In this commentary, I discuss why, despite the existence of gradience in phonetics and phonology, there is still a need for abstract representations. Most proponents of exemplar models assume multiple levels of abstraction, allowing for an integration of the gradient and the categorical. Ben Ambridge's dismissal of generative models such as…

Pragmatics, the social language skills human beings use through everyday social interaction, is a critical and complicated segment of learning a new language. Thus, it is essential to teach pragmatics in English as a Second Language (ESL) classrooms and ESL teachers have pragmatic knowledge. This qualitative case study was designed to investigate…

There are several theories which tackle predicting the source of third language (L3) crosslinguistic influence. The two orthogonal questions that arise are which language is most likely to influence the L3 and whether the influence will be wholesale or piecemeal (property-by-property). To my mind, Westergaard's Linguistic Proximity Model (LPM) is…

Interface Delay is a theory of syntactic development, which attempts to explain an array of constructions that are slow to develop, which are characterized by being sensitive to discourse-pragmatic considerations of the type associated with the natural semantic class of definites. The theory claims that neither syntax itself, nor the…

The concept of bias is familiar to linguists primarily from the literature on questions. Following the work of Giannakidou and Mari (Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought: Modality, Mood, and Propositional Attitudes, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2021), we assume "nonveridical equilibrium" (implying that p and ¬p as equal…

According to the Presupposition-Denial Account, complement set reference arises when focus is on the "shortfall" between the amount conveyed by a natural language quantifier and a larger, expected amount. Negative quantifiers imply a shortfall, through the denial of a presupposition, whereas positive quantifiers do not. An exception may…

Speech is extremely variable along many different dimensions. One source of variability listeners often encounter is accented speech, in which phonological units can systematically differ from the listener's native categories. This dissertation presents five experiments testing how listeners adapt to accent-based phonological variability,…

Since its first adoption as a computational model for language learning, evidence has accumulated that Rescorla-Wagner error-correction learning (Rescorla & Wagner, 1972) captures several aspects of language processing. Whereas previous studies have provided general support for the Rescorla-Wagner rule by using it to explain the behavior of…

This study explores the bases of achievement invoked by teachers when assessing students' work in the context of a bilingual education program where academic subjects are taught through English as a foreign language. During a professional development seminar, teachers judged samples of students' writing in response to tasks that elicited the three…

We test children's distributive and collective sentence interpretations and the variables that predict them. In our first experiment, we establish that adult English collective sentences with "the" or "some" in the subject are categorically collective in their interpretations. We further demonstrate that children's collective…

In this article Renata Love Jones and Patrick Proctor introduce the notion of pursuing language to engage in critical dialogue about the nature and focus of language and literacy education in multilingual and multicultural contexts. A persistent threat in language and literacy education is standardization that constrains how language and literacy…

This paper addresses the irruptive potentiality of language in rethinking pivotal concepts in pre-service and in-service teacher education. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's reconceptualization of language, we undertake a radical undoing of dominant concepts of pedagogy, curriculum, and assessment as 'order-words' that variously segment, delimit,…

The current study tests the hypothesis that language comprehension is, in part, influenced by language exposure, and the biases that people develop are related to the frequency of exposure to different linguistic input, like, for instance, pronoun coreference. As comprehenders filter the linguistic input they encounter, we ask, what is the impact…

The world of Carroll's Wonderland narratives, in which language tests its own limits, overlaps with Wittgenstein's world of counterexample, and such convergence becomes most overt in Wittgenstein's example of a nonsensical scale in his "Philosophical Investigations" (§142). Wittgenstein does not find much use for such a scale, but in…

The present study investigated the second language processing of grammatical mood in Spanish. Eye-movement data from a group of advanced proficiency second language users revealed nativelike processing with irregular verb stimuli but not with regular verb stimuli. A comparison group of native speakers showed the expected effect with both types of…