The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming education and creating new opportunities for language learning and teaching. In English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts, idiomatic competence represents a persistent instructional challenge because it requires cultural awareness and contextual understanding. Traditional…

Kevin M. Roessger is an assistant professor of adult and lifelong learning at the University of Arkansas. He teaches courses in all areas of adult learning and development. His research interests include behavioural analytic approaches to skills-based learning and reflection as a natural phenomenon. Current conceptualisations of reflection have…

The last decade has produced an explosion in neuroscience research examining young children's early processing of language that has implications for education. Noninvasive, safe functional brain measurements have now been proven feasible for use with children starting at birth. In the arena of language, the neural signatures of learning can be…

In her thoughtful work regarding various aspects of emotion and emotion related words, Pavlenko explores a variety of perspectives on how we might characterize and conceptualize expressions of emotion. It is a work that is quite rich in breadth--one that leads to a variety of different thoughts on this topic, many of which are amenable to…

We report an investigation of 9-year-olds' ability to interpret idioms in relation to their reading comprehension level. We manipulated whether the idioms were transparent or opaque, whether they were real or novel, whether they were presented in isolation or in a supportive narrative context. As predicted, children were better able to explain the…

This article discusses three claims of the Graded Salience Hypothesis presented in Rachel Giora's book "On our mind". It is argued that these claims may give second language researchers the chance to revise the way they think about word meaning, the literal meaning-figurative meaning dichotomy and the role of context in language…

Reviews phoneme monitoring studies from 1969 to 1996 and groups them in terms of issues addressed with the task, including the contribution of the lexicon to speech perception, processing complexity, attention, contribution of prosodic information, and the basic unit of speech perception. Identifies and highlights task demands and artifactual…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…

Explores how children negotiated social identities through language used in spontaneous, casual conversation. Examines how audio transcripts of the childrens' conversations exhibit different aspects of their social "selves" and suggests that their talk can be analyzed in relation to the individual self, the immediately situated social actor, and…

Discourse context may affect comprehension of a word in a text by facilitating lexical access or by facilitating integration of the target concept with the preceding text. In two experiments, we used eye tracking measures to examine contextual influence on the integration of role fillers in scripted narratives. In both experiments, context had an…

Notes that speech intelligibility has traditionally been measured by presenting words mixed in noise to listeners for identification at different signal-to-noise ratios. The words are produced in isolation or in sequence contexts where the predictability of specific items can be varied. Emphasizes that the technique provides valuable data about…

Explores how the discourse context of metaphorical language supports children's understanding of sociocultural norms. Classroom data are examined to determine how language, situation, and interaction assist in the interpretation of metaphorically used language. (46 references) (Author/CK)

Considers the relevance of the points raised in the preceding articles in this issue to the sociolinguistic development of children with speech and language impairments. Notes that such children often have low self-esteem and that their inability to negotiate an identity for themselves through discussion with their peers may contribute to this…

Reviews the syntactic priming task, a paradigm involving the presentation of a phrasal or clausal context, followed by the presentation of a target item for lexical decision or naming. Notes that response times are faster for targets syntactically congruent with the preceding context than for incongruent targets. Outlines how to administer this…

Pragmatics, the use of language in context, has been investigated only recently in the language used by children who stutter (CWS). Historically, researchers compared the length and complexity of the syntactic constructions produced by these children with those of children who do not stutter (CWNS) and generally found the CWS to be relatively…