The meaning of words can be influenced by their co-occurrences. Semantic prosody (SP) is attitudinal and evaluative meaning inferred from the habitual lexical environment of a word in a corpus. By introducing SP in an English teaching classroom, teachers can reveal more implicit knowledge about language usage and assist students in reaching…

Much progress has been made in the areas of diminishing, avoiding, and resisting plagiarism, due to the recent development of plagiarism tools. Many scholars/authors across the globe have been struggling with plagiarism, giving a number of lectures and writing articles pinpointing strategies that take into account on-line plagiarism services such…

The ability to spell correctly is a fundamental skill for participating in society and engaging in professional work. In the German language, the capitalization of nouns and proper names presents major difficulties for both native and nonnative learners, since the definition of what is a noun varies according to one's linguistic perspective. In…

School and university classrooms remain the standard around the world for second language instruction. However, over the past 20 years various methods of language learning have permeated the educational landscape to include self-study textbooks, language learning software and online teachers. Some models are evidence based while others lack…

When learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence "the boy is glorping the girl," 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a…

San Juan Quiahije Chatino Sign Language (CSL) is a group of six family-based signed language varieties in rural Mexico. This study analyzes the variation of iconic patterns of CSL signs with respect to three semantic categories, tools, food, and animals, using an Embodied Cognitive Phonology framework. Signs are organized around iconic prototypes,…

This article reports on a small, classroom-based study exploring the use of a task to teach the passive in an English for specific purposes context. The participants were 34 adult Japanese male learners, all security professionals, ranging in proficiency level from elementary to advanced. The task was designed to highlight the form--meaning…

This paper investigates the interpretation that Italian-speaking children and adults assign to negative sentences with disjunction and negative sentences with conjunction. The aim of the study was to determine whether children and adults assign the same interpretation to these types of sentences. The Semantic Subset Principle (SSP) (Crain et al.,…

The aim of this study was to examine the internal consistency and factor structure of the Traditional Chinese version of the Impact on Family Scale in order to make cross cultural comparisons. The Traditional Chinese version of the scale was administered to 137 Hong Kong Chinese parents of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders. Two short…

Background: Disruptions of reading processes due to text substitutions can measure how readers use lexical information. Methods: With eye-movement recording, children and adults viewed sentences with either identical, orthographically similar, homophonic or unrelated substitutions of the first characters in target words. To the extent that readers…

This study explored the experiences of communication and collaboration of parents with the teachers of their children with special educational needs (SEN). In this investigation in the Bhutanese context, 26 parents (13 fathers and 13 mothers) of children with SEN, either fully or partially included in 3 schools with SEN programmes in Bhutan…

A reading experiment combining online and offline data evaluates the effect on second language learners' reading behaviors and lexical uptake of three gloss types designed to clarify word meaning. These are (a) textual definition, (b) textual definition accompanied by picture, and (c) picture only. We recorded eye movements while intermediate…

The Spanish mood contrast is a good test case for research on acquiring form-meaning connections in contexts where input is variable and multiple areas of the grammar are implicated (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Nevertheless, research on interpretation of this contrast lags and little is known about how individual lexical items and…

This paper considers the ways in which the words "school" and "education" are conflated in the social imaginary, and what the effects of this conflation in meaning and purpose are both theoretically and in practice. It is not difficult to see the ways in which these two terms are used almost synonymously, and uncritically. Yet…

Children interact with and learn about all types of sound sources, including dogs, bells, trains, and human beings. Although it is clear that knowledge of semantic categories for everyday sights and sounds develops during childhood, there are very few studies examining how children use this knowledge to make sense of auditory scenes. We used a…