This article presents a series of three experiments investigating the processing of nested epistemic expressions, utterances containing two epistemic modals in one clause, such as "he 'certainly may' have forgotten." While some linguists claim that in a nested epistemic expression one modal is semantically embedded within the scope of…

Conversational interactants rely on each other to cooperate with ongoing actions and activities both structurally (alignment) and affectively (affiliation). They monitor one another's cooperative behaviors to detect any (potential) problems in alignment and affiliation. The present study describes one interactional strategy Japanese speakers use…

Evidence is widely recognized as an essential component of argumentation. Existing research has primarily focused on students' use of evidence to construct explanations or claims. In the present study, 54 11- to 12-year-old Chinese students participated in an extended discourse-based argumentation curriculum, along with an equivalent…

Despite a seemingly fragmented interactional context, teachers and students in classrooms routinely manage to co-construct coherent, inter-related, and individually adapted learning trajectories distributed over days and weeks. The aim of this article is to explore with what interactional resources progressivity is accomplished in learning…

As part of a growing body of conversation analytic research on epistemics in social interaction, this study explores various uses of the Japanese sentence-final particle "kke", which conveys the speaker's claim that she or he has some degree of uncertainty in recalling something from the past. The study aims to demonstrate how "mental" concepts…

In present-day knowledge societies, readers cannot understand complex issues without constructing meaning across multiple information sources. To what extent they are able to do so may depend on both characteristics of reading tasks and characteristics of readers themselves. In this study, 184 undergraduates read multiple texts about the complex…

In a pedagogical method increasing in popularity, students of all levels--from elementary to post graduate--are likely to be asked to engage in debate with peers. How they understand the purposes and values of argumentive discourse is likely to affect its effectiveness. The 3 studies presented here involve junior high school, senior high school,…