Tennis scores represent a natural language domain that offers the unique opportunity to study the effects of discourse constraints on prosody with strict control over syntactic and lexical variation. This study analyzed a set of tennis scores, such as "30-15," from live recordings of several Wimbledon and Davis Cup matches. The objective was to…

The present investigation examines possible social and linguistic factors that influence forms of address used in Chilean Spanish with various interlocutors. A characteristic of the Spanish of Chile is the use of a variety of forms of address for the second person singular, "tu", "vos", and "usted", with corresponding…

The article examines the effect of two factors on achievement test scores in English as a foreign language for specific purposes in higher education: preexisting linguistic competence and frequency of use of language learner strategies. The rationale for the analysis of language learner strategies as a factor affecting achievement test outcomes is…

Mathematical Mediated Language (MML) is a teaching technique designed to enhance children's learning. Teachers who use MML engage in a dialogue with children about mathematics concepts that apply to the activity in which they are engaged. This dialogue links "conceptually related linguistic and mathematical knowledge." In other words, teachers…

The GARS-2 (Gilliam 2006) is widely used for autism screening; however, the validity of its three conceptually-derived subscales has not been evaluated. In this study, exploratory (EFA) and confirmatory (CFA) factor analyses of data from matched subgroups of the standardization sample did not support the GARS-2 subscale structure. EFAs identified…

This paper is an application of Robert E. MacLaury's Vantage Theory (VT) to the analysis of real life spoken discourse. It utilizes Dennis R. Preston's (1994) modification of MacLaury's VT. It elucidates how cognitive processes of coordinate selection and combination contribute to the on-line construction of category membership in the abstract…

It has been recently argued that the particles in Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) constitute a grammatical category that actively draws new members to it. Drawing on distributional and collocational evidence, this paper establishes that CSE has a new particle, "ya". The paper then proceeds to analyse the discourse pragmatic function…

Vocabulary knowledge is a critical contributor to reading, especially reading comprehension. A word-rich classroom environment maximizes students' opportunities to learn new words. The teacher's use of language provides an important model for children's vocabulary development. By modeling the use of sophisticated words, teachers can promote…

What role does language play during attention allocation in perceiving and remembering events? We recorded adults' eye movements as they studied animated motion events for a later recognition task. We compared native speakers of two languages that use different means of expressing motion (Greek and English). In Experiment 1, eye movements revealed…

English as taught in city schools does not always reflect the Englishes city students travel with. Their urban English landscape is enriched by a procession of many voices that march in various directions in, around, and through the monuments of the city. These languages--Englishes, in this case--which have been traded on through various public…

This article outlines the findings of a new study that explores the portrayal of disability within a sample of the primary-age children's literature most readily available to UK schools. The kind of literature to which children are exposed is likely to influence their general perceptions of social life. How disability is handled by authors is…

This article brings together salient findings regarding communication and identity through studies of everyday social practices, studies of discourses about these practices and policy documents pertaining to special schools from "previous" and "ongoing" ethnographic projects based at the KKOM-DS (Communication, Culture and…

This paper investigates how the processes of language transmission among speakers of Southern Tutchone ("dan k'e"), an indigenous Athapaskan language of the southern Yukon Territory, Canada, bear out an emerging theoretical interest in how bottom-up communicative practices shape language policy. An examination of "dan k'e"…

Toward the end of their first year of life, infants' overly specified word representations are thought to give way to more abstract ones, which helps them to better cope with variation not relevant to word identity (e.g., voice and affect). This developmental change may help infants process the ambient language more efficiently, thus enabling…

This article considers language learner agency from a poststructuralist perspective, focusing on how agency is discursively constituted as individuals position themselves and are positioned as (potential) agents within ideologically defined spaces. As such, I regard agency as inherently unstable and as a discursively mobilized capacity to act.…