In today's society, we are constantly absorbing information via text (e.g., news, social media), much of which may be affectively charged. However, to date, little is known about how the affective framing of the text itself may give rise to various affective experiences "during" reading. We examined how subtle changes to wording…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

Interaction has received attention in different fields of applied linguistics. In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA), scholars have perceived interaction as a platform where L2 learners can engage in language experimentation. It has been considered in light of Long's (1981) Interaction Hypothesis, which posits that negotiation of…

Reading picture books to pre-literate children is associated with improved language outcomes, but the causal pathways of this relationship are not well understood. The present analyses focus on several syntactic differences between the text of children's picture books and typical child-directed speech, with the aim of understanding ways in which…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

The present article aims to shed light on the relationship between priming and creativity throughout Chinese children's ontogenetic development. It has been suggested that priming in naturalistic interaction occurs not as an exclusively implicit phenomenon. New methodological desiderata beyond traditional acceptability judgments have been…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…

Humor plays an essential role in human interactions. Precisely what makes something funny, however, remains elusive. While research on natural language understanding has made significant advancements in recent years, there has been little direct integration of humor research with computational models of language understanding. In this paper, we…

In embodied theories of semantic representation, the processes and mechanisms of modal simulations that are engaged during semantic processing have tended to be underspecified. We investigated the possibility that motor imagery may be a mechanism of simulation, using an individual differences approach. In this preregistered study, we assessed…

This dissertation investigated the relationship between Linguistic Empathy and Psychological Empathy by implementing a psycholinguistic experiment that measured a person's acceptability ratings of sentences with violations of Linguistic Empathy and correlating them with a measure of the person's Psychological Empathy. Linguistic Empathy…

This study examined dual language learners' (DLLs n = 24) and English-only (EO n = 20) children's expressive and receptive language in kindergarten (M[subscript age] = 5.7 years) as well as the relation to peers' language use. Expressive language skills (vocabulary diversity, syntactic complexity) were measured in the fall, winter, and spring…

This article explores the use of two epistemic adverbs in Argentine Spanish, "quizás" and "capaz". While scholars have noted the existence of "capaz" as an epistemic adverb, it had not been systematically studied prior to this investigation. To examine the epistemic stance of the adverbs, 117 participants completed an…

We examine the stylistic aspects of L2 translations using a set of quantifiable descriptors. The sample includes 40 translations of a promotional text from Czech into English and French produced by novices and professional translators. The general stylistic competence is slightly higher in the group of professionals, although the overall quality…

This article examines the relationship between language curriculum and learners' subjectivity through a poststructuralist perspective. I use performativity theory to highlight the constituting power of language and integrate it with critical race theory to understand the relationships among curriculum, classroom interaction, and subjectivity…