Computer based analyses offer a possibility for objective methods to assess semantic-linguistic quality of narratives at the text level. The aim of the present study is to investigate whether a semantic language impairment index (SELIMI) based on latent semantic analysis (LSA) can discriminate between children with developmental language disorder…

This study quantitatively measures the variation in language derived from a targeted set of digital game mechanics. Mechanics refer to the design elements of a game that make up the overall gameplay experience, determining player actions and the degree of language interaction. A corpus was compiled by extracting the language files from two popular…

This study investigates whether re-thinking the separation of lexis and grammar in language testing could lead to more valid inferences about proficiency across modes. As argued by Römer, typical scoring rubrics ignore important information about proficiency encoded at the lexis-grammar interface, in particular how the co-selection of lexical and…

Material development is important for training beginner student interpreters, as it guides the direction of interpreting learning. One key principle is difficulty progression, which requires a good knowledge of the indicators of difficulty. Since text structure outweighs words and sentences in the information processing of consecutive…

The present study investigated the speaking module of TOEFL iBT with an emphasis on the dichotomy of independent and integrated tasks. The potential differences between the two speaking conditions were intended to be explored based on the oral performance elicited from a group of Iranian test takers. To collect the required data, a simulated…

Purpose: Children's ability to adjust one's language according to discourse context is important for success in academic settings. This study examined whether second graders vary in linguistic and discourse features depending on discourse contexts, that is, when describing pictures in contextualized (describing the picture to an examiner while…

Purpose: Children's ability to adjust one's language according to discourse context is important for success in academic settings. This study examined whether second graders vary in linguistic and discourse features depending on discourse contexts, that is, when describing pictures in contextualized (describing the picture to an examiner while…

The present study aims to explore the effects of corpus-based teaching on English language learners' pragmatic comprehension and production of 19 formulaic sequences (FS), categorized under agreements, disagreements, self-clarifications and other-clarifications. The study had a quasi-experimental research design with a pre-test, immediate…

We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

This project analyzes teacher behavior using a corpus of 110 hours of recorded instruction in order to document the realities of second-language pronunciation instruction. Teachers of six intact classes were recorded during a seven-week oral communication course. Four classes implemented a focus on pronunciation that was integrated into the…

This study investigates prosodic modulation in the spontaneous canonical babble of congenitally deaf infants with cochlear implants (CI) and normally hearing (NH) infants. Research has shown that the acoustic cues to prominence are less modulated in CI babble. However acoustic measurements of individual cues to prominence give incomplete…

In light of the impact of professional and personal skills of teachers on their students, the purpose of this paper was to delimit the efficiency of corpus on pre-service teachers' self-directed learning and oral proficiency. It was anticipated that pre-service teachers receiving training on corpus would reveal greater gains in self-directed…

Hardly any work has been done on the features of Philippine English in the clausal level from spoken discourses from a professional group. This paper compares the cases of inverted subject-auxiliary in embedded questions of the same group of professionals between 1999 and the years of 2016-2019, thus spanning almost 20 years. A total of 167 hits…

Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPIs) are widely used to measure speaking ability in a second or foreign language. The Michigan English Language Assessment Battery (MELAB) Speaking Test is an OPI used for academic and professional purposes around the world. However, little research on this or other OPIs has quantitatively compared test takers' speech…

Previously published corpora of two-word utterances by three chimpanzees and three human children were compared to determine whether, as has been claimed, apes possess the same basic syntactic and semantic capacities as 2-year old children. Some similarities were observed in the type of semantic relations expressed by the two groups; however,…