This conversation analytic study offers an empirical analysis of the Japanese turn-initial interjection "are." The interjectional "are" is said to be pragmatized from its use as a distal demonstrative and has been considered as an expression of a speaker's internal state of being surprised at something. In contrast, this study…

Purpose: The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association requires speech-language pathologists (SLPs) to be aware of language disorders versus language differences. SLPs are likely to provide clinical services to Navajo and other Native American children with communication disorders. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to educate SLPs who…

This study describes the prosodic and functional patterns of the particle "t?ayb[superscript 2]" in Spoken Saudi Arabic (SSA; the variety of Arabic spoken in Saudi Arabia) through phonetic and conversational analysis. This particle, literally meaning "good/well/okay," is one of the most common spoken particles used in SSA. Data…

Studies on young children's comprehension have shown that children can experience problems interpreting object pronouns, even when reflexive interpretation is already adult-like. Compared to resolving reflexives, linking pronouns to a referent is considered a more "intensive" process, because it also involves non-syntactic factors like…

This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…

Why are spatial metaphors, like the use of "high" to describe a musical pitch, so common? This study tested one hundred and fifty-four 3- to 5-year-old English-learning children on their ability to learn a novel adjective in the domain of space or pitch and to extend this adjective to the untrained dimension. Children were more…

Although still disputed by some authors, complement anaphora interpretations are widely accepted today. However, they are marked and subject to strict interpretation conditions. Most commonly, monotone decreasing quantifiers facilitate a salient complement set interpretation that is suitable for subsequent anaphoric reference, whereas monotone…

This qualitative study aims at exploring the internal structure of personal experience oral narrative in Arabic in terms of Woodbury (1987) rhetorical components and Labov (1972) approach of narrative structure, who claimed its presence in all well-formed narratives. Recordings of orally told narratives by five Saudi informants were elicited in…

The main goal of this tutorial is to promote the study of children with developmental language disorder (DLD) across different languages of the world. The cumulative effect of these efforts is likely to be a set of more compelling and comprehensive theories of language learning difficulties and, possibly, of language acquisition in general.…

In this article we look at some of the structural properties of second language (L2) Japanese WH questions. In Japanese the WH words are licensed to remain "in situ" by the prosodic contiguity properties of the phrases which have no prosodic boundaries between the WH word and the question particle. In a rehearsed-reading, sentence…

"One" anaphora (e.g., "this is a good one") has been used as a key diagnostic in syntactic analyses of the English noun phrase, and "'one'-replacement" has also figured prominently in debates about the learnability of language. However, much of this work has been based on faulty premises, as a few perceptive…

Given the importance of consultation in school psychology practice, more research is needed to examine the types of interpersonal communication through which consultation is effective. This study revisited Erchul and Schulte (1990), which investigated the amount of transcription and coding of consultation sessions required for reliable and…

Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study's research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected,…

We examine whether German children attach an adultlike relevance to the pragmatic category of polarity contrast (e.g., "In my picture the child IS eating the candies" following after "In my picture the child is not eating the candies") with linguistic expressions (i.e., the affirmative particles…

Background: The current study explored the effect of implicit prosody on syntactic parsing in the silent reading of an ambiguous double prepositional phrase (PP) construction in Hebrew by employing the Implicit Prosody Hypothesis test (Fodor, 2002). Method: The parsing preferences of the construction in silent reading were tested and compared to…