This study examined the direct and indirect effects of foundational language (vocabulary and syntactic knowledge) and literacy (orthographic knowledge) skills, transcription (spelling and handwriting fluency), and higher-order cognitive skills (comprehension monitoring and inferencing making) on writing among Chinese children. Participants were…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

This study is intended to help English foreign language learners avoid a type of syntactic ambiguity in sentences resulting from prepositional phrases (PPs). The students are guided to make use of the features of both adverbials and adjectivals in resolving this type of ambiguity. The movability of adverbials and the use of relative clauses…

A previous study has shown that children use recent input to adapt their syntactic predictions and use these adapted predictions to infer the meaning of novel words. In the current study, we investigated whether children could use this mechanism to disambiguate words whose interpretation as a noun or a verb is ambiguous. We tested 2- to 4-year-old…

Assessment is a useful process as it provides various stakeholders (e.g., teachers, parents, government, employers) with information about students' competence in a particular subject area. However, for the information generated by assessment to be useful, it needs to support valid inferences. One factor that can undermine the validity of…

Listening has been widely characterised as a multifaceted process encompassing a range of linguistic and psycholinguistic components (see Rubin, 1994). However, for learners at different levels of L2 proficiency, there is uncertainty over the relative importance of the various sub-skills. To address this issue, a number of linguistic and…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…

This research is a multi-aspect exploratory investigation of Russian English institutional written discourse and highlights its features demonstrated by Russian native learners, tertiary students of English for the tourism and hospitality industry. The author approaches the theme from the perspectives of World Englishes and the pedagogical agenda.…

Prosodic boundaries can be used to guide syntactic parsing in both spoken and written sentence comprehension, but it is unknown whether the processing of prosodic boundaries affects the processing of upcoming lexical information. In 3 eye-tracking experiments, participants read silently sentences that allow for 2 possible syntactic interpretations…

Purpose: Inference-making skills are necessary for reading comprehension. Training in riddle appreciation is an effective way to improve reading comprehension among English-speaking children. However, it is not clear whether these methods generalize to other writing systems. The goal of the present study was to investigate the relationship between…

This study aims to investigate the techniques of teaching new lexis which are adopted by non-native teachers of English language. It also aims to investigate the strategies of learning new lexis which are adopted by learners in relation to their level. The work is based on two hypotheses: It is hypothesized that there is a relationship between the…