Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

This dissertation explores the role of memory in language processing, and specifically how interference during lexical encoding can result in downstream interference during retrieval. The dissertation merges insights from both the sentence processing literature as well as the study of memory in non-sentential contexts and focuses on two factors…

This study investigated the feasibility of a vocabulary-based teacher intervention to increase preschool teachers' production of complement clauses (e.g. "I wonder if we can put the monkey in the tree") in teacher-children play interactions. Using a multiple baseline across participants design we measured the impact of an intervention…

Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact…

Technological advances have made the ability to translate no longer exclusively belong to humans. Today, machine translation has turned into a tool with superior performance to convert text between languages without the need for human intervention. One of the translation research foci is the studies of causative translation, especially from…

Within the framework of the systematic functional grammar (SFG), Matthiessen (2004) has provided an analysis of the word/element order according to which word/element order in a clause is decided by experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. In this study which has been conducted aiming at the description and analysis of the…

The design brief informs particularly the first phases of the design process; however, there are very limited studies on its role and functions. The current study proposes a framework that relates problem statement types in a design brief to creative outcomes by promoting the priming effect, which is a cognitive phenomenon describing the ways…

This systematic review reports on research investigating the impact of multi-word unit (MWU) input on young learners' second language (L2) attainment in instructed settings. Recent findings suggest that L2 learners can generalise from MWU input, abstract patterns and employ such schemata productively via slot-filling, indicating that MWUs are key…

Phraseology has been flourishing in the field of English writing studies in recent years. However, the focus has primarily been on items with less variability, such as ngrams or lexical bundles. To address this gap, this study investigates concgrams (Cheng et al., 2006), which encompass both constituency and positional variations, in advanced…

Although a growing body of research has sought to understand the relationship between word order and information structure, previous information structure (IS) analyses of verb-subject order have produced conflicting results for Medieval French, which have subsequently led to conflicting claims about the importance of IS to its word order as well…

This meta-analysis synthesized 35 English studies (130 effect sizes, N = 1,981) that employed online tasks to investigate the processing of multiword sequences (MWSs). We examined (a) to what extent MWSs enjoy a processing advantage over novel word combinations; (b) how such a processing advantage is moderated by statistical regularities (i.e.,…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2024) upgrades ED628218 (ERIC) with labels and analysis and brings the work up to date to reflect language change at the speed of the internet, ChatGPT, social discord, and bloody wars. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday…

Children often interpret first noun phrases (NP1s) as agents, which improves comprehension of actives but hinders passives. While children sometimes withhold the agent-first bias, the reasons remain unclear. The current study tests the hypothesis that children default to the agent-first bias as a "best guess" of role assignment when they…

Although syntactic priming has been well studied and is commonly assumed to involve implicit learning, the mechanisms behind this phenomenon are still under debate. Recent studies have suggested that exposure to nonlinguistic statistical patterns may influence language users' relative clause attachment biases, but whether the priming effect comes…

Purpose: Extemporaneous speech tasks provide an ecologically valid sample to examine speech acoustics, but differing methodologies exist in the literature for segmentation. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the utility and reliability of a segmentation approach for extemporaneous speech specified by systemic functional…