The current study focused mainly on the role of the linguistic complexity of IELTS writing Task 2. In other words, it investigated the differential effects of two interrelated linguistic complexities of writing Task 2 on the three levels of discourse representation and what IELTS candidates perceived through analyzing IELTS writing topics both at…

This paper revisits the longstanding observation that children produce modal verbs (e.g., must, could) with their root meanings (e.g., abilities, obligations) by age 2, typically a year or more earlier than with their epistemic meanings (e.g., inferences). Established explanations for this "Epistemic Gap" argue that epistemic language…

The article seeks to answer four questions: (1) How different are the value worlds in the Estonian- and German-language songbooks used in Estonia 1860-1914? (2) To what extent do the value worlds of songbooks express the ideals of the Wandervogel movement? (3) What is the position of wandering among other values? (4) Is the representation of…

Two eye-tracking experiments were conducted using written Chinese sentences that contained a multi-word ambiguous region. The goal was to determine whether readers maintained multiple interpretations throughout the ambiguous region or selected a single interpretation at the point of ambiguity. Within the ambiguous region, we manipulated the…

One of the fundamental issues for a language is its capacity to express argument structure unambiguously. This study presents evidence for the emergence and the incremental development of these basic mechanisms in a newly developing language, Central Taurus Sign Language. Our analyses identify universal patterns in both the emergence and…

Speech intelligibility, or how well a speaker's words are understood by others, affects listeners' judgments of the speaker's competence and personality. Deaf cochlear implant (CI) users vary widely in speech intelligibility, and their speech may have a noticeable "deaf" quality, both of which could evoke negative stereotypes or…

Chomsky put forth his "A-over-A" theory in his book "Language and Mind", which means if a sentence contains (S… (A...) A…) S (A-over-A) structure, then this sentence can only be transformed on the basis of the larger phrase. In this paper the author puts forth the "Psychological Momentum" theory to analyze the…

Current events influence public interest and drive Internet word searches. For over a decade, linguists and dictionary publishers have analyzed big data from Internet word searches to designate "Words of the Year" (WsOY). In this study, we examine how WsOY can foster critical digital literacy and illuminate essential aspects of inquiry…

This study has two goals. First, we present much-needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the…

This paper offers a summary of the developments that open learning has gone through, from the stages before e-learning emerged to when it carved out a niche position. It first analyzes how open learning moved through five stages, and identifies the characteristics and dominant technology at each stage. The five stages cover the period from…

This article reports two experiments in which the artificial orthography paradigm was used to investigate the mechanisms underlying learning to read. In each experiment, participants were taught the meanings and pronunications of words written in an unfamiliar orthography, and the statistical structure of the mapping between written and spoken…

Propositional attitude verbs, such as "think" and "want," have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the…

This study focuses on the use of American Invention Kits from the Smithsonian Institute in conjunction with a 3D printer. In conjunction with a large dataset from a study funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), this innovative research focuses on the effect the digital fabrication curriculum unit has on gifted and talented students'…

Ten years ago, researchers using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to study language comprehension were puzzled by what looked like a "Semantic Illusion": Semantically anomalous, but structurally well-formed sentences did not affect the N400 component--traditionally taken to reflect semantic integration--but instead produced a P600…

Theoretical and empirical research on quantity implicature has concurred that pragmatically strengthened, richer readings are not available when they are not relevant to the discourse purpose. However, this claim relies on an appeal to a notion of "relevance" that has proved difficult to make precise. In this article I discuss and…