Current debates about successful mathematics pedagogy suggest that mathematical learning and problem solving can be enhanced by using metaphors as they provide students with a tool for thinking. But assisting pre-service teachers to understand the importance of careful and accurate explanations for mathematical concepts remains an issue. This…

This study investigated the stability of propositional density (PD) in written texts, as this aspect of language shows promise as an indicator and as a predictor of language decline with ageing. This descriptive longitudinal study analysed written texts obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health in which participants were…

With clinical purposes in mind, a review of the proximaldistal opposition is carried out in order to define a universal parameter of variability in semiotic procedures. By taking into consideration different--although notionally inter-related--senses of the proximaldistal opposition, a cluster of semiotic properties is proposed, which initially…

Students seldom think about language unless they are instructed to do so or are made to do so during learning activities. To arouse students' awareness while learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this study formed a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community to engage teachers and students from different domains and…

This research examines advertising discourse in Russian and English as acts of communicative exchange and interpersonal relationship between advertising discourse participants. The purpose was to identify and describe the way that viewers process information contained in television commercials and how they become consumers moving from getting…

The goal of this study was to explore the contribution that a dynamic usage based (DUB) perspective can bring to the establishment of objective measures to assess L2 learners' written texts and at the same time to gain insight into the dynamic process of language development. Four hundred and thirty seven texts written by Dutch learners of English…

Children, like adults, use referring expressions to refer to specific objects, events, or people. Research has provided insights into how children use referring expressions and the appearance of forms developmentally (Radford, 1990; Abu-Akel, et al., 2004; Pine & Lieven, 1997). This study examined how three, four, and five year-old children…

There is mounting evidence that language users are sensitive to distributional information at many grain-sizes. Much of this research has focused on the distributional properties of words, the units they consist of (morphemes, phonemes), and the syntactic structures they appear in (verb-categorization frames, syntactic constructions). In a series…

It is widely recognized that the processor has a key role to play in creating and strengthening the mapping between form and meaning that is integral to language use. Adopting an emergentist approach to heritage language acquisition, the current study considers the extent to which the operation of the processor can contribute to an account of what…

Two of the major claims of the cognitivist approach to metaphor, the paradigm which has emerged as dominant over the last three decades, are (1) that metaphor is a conceptual, rather than strictly linguistic, phenomenon, and (2) that metaphor exemplifies processes which are at work in cognition more generally. This view of metaphor is here placed…

There are several accounts of why some individuals with post-stroke aphasia experience difficulty in producing morphologically complex verbs. Although a majority of these individuals also produce syntactically flawed utterances, at least two accounts focus on word-level encoding operations. One account proposes a difficulty with rule-governed…

This study examined the relation between young English language learners' (ELL) native oral language skills and their language input in transitional bilingual education kindergarten classrooms. Spanish-speaking ELLs' ("n" = 101) Spanish expressive language skills were assessed using the memory for sentences and picture vocabulary…

This qualitative study examined code-switching patterns in the writing-related talk of 6 emergent Spanish-English bilingual first-grade children. Audio recordings, field notes, and writing artifacts documenting participant activities and language use in Spanish and English writing workshops were gathered over the course of 6 months and analyzed…

The languages of the world encode possession in a variety of ways. In Slavic languages, possession on the level of the clause, or predicative possession, is represented by two main encoding strategies. Most Slavic languages, including those in the West and South Slavic sub-groupings, use a "have" verb comparable to English have and German "haben."…

Despite substantial correlational evidence of a relationship between morphological awareness and reading ability, there has been only limited intervention research conducted to document the effects of morphological awareness on various literacy outcomes, particularly reading comprehension, and almost no research comparing the relative…