This study examines the comprehension patterns of various sentence types by Mandarin-speaking aphasic patients and evaluates the validity of the predictions from the Trace-Deletion Hypothesis (TDH) and the Double Dependency Hypothesis (DDH). Like English, the canonical word order in Mandarin is SVO, but the two languages differ in that the head…

This article outlines criteria to define a figurative idiom, and then compares the frequent figurative idioms identified in two sources of spoken American English (academic and contemporary) to their frequency in spoken British English. This is done by searching the spoken part of the British National Corpus (BNC), to see whether they are frequent…

Imperfective or progressive verb morphology makes it possible to use the name of a whole event to refer to an activity that is clearly not a complete instance of that event, leading to what is known as the Imperfective Paradox. For example, a sentence like "John was building a house" does not entail that a house ever got built. The Imperfective…

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the…

Pattern language is the lexicon used to express the schema of a field of professional practice (Smethurst, 1997). This lexicon is frequently presumed to exist in communities of practice in educational settings, although the findings derived from the longitudinal study of schools (Elmore, 1996; Goodlad, 1984; Lortie, 1975; McLaughlin & Talbert,…

Patterns of language are usually perceived, learned and used as meaningful chunks that are processed as a whole, resulting in a reduced learning burden and increased fluency. The ability to comprehend and produce lexical chunks or groups of words which are commonly found together is an important part of language acquisition. This paper…

Pragmatics is included in one of four communicative competences (Canale, 1980). It is necessary and important to teach pragmatics at school in our globalized world in order to avoid as much as misunderstanding, which is likely to stem from cultural difference. As a result, greater importance should be attached to diverse customs and pragmatics.…

Adult English language learners in the United States approach the learning of English pronunciation from a wide variety of native language backgrounds. They may speak languages with sound systems that vary a great deal from that of English. The pronunciation goals and needs of adult English language learners are diverse. These goals and needs…

In this article, Paris explores the deep linguistic and cultural ways in which youth in a multiethnic urban high school employ linguistic features of African American Language (AAL) across ethnic lines. The author also discusses how knowledge about the use of AAL in multiethnic contexts might be applied to language and literacy education and how…

Differential performance results occur when a specific population subgroup achieves a passing rate which is significantly lower than that of the normative reference group. African Americans do less well, in general, on all types of assessments, including constructed-response tests. The present study examined the writing styles of African American…

This case study investigates the bilingual and trilingual codeswitching patterns of two multilinguals who grew up in a Hungarian-Romanian two-language family in Transylvania, and whose bilingual codeswitching changed into trilingual codeswitching after they moved to North America. An analysis of the speakers' discourse reveals the amounts of…

Direct quotation can be a source of meaning in storybook texts for beginning readers. The author of this article sketches the linguistic complexity of direct quotation and offers instructional strategies. Three aspects of direct quotation are examined: the cluster of print features and syntactic characteristics that direct quotation involves, the…

This paper presents a four-subject study that examines the relative influence of syllable position and stress, together with vowel context on the colouring of the dark-l characteristic of speakers of General American English. Most investigators report lighter /l/ tokens in syllable onsets and darker tokens in coda positions. The present study…

The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily…

It is cross-linguistically common for languages to undergo a diachronic increase in the range of adverbial notions that can be expressed by means of infinitival constructions, and the Romance languages are a good example of this process. Examining the development of adverbial "prepositional infinitive" constructions in Spanish, Portuguese and…