schools who had taken part in a multinational CMC project involving…

English sentences containing the universal quantifiers "each", "every", and "all" are highly complex structures in view of the subtleties of their scope properties and resulting ambiguities. This study explored the acquisition of universal quantifier sentences as reflected in the performance of three diverse college-level student groups on a…

In this article, we present an approach to the automatic correction of preposition errors in L2 English. Our system, based on a maximum entropy classifier, achieves average precision of 42% and recall of 35% on this task. The discussion of results obtained on correct and incorrect data aims to establish what characteristics of L2 writing prove…

There have been a growing number of discourse studies in recent years on written academic genres produced by students. However, the master's thesis has not received as much attention as the PhD dissertation. This investigation of master's theses from three disciplines, biology, philosophy and linguistics, employs both discourse analysis and…

This paper examines the concept of polysemy which serves as the basis of the "principled polysemy model" of spatial prepositions proposed by A. Tyler and V. Evans in a number of recent publications [Tyler, Andrea, Evans, Vyvyan, 2001. Reconsidering prepositional polysemy networks: The case of "over". Language 77, 724-765;…

This paper examines the syntax of "GENDER CONCORD" in mixed utterances where bilingual children switch between a modifier in one language and a noun in another. Particular attention is paid to how children deal with potential gender mismatches between modifier and noun, i.e., if one of the languages has grammatical gender but the other does not,…

During a yearlong collaborative effort to enhance vocabulary instruction in secondary classrooms, high school teachers and university faculty developed and implemented a variety of approaches to support students in building rich representations of word meanings as well as an understanding of word features such as roots, affixes, and parts of…

Purpose: Children with specific language impairment (SLI) often fail to produce past tense forms in obligatory contexts, although the factors affecting such inconsistency are not well understood. This study examined the influence of accompanying temporal adverbials (e.g., "just, already") on the past tense production of these children. Method:…

This article presents a review of the author's long-term research in urban classrooms. The authors explore six illustrated information books created by children as culminating activities of integrated science-literacy units, Forest and Matter, that they developed, implemented, and studied in several 1st-3rd grade classrooms in Chicago Public…