We studied the role of discourse coherence relations on structure formulation in sentence production by examining whether a connective, an essential signal of coherence relations, modulates the tendency for speakers to reuse sentence structures (i.e., structural priming). We further examined three possible modulating factors: the type of…

This study investigates how task complexity affects native speakers' and second language (L2) learners', and experts' perceptions of task difficulty in writing tasks. It also explores how task complexity influences English native speakers' and L2 learners' linguistic complexity in their writing. Ninety participants performed one simple and one…

The present study explores the effects of meta-cognitive strategies, working memory capacity (WMC), and syntactic awareness on Chinese EFL learners' L2 reading comprehension. One hundred and sixty-seven Chinese college students who were enrolled in the required English class, aged from 19 to 21 years, participated in this study. A questionnaire…

The purpose of this study was to investigate the probable effects of cognitive in linguistics properties of descriptive writing. The cognitive was studied on reflectivity and impulsivity in which students were categorized in to two groups. The linguistics properties of the learners' descriptive writings were examined through syntactic complexity…

Since database conceptual modeling is a complex cognitive activity, finding an appropriate pedagogy to deliver the topic to novice database designers is a challenge for Information Systems (IS) educators. The four-level TSSL model that is known in the area of human-computer interactions (HCI) is used to explain and demonstrate how instructional…

This study investigates how syntactic complexity affects speaking performance in first (L1) and second language (L2) in terms of speaking fluency. Participants (30 Dutch native speakers with an average to advanced level of English) performed two speaking experiments, one in Dutch (L1) and one in English (L2). Syntactic complexity was…

When people describe motion events, their path expressions are biased toward inclusion of goal paths (e.g., into the house) and omission of source paths (e.g., out of the house). In this paper, we explored whether this asymmetry has its origins in people's non-linguistic representations of events. In three experiments, 4-year-old children and…

This review of current writing assessment practices focuses upon the adult population, an area significantly underrepresented within psychoeducational literature. As compared to other populations, such as K-12 students, there are few options for the practitioner wishing to evaluate adult writers by means of standardized assessment instruments.…

Recasts are one type of corrective feedback that reformulates all or part of a learner's erroneous utterance during communicative interaction without changing the meaning. Categorized as implicit and input-providing corrective feedback, recasts have become the focus of debate in the area of interaction research in recent years. The debate…

The present study adopted a cognitive linguistic framework--Talmy's (1985, 1991, 2000) typological classification of motion events--to investigate how second-language (L2) Chinese learners come to express motion events in a targetlike manner. Fifty-five U.S. university students and 20 native speakers of Chinese participated in the study. A…

Building up messages as a cognitive activity within the linguistic multi-level system is the result of the interaction between the various components of this system. Yet, this interactive process occurring in the language user's mind while encoding can vary from person to person. Likewise, it also differs in different recipients while decoding.…

In this experiment, syntactic constraints on the retrieval of orthography were investigated using homophones embedded in sentence contexts. Participants typed auditorily presented sentences that included a contextually appropriate homophone that either shared part of speech with its homophone competitor (i.e., was syntactically unambiguous) or had…

This essay mainly discusses the following issue: Do people from different cultures store English words in their minds in different ways; and what elements determine people's mental lexicon? The findings from my experiment showed that cultural factors only play a minor role on this stage. The leading dominants in this light are the linguistic…

The purpose of this paper is to offer a framework for categorizing and describing the different types of processes that undergraduates use to construct proofs. Based on 176 observations of undergraduates constructing proofs collected over several studies, I describe three qualitatively different ways that undergraduates use to construct proofs. In…