Corpus evidence suggests that in contexts in which the presence of multiple antecedents might favor plural reference, the disadvantage observed for singular reference may disappear if the potential antecedents are combined in a group-like plural entity. We examined the relative salience of antecedents in conditions where the context either made a…

This study examined givenness in discourse via passive constructions in research articles. While it is commonly held in grammar books and grammar classes that the passive voice is the counterpart of the active voice, the present study argues that Argument movement in passive constructions can act as a syntactic device contributing to sound…

The acquisition of quantifiers is a central topic in cognitive science. The present study investigated the emergence, frequency, and non-target-like production of the universal quantifiers "all," "every," and "each" in child English from a linguistic perspective, based on the data from longitudinal naturalistic…

Understanding visual narratives requires readers to track dimensions of time, spatial location, and characters across a sequence. Previous work has found situational changes across adjacent panels differ cross-culturally, but few works have examined such situational dimensions across extended sequences. We therefore investigated situational…

Inspired by neo-institutional theory, we explore whether the semantics of diversity appears to be global and universal through computer-assisted content analysis of 2378 publications. Diversity discourses are dominant, but only in the USA and Canada, UK and Ireland and Europe, not being present in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.…

This study examined number marking comprehension among Japanese learners of second language (L2) English, whose first language (L1) does not have an obligatory number marking system. The study conducted an online sentence comprehension experiment with 96 L1-Japanese learners and 32 native speakers of English, wherein participants engaged in a…

Nonmanual articulations in sign languages range from being semantically impoverished to semantically rich, and from being independent of manual articulations to coordinated with them. But, while this range has been well noted, certain nonmanuals remain understudied. Of particular interest to us are nonmanual articulations coordinated with manual…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to explore the mathematical values, mathematics educational values, and educational values involved in mathematical modeling tasks based on different mathematical modeling perspectives. Design/Approach/Methods: In this context, the present study is a qualitative research based on document analysis. The data…

Previous research on bilingual mathematics education has proposed that as children "language mathematics" they use multiple sources of meaning. In this paper, we focus on lexical inventions--bilingual children's made up words that are not formally defined or used but follow the phonology and morphology of a language--as a source of…

The present study aims to reveal the use of high-frequency verbs "make" and "do" when they occur in a verb+noun combination in the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English. In this context, the present study investigated the grammatical and semantic patterns and erroneous productions in the learner corpus. The…

Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely…

Based on a cross-cultural perspective, the current study aims to compare the realization of the speech act of compliments among Yemeni Arabic native speakers (YANSs) and American English native speakers (AENSs). Samples of 30 participants of Americans and 30 other participants of Yemenis were involved in the study. The data were collected through…

Background: A significant portion of adults struggle to read at a basic level. Word reading (defined here as decoding and word recognition) appears to play a pivotal role for this population of readers; however, less is known about how word reading relates to other important semantic processes (e.g., vocabulary, sentence processing) known to…

This study explored second language (L2) competence in discontinuous discursive formulaic sequences, namely Chinese correlative connectives (CCCs; e.g. yinwei . . . suy 'because . . . so'), in relation to the determinants of formulaic sequence acquisition by scrutinizing L2 Chinese learners' performance on two controlled tasks. Mixed-effects…

To determine whether the developing semantic lexicon varies with culture, we examined the animal and food naming of children from three communities distinguished by language, cultural heritage, and population density. The children were fve- and seven-year-olds from Australia (n = 197), Taiwan (n = 456), and the US (n = 172). Naming patterns…