As integrated writing tasks in large-scale and classroom-based writing assessments have risen in popularity, research studies have increasingly concentrated on providing validity evidence. Given the fact that most of these studies focus on adult second language learners rather than younger ones, this study examined the relationship between written…

Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. "eat," "sleep") can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language's rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this…

Virtual reality (VR) has brought about numerous alternative learning opportunities in the last decade, and with modern products such as Oculus Rift and other wearable Virtual Reality technologies being introduced into society, VR will promisingly continue to provide yet unseen opportunities in the next few decades and therefore is a technology…

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese "shì…de" cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity…

This research is the result of 10 weeks of field work in Taiwan during the summer of 1972. It consists of a description, analysis, and comparison of the morphologically marked causative verbs in Rukai, Bunun, Tsou, Anis, Seedig, and Saisiyat. The theoretical framework employed is a type of case grammar referred to as "lexicase," a…

This study focused on examining the overall effect of using email on the improvement of writing performance in aspects of syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy and lexical density, as well as investigating the relation between the number of email exchanges and writing performance. Subjects in this study were 40 non-traditional EFL students…

Reports of recent original research on linguistics by faculty and students of the University of Kansas are presented. Topics include: "Collaboration on Topic Change in Conversation" (Mary Howe); "Stories in Conversation" (Roberta Senner Hofer); "It's Like, 'What's Happening in the Evolution of Like?': A Theory of…

The pragmatic function of conveying given and new information is one of the most important universal communicative functions that language serves. This study investigates how Mandarin-speaking children and adults utilize surface cues of word order, marked grammatical structure, and emphatic stress to determine whether information is given or new…

Taiwanese college students have significant difficulty in reading technical texts in English. Based on information gathered from students in freshman English classes in Taiwan, and on previous research, three significant areas of student confusion are: (1) frequent use of prepositions, particularly when an English preposition with multiple…