This study examined the semantic features of the simulated mini-lectures in the listening sections of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) and the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) based on automatized semantic analysis to explore the content validity of the two tests. Two study corpora were utilized, the IELTS…

This article discusses the function of a particular feature of sign language--mouth action--as it is expressed in various discourse contexts. Specifically, we examine forms of mouthing and mouth gesture as they are used in signed narrative and expository texts, highlighting the signers' choices during the production of these two text types. We…

This paper considers the anaphoric status of the pro-form "fer-ho" (do it) in Catalan [This paper contains some ideas included in Busquets (2005)]. I discuss some anaphoric properties of "fer-ho" as deep anaphora. I also compare these properties to those of other types of anaphora, like VPE and pseudogapping (pg). I show that…

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

Chomsky put forth his "A-over-A" theory in his book "Language and Mind", which means if a sentence contains (S… (A...) A…) S (A-over-A) structure, then this sentence can only be transformed on the basis of the larger phrase. In this paper the author puts forth the "Psychological Momentum" theory to analyze the…

The main goal of this study was to ascertain the effectiveness of an intervention programme on narrative coherence in students with Typical Development (TD) and with a Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). Participants were 99 five-year-old students from schools in Tenerife. A task involving retelling a story was used for the narrative analysis,…

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as "but" or "moreover") with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

Being a configuration of logically interconnected statements realized in moves and stages, an argumentative essay is built around the notion of textual unity achieved through lexico-grammar and semantic associations. The study attempted to analyze the role of cohesion in the rhetorical structure of undergraduate EFL students. Hence, the 13 moves…

Analyses of learning based on student discourse need to account not only for the content of the utterances but also for the ways in which students make connections across turns of talk. This requires segmentation of discourse data to define when connections are likely to be meaningful. In this paper, we present an approach to segmenting data for…

Language in chemistry is highly specialized, and for students, transitions in language complexity from high school to university can be extremely challenging. With an increasingly diverse cohort of students enrolled in UK chemistry degree programs, better understanding the linguistic challenges students face is becoming a greater pedagogical…

Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) plays an important role in analyzing text data from education settings. LSA represents meaning of words and sets of words by vectors from a k-dimensional space generated from a selected corpus. While the impact of the value of k has been investigated by many researchers, the impact of the selection of documents and…

This study investigates the influence of causal and concessive relations on discourse coherence in Chinese by means of eye movement and self-paced reading techniques. We use the sentential structure like "NP[subscript HUMAN] moved from place A to place B, {because ([Chinese characters omitted] yinwei) /although ([Chinese characters omitted]…

The present study aimed to investigate the frequency of the use of two semantic adjustment strategies; namely, expansion and reduction, in the two English translations of book one of "Masnavi." For this purpose, 300 lines of "Masnavi" by Rumi (2014) along its two corresponding English translations by Nicholson (2004) and…

Just as language reflects one's thoughts, the text of science textbooks reflects the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. Therefore, students' learning of scientific language leads to their acquisition of the structure of scientific knowledge and thought. The purposes of this study were to extract scientific semantic network from science…