This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

Out-of-class learning constitutes an important context for human development, and active engagement in out-of-class activities is associated with successful language development. However, not all out-of-class experiences are equally beneficial to learning, and it is of paramount importance to understand what quality out-of-class English language…

Atypical expressive prosody is reported as a consistent challenge for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and is associated with a broad set of clinical impairments including perceptions of oddness from others. Theories of atypical prosody in ASD have attributed these impairments to the broader symptoms of ASD, particularly in the…

Models of monolingual literacy propose that reading acquisition builds upon children's semantic, phonological, and orthographic knowledge. The relationships between these components vary cross-linguistically, yet it is generally unknown how these differences impact bilingual children's literacy. A comparison between Spanish-English bilingual and…

Arbitrary symbolism is a linguistic doctrine that predicts an orthogonal relationship between word forms and their corresponding meanings. Recent corpora analyses have demonstrated violations of arbitrary symbolism with respect to concreteness, a variable characterizing the sensorimotor salience of a word. In addition to qualitative semantic…

Informed by sociocultural and systems theory tenets, this study used ethnographic research methods to examine the feasibility of using speech recognition (SR) technology to support struggling readers in an early elementary classroom setting. Observations of eight first graders were conducted as they participated in a structured SR-supported…

Legal translation of contract agreements is a challenge to translators as it involves combining the literary translation with the technical terminological precision. In translating legal contract agreements, a legal translator must utilize the lexical or syntactic precision and, more importantly, the pragmatic awareness of the context. This will…

Drawing on the function of Russian as a state language the paper proposes a concept of continuous linguistic rhetorical (LR) education perceived as a means of optimizing language policy in Russian multinational regions. LR education as an innovative pedagogical system shapes a learner's readiness for self-projection as a strong linguistic…

An in-depth examination of the acquisition of grammatical gender has not previously been conducted for Irish, an endangered indigenous language now typically acquired simultaneously with English, or as L2. Children acquiring Irish must contend with the opacity of the Irish gender system and the plurifunctionality of the inflections used to mark…

Lexical development in first language (L1) Turkish and second language (L2) German in two- to three-year-old children was examined, using parental vocabulary checklists in Turkish and in German. Children showed strong Turkish dominance in the number of lexical items they produced, which was due to the more frequent exposure to Turkish and higher…

In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

Domain adaptation of natural language processing systems is challenging because it requires human expertise. While manual effort is effective in creating a high quality knowledge base, it is expensive and time consuming. Clinical text adds another layer of complexity to the task due to privacy and confidentiality restrictions that hinder the…

This paper reports an experiment designed to evaluate an attempt to improve the effectiveness of an existing L2 idiom-learning tool. In this tool, learners are helped to associate the abstract, idiomatic meaning of expressions such as "jump the gun" (act too soon) with their original, concrete meaning (e.g. associating "jump the…

Vocabulary is an indispensable part of language and it is of vital importance for second language learners. Wilkins (1972) points out: "without grammar very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed." Vocabulary teaching has experienced several stages characterized by grammatical-translation method, audio-lingual…

Ambiguity tolerance and perceptual learning styles are the two influential elements showing individual differences in EFL learning. This research is intended to explore the relationship between Chinese EFL learners' ambiguity tolerance and their preferred perceptual learning styles. The findings include (1) the learners are sensitive to English…