Learners of a nonnull subject language (e.g., English) whose first language (L1) is a null subject language (e.g., Spanish) can show some optionality in the interpretation of overt subject pronouns in the second language (L2). By exposing L2 learners to nativelike interpretations of pronouns in discourse, we aim at understanding how exposure can…

English argumentative writing is difficult in second language writing for ESL students. Although there has been a lot of research on English argumentative writings, empirical research focusing on claims in argumentative writing is very scarce. Based on the Toulmin model, this paper studied the relationship between the claims and English…

As transgender students become an increasingly visible segment of college student populations, policies allowing students to indicate chosen names and pronouns will offer crucial support while also helping transform campuses into more gender-inclusive spaces. Successful implementation of these policies requires educated and supportive faculty.…

This study intends to find out what is the initial knowledge of the students before they were treated using Numbered Heads Together (NHT) and Team Games Tournament (TGT), ascertain of the significant difference between these two teaching strategies, and to know the responses of the students after they taught using Numbered Heads Together and Team…

The article explores lexical units denoting colour in English. The study focuses on colour lexemes in a literary text in terms of their combining potential, structure, and stylistic properties. The undertaken analysis of 11 basic colour lexemes ("black," "white," "grey," "red," "blue,"…

Using a cross-linguistic approach, we investigated Turkish-speaking children's acquisition and use of relative clauses (RCs) by examining longitudinal child-caregiver interactions and cross-sectional peer conversations. Longitudinal data were collected from 8 children between the ages of 8 and 36 months. Peer conversational corpus came from 78…

Scholars of language development have long been challenged to understand the development of functional categories. Traditionally, it was assumed that children's language development initially relies on lexical elements, while functional elements become accessible only at later periods; and that it is lexical growth which bootstraps grammatical…

This article examines children's comprehension of the "get"-passive relative to the "be"-passive in an attempt to systematically compare the acquisition of both types of passives. It discusses the findings of two experiments (a picture-matching task and an act-out task) with children ages 36. Results from the picture-matching…

The study aims at finding the meaning of the texts or sentences in detail from the discourse semantics' perspectives through metafunctions analysis of conjunction systems introduced by Martin and Rose (2003: 110 ). This study used qualitative and descriptive methods. The data used in this study is taken from the top three most shared articles by…

We investigate the development of text reconstruction abilities in Hebrew-speaking children, with a particular focus on verbal passive constructions. The acquisition of verbal passives in Hebrew is a late developmental milestone, closely tied to the expression of event semantics. The current study explores how narrative and informative text genres…

Close reading requires students to unpack the implicit relationships within and across sentences. The authors discuss three potential barriers to comprehension embedded within text that they have seen with their own students and with the teachers they have worked with: anaphoric relationships, connectives, and appositives. The authors begin each…

Politicians usually use plural personal pronouns we and us to highlight their qualities or positive aspects or of their in-group members. They also use these pronouns to represent a team, group or an organization and show shared responsibilities. This paper employs CDA approach to analyze the discursive practice of using inclusive and exclusive…

Previous studies have found that Hebrew-speaking children accurately comprehend object relatives (OR) with an embedded non-referential arbitrary subject pronoun (ASP). The facilitation of ORs with embedded pronouns is expected both from a discourse-pragmatics perspective and within a syntax-based locality approach. However, the specific effect of…

We present a self-organizing approach to sentence processing that sheds new light on notional plurality effects in agreement attraction, using pseudopartitive subject noun phrases (e.g., "a bottle of pills"). We first show that notional plurality ratings (numerosity judgments for subject noun phrases) predict verb agreement choices in…

Previous research accounting for pronoun resolution as a problem of probabilistic inference has not explored the phenomenon of adaptation, whereby the processor constantly tracks and adapts, rationally, to changes in a statistical environment. We investigate whether Brazilian (BP) and European Portuguese (EP) speakers adapt to variations in the…