This dissertation examines the associations between pragmatic meaning categories in English and specific realizations of prosodic prominence. It has been well-established that in Mainstream American English (MAE), prominence is often used to convey contrast. A more limited set of studies suggests that prosodic prominence may also be capable of…

Character strengths are a protective factor against psychological symptoms. However, there is a lack of research that has investigated the psychometric properties of abbreviated character strengths scales. The purpose of this study was to adapt and validate the Character Strengths Semantic Differential Scale (CS-SDS) with a sample of 235 college…

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ("Interface Hypothesis", Sorace and Filiaci in "Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian." "Second Lang…

This dissertation presents various machine learning applications for predicting different cognitive states of students while they are using a vocabulary tutoring system, DSCoVAR. We conduct four studies, each of which includes a comprehensive analysis of behavioral and linguistic data and provides data-driven evidence for designing personalized…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

This study investigates the role of components of intercultural competence in the use of intercultural mediation behaviors. Through the use of the Revised Intercultural Mediation Measure, an instrument revised by the authors, 291 Anglophone and 161 Francophone participants in Canada were asked to indicate their likelihood of employing various…

This paper discusses on the mapping of the English preposition "at" in the context of forward and backward translation in temporal domain based on the temporal sense of "at" of the English preposition and its extension to different lexical positions in the Arabic language. This can be explained in the way the conceptual mapping…

A study showing that lexically equivalent words in two languages have different affective meanings, that affective intensity of dominant language words is greater than for second language equivalents, and that the difference is greatest for words with high affective meaning demonstrates that affective meaning is an important component of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the attitudes of monolingual English, bilingual Cantonese-English, and bilingual Russian-English speakers toward individuals with voice disorders. METHOD: In a mixed experimental design, a total of 30 older and 29 younger female listeners from the 3 language groups rated the voices of 10 females,…

In connection with the hypotheses of Whorf and Sapir, this article describes a test using Osgood's semantic differential technique on subjects who were monolingual speakers of English or French. The control group consisted of multilinguals. It is concluded that the experiement supports Whorf's hypothesis. (IFS/WGA)