A substantial quantity of research has explored whether readers' eye movements are sensitive to the distinction between function and content words. No clear answer has emerged, in part due to the difficulty of accounting for differences in length, frequency, and predictability between the words in the two classes. Based on evidence that readers…

This study compared the five-word lexical bundles (LBs) expressing gratitude in acknowledgments of dissertations written by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics. Two corpora were built: (1) The Chinese University Dissertation Acknowledgments Collection (CUC) which contained 700 acknowledgments with a total of 300,686 tokens, and (2)…

The focus of the present study is the use of complex noun groups, in the dissertations written 100 EdD and 100 PhD degrees in educational leadership. Four research questions were investigated: Research Question 1: What, if any, differences exist in the frequency of attributive adjectives that function as noun modifiers in the corpora of PhD and…

This study investigated the processing of the Chinese nongendered third-person singular pronoun, "TA," in a series of self-paced reading experiments. We begin by investigating the perceived appropriateness of TA using a novel implementation of the modified maze task. We then contrasted reading latencies for TA and male- and female-gender…

The definition of function varies from textbook to textbook at the introductory level. Though the definitions are often mathematically equivalent, there are linguistic features that may make some definitions more accessible to beginning learners. In particular, students who see functions as actions or processes rather than objects may be better…

Previous masked translation priming studies, especially those with different-script bilinguals, have shown that cognates provide more priming than noncognates, a difference attributed to cognates' phonological similarity. In our experiments employing a word naming task, we examined this issue for Chinese-Japanese bilinguals in a slightly different…

Using eye-tracking, we examined whether overspecification hinders or facilitates referent selection and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual display while their…

People frequently struggle with comprehending the text they read and require more intensive support to develop proficiency in reading comprehension. Some find it perplexing observing all the elements and constituents of the paragraph theory. Good readers, however, can understand what a paragraph is by studying the conjunction relationships between…

Understanding how people think is a key interest in psychology, and recent advances in automated text analysis have used a verbal analytic thinking index to approximate Kahneman's System 2 (e.g., deliberate, rational thinking). That is, prior work used a style word index to assess university student admissions essays and observed that those who…

Purpose: This study was designed to distinguish the degree of sharing of representations between different modalities by investigating whether a word encountering experience in one modality impacts word processing in another modality. Method: In three experiments, participants experienced some words frequently in the auditory modality (Experiment…

This study aimed to analyze common syntactic errors found in the argumentative essays of third-year English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Vietnam. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to obtain data in this study. The quantitative approach involved counting and calculating the frequency,…

Antilocality effects provide strong evidence for expectation-based sentence parsing models. Previous discussion of the antilocality effect, however, largely focused on the argument-verb dependencies in verb-final constructions, for which a memory retrieval-based account has been argued to be equally adequate. To test whether the principles of…

Background: Medical students may be influenced by perceived program culture and personal fit when applying to residency. Activity: Medical students were given three iterations of a generic residency program description presented with gender-neutral, feminine, or masculine skewed language and were subsequently asked to assess their perception of…

Faculty, students, and staff--as well as institutional structures such as record systems--can provide foundational sources of support and recognition for trans students (Linley et al., 2016; Singh et al., 2014). However, limited research has addressed the perceptions of students about both the practice of sharing names/pronouns and the inclusion…

The study aimed to disentangle the influence of information status and referential form on the distribution of gestures in sustained discourse. Previous research shows that new and less accessible rather than old and more accessible information, expressed by rich rather than lean referential forms, is more likely to be accompanied by gestures.…