We expand upon a previous proposal by Bloom and Wynn (1997) that young children learn about the meaning of number words by tracking their occurrence in particular syntactic environments, in combination with the discourse context in which they are used. An analysis of the Childes database (MacWhinney, 2000) reveals that the environments studied by…

The effects of word predictability and shared semantic similarity between a target word and other words that could have taken its place in a sentence on language comprehension are investigated using data from a reading time study, a sentence completion study, and linear mixed-effects regression modeling. We find that processing is facilitated if…

Words should be chosen and used carefully so that they convey the meaning or meanings that you intend--and do not convey any unintended or double meanings. Writing should leave little ambiguity or uncertainty about what you are referring to--unless some purposeful ambiguity is desired. Sometimes words that are abstract or superficial may be chosen…

The TARP program, a federal response to the 2008 financial crisis, has generated much debate both inside and outside of academia. Since business ethics, corporate responsibility, and public policy form the basic educational framework of the undergraduate business school curriculum, we investigated attitudes toward the TARP in the Spring of 2009.…

This paper reports a study of perceptions and attitudes relating to regional varieties of Polish. The methodology followed folk linguistic approaches to attitudes research. Respondents in two Polish provinces were asked to draw on a map of Poland where they thought the main regional varieties of Polish were spoken, and then to name and…

Sometimes, the relationship between form and meaning in language is not one-to-one. Here, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to illuminate the neural correlates of such flexible syntax-semantics mappings during sentence comprehension by examining split-intransitivity. While some ("rigid") verbs consistently select one…

This study examined how noun and verb processing in bilingual visual word recognition are affected by within and between-language overlap. We investigated how word class ambiguous noun and verb cognates are processed by bilinguals, to see if co-activation of overlapping word forms between languages benefits from additional overlap within a…

Using the blocked-translation paradigm with healthy participants, we examined Crutch and Warrington's hypothesis that concrete and abstract concepts are organized by distinct principles: concrete concepts by semantic similarities and abstract ones by associations. In three experiments we constructed two types of experimental blocking (similar…

Over the past several decades, the TESOL community has seen an increased interest in the use of data-driven learning (DDL) approaches. Most studies of DDL have focused on the acquisition of vocabulary items, including a wide range of information necessary for their correct usage. One type of vocabulary that has yet to be properly investigated has…

Recently, several ERP studies have shown that the human language comprehension system anticipates words that are highly likely continuations of a given text. However, it remains an open issue whether the language comprehension system can also make predictions that go beyond a specific word. Here, we address the question of whether readers predict…

This article examines definitions state education agencies use to describe the federal education disability called "emotional disturbance." State definitions were collected so that various aspects of them could be analyzed and compared with results of similar studies completed in the 1970s and 1980s. Among results are that state definitions have…

The present study investigated how lexicosemantic information, syntactic information, and world knowledge are integrated in the course of oral sentence processing in children with specific language impairment (SLI) as compared to children with typical language development. A primed lexical-decision task was used where participants had to make a…

Comprehension includes interpreting sentences in terms of aspectual categories such as processes ("Harry climbed") and culminations ("Harry reached the top"). Adding a verbal modifier such as "for many years" to a culmination coerces its interpretation from one to many culminations. Previous studies have found that coercion increases lexical…

Morphosyntax constitutes one of the most complex areas of language. It takes into account the structure of the word and that of the sentence, and its development allows one to establish adequately agreements both within the nominal phrase and in the rest of the sentence. Morphosyntax is particularly impaired in individuals with Down syndrome. To…

Purpose: To investigate the attitudes of school teachers toward children with voice problems in a Chinese population. Method: Three groups of listeners participated in this study: primary school teachers, speech-language pathology students, and general university students. The participants were required to make attitude judgments on 12 voice…