Speech disfluencies can guide the ways in which listeners interpret spoken language. Here, we examined whether three-year-olds, five-year-olds, and adults use filled pauses to anticipate that a speaker is likely to refer to a novel object. Across three experiments, participants were presented with pairs of novel and familiar objects and heard a…

The item wording (or keying) effect is respondents' differential response style to positively and negatively worded items. Despite decades of research, the nature of the effect is still unclear. This article proposes a potential reason; namely, that the item wording effect is scale-specific, and thus findings are applicable only to a particular…

This paper argues against the assumption that Spanish--and more generally Romance--imperfective past (IMP) is an intrinsically anaphoric tense. It is a widely accepted view that IMP requires a temporal discourse antecedent to be licensed. My aim is to show that such requirement is not actually in force when IMP combines with a stative/atelic…

We argue that coherence relations (relations between propositions, such as "Concession" or "Purpose") are signalled more frequently and by more means than is generally believed. We examine how coherence relations in text are indicated by all possible textual signals, and whether every relation is signalled. To that end, we…

This article examines the development of education policy in Myanmar/Burma at a period of "critical juncture." There are two major strands to this article, regarding policy process and stakeholder voices that we bring together. We argue that powerful actors such as the government and international agencies frame policy in ways that often…

This article presents a study of prospective teachers' writing about service-learning experiences. Focusing on three teachers' writing about their work with students who are 'at-risk' of school failure, this article outlines how Bakhtin's theory of dialogism assists in understanding the responsive quality of writing. Specifically, the article…

Language activism has been at the core of language education policy since its emergence as a scholarly field in the 1960s under the leadership of Joshua Fishman. In this article, we seek to build on this tradition to envision a new approach to language activism for the twenty-first century. In particular, we advocate a materialist anti-racist…

In foreign language teaching, the transmission of the culture within which the target language grows is as important as teaching new words and grammar. All elements of the culture have their own special places within the vocabulary of the language. Reflecting not only the linguistic structure but also the culture of the society to which they…

Empirical evidence has recently been provided for the distinctiveness of emotion words as compared to abstract and concrete words for monolinguals, calling for a reconsideration of the relation between emotion and language. The present study investigates whether the distinctiveness of emotion words among monolinguals holds for foreign language…

This study investigates how L1 and L2 users of Mandarin perceive a rare construction in Mandarin that involves interpreting an NP in the object position as a location argument or instrument argument instead of as a theme/patient argument. For example, "kai zuoshou" (literally "drive left-hand") has been used to mean "use…

This piece explores how moving from grammar instruction to language study empowers students and their writing. To shift perspective and re-envision how language discussion can begin in the classroom, suggestions are offered with power dynamics and contextual needs of real communication situations. The authors detail activities that draw on…

This essay, a speculative work, suggests that educational encounters of critical theory and pedagogy are today too often hampered by an emerging form of schooled reproduction in which university learners perform critical stances in order to garner recognition rather than for reasons of intellectual or political commitment. It suggests that the…

Most models of lexical access assume that bilingual speakers activate their two languages even when they are in a context in which only one language is used. A critical piece of evidence used to support this notion is the observation that a given word automatically activates its translation equivalent in the other language. Here, we argue that…

This paper reviews Deleuze's theory of language in "Logic of Sense," and Deleuze and Guattari's theory of language in "A Thousand Plateaus." In the ontology informed by the Stoics described in those books, human being and language do not exist separately but in a mixture of words and things. The author argues that this…

When applied to education, Heidegger's analysis of Da-sein suggests that in his ontology the epistemological problem of clarifying cognition is replaced by the existential problem of the cognition of the understanding individual. Thus, Heidegger treats "education" ontologically as the ability to achieve Da-sein as one's own true and…