For years, research has shown that language learning at an early age has great benefits. Most recently, a May 2015 study published in "Science Daily" suggests that exposure to multiple languages in childhood produces better communicators ("Children exposed to multiple languages"). A 2014 study in Singapore showed that infants…

The present article investigates the use of first year university students' formulaic sequences in written and oral texts in an English as a foreign language context. The corpus of the study consists of eight descriptive texts--four written and four oral--which were composed of four students of English Pedagogy at a university in Santiago, Chile.…

The Report of Chinese Students' English Writing Ability (2014) focuses on the Chinese students' English writing in the automated essay-evaluation context. The data and samples are primarily from a national-wide writing project involving 300,814 English as a Foreign Language participants from 452 schools in China during a period of April 10 to May…

Generic noun phrases, or generics, refer to abstract categories ("Dogs" bark) rather than particular individuals ("Those dogs" bark). Study 1 investigated how parents use gestures in association with generic versus particular reference during naturalistic interactions with their 2- and 3-year-old children. Parents provided…

We used eye tracking to investigate the downstream processing consequences of encountering noun/verb (NV) homographs (i.e., park) in semantically neutral but syntactically constraining contexts. Target words were followed by a prepositional phrase containing a noun that was plausible for only 1 meaning of the homograph. Replicating previous work,…

Background Children with severe cerebral palsy (CP) (i.e. "non-speaking children with severely limited mobility") are restricted in many domains that are important to the acquisition of language. Aims To investigate comprehension of spoken language on sentence type level in non-speaking children with severe CP. Methods & Procedures…

Taking a dynamic usage-based perspective, this longitudinal case study compares the development of sentence complexity in speaking versus writing in two beginner Taiwanese learners of English (identical twins) in an extensive corpus consisting of 100 oral and 100 written texts of approximately 200 words produced by each twin over 8 months. Three…

This corpus study brings a second language (L2) research perspective, insights from generative grammar, and new empirical evidence to bear on a long-accepted claim in the World Englishes literature--namely, that inversion with "wh"-movement in colloquial Indian English is obligatory in embedded clauses and impossible in main clauses. It…

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…

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…

Some studies have reported the positive outcome of using concordancers and dictionaries in (ESL) context. This study aims to examine how an EFL writer consulted with concordancers and dictionaries along with Google and Google Scholar when engaging in academic writing at university level. The researcher investigated a non-English-major postgraduate…

This research inspects the allocation of involvement load to the evaluation component of the involvement load hypothesis, examining how three typical approaches to evaluation (cloze-exercises, sentence-writing, and composition-writing) promote word learning. The results of this research were partially consistent with the predictions of the…

The utilization of English recurrent word combinations--lexical bundles--play a fundamental role in academic prose (Karabacak & Qin, 2013). There has been highly limited research about comparing Turkish non-native and native English writers' use of lexical bundles in academic prose in terms of frequency, structure and functions of lexical…

This research proposes a unified approach to the semantics of the so-called bare nominals, which include proper names (e.g., "Mary"), mass and plural terms (e.g., "water," "cats"), and articleless noun phrases in Japanese. I argue that bare nominals themselves are monadic predicates applicable to more than one…

Previous work has suggested that the difficulty normally associated with processing an object-extracted relative clause (ORC) compared to a subject-extracted relative clause (SRC) is increased when the head noun phrase (NP1) is animate and the embedded noun phrase (NP2) is inanimate, compared to the reverse animacy configuration. Two eye-tracking…