The two studies reported in the article provide normative measures for 120 novel nominal metaphors, 120 novel similes, 120 literal sentences, and 120 anomalous utterances in Polish (Study 1) and in English (Study 2). The presented set is ideally suited to addressing methodological requirements in research on metaphor processing. The critical…

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British…

Grounded or embodied cognition research has employed body-object interaction (BOI; e.g., Pexman et al., 2019) ratings to investigate sensorimotor effects during language processing. We investigated relationships between BOI ratings and nonarbitrary statistical mappings between words' phonological forms and their syntactic category in English;…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

Tourism has been growing fast as a global industry. Promoting national tourism is therefore an important part of a country's economic plan and can contribute to its economic success. Tourism slogans have always been part of the promotion of national tourism. Almost every country has their own catchy, pungent taglines to attract new tourists. This…

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding…

This study examines how adult second language learners acquire the different meanings of the Spanish preposition "a". Cognitive linguistic models predict that spatial meanings are acquired first, as they are conceptually basic and are the source from which other meanings derive via natural cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and…

Over the past 30-years linguists have been witnessing the birth and evolution of a language, Idioma de Señas de Nicaragua (ISN), in Nicaragua, and have initiated and documented the syntax and grammar of this new language. Research is only beginning to emerge on the implications of ISN on the education of deaf/hard of hearing children in Nicaragua.…

Research suggests that characteristics of EFL input cause morphosyntactic features to be acquired in an order dissimilar to that found in ESL contexts. To determine whether acquisition order for Korean learners could be explained by characteristics of their EFL input, a Korean elementary school curriculum was analyzed. Morphosyntactic features…

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in…

Discusses how current procedures for selecting/constructing equivalent texts may lead to error because of their specific limitations; proposes the utilization of micro-propositional analysis coupled with word-frequency lists and readability formulas for constructing "matching" texts; presents some procedures which researchers working in…

This dictionary, containing 32,000 entries, has been compiled for the general use of the American student of Spanish and the Spanish-speaking student of English, with special reference in either case to New World usage as found in the United States and in Spanish America. Entries were selected according to the relative frequency of their…

A study investigated the relatively greater frequency of negation in conversation than in written language. It discovered that rejections and explicit denials of previously asserted propositions, two categories of negation postulated to be speech-specific, accounted for only about 16 percent of all negatives. Use of negatives as supports, in…

This study hypothesized that recent experience with a set of words is a strong influence on selecting words in an appropriate context where other lexical items are equally available for selection, i.e., recency training should significantly increase the probability of occurrence of words chosen to fill gaps in structured sentences. Two experiments…