This study aims to investigate the perception of phonological, grammatical, and semantic structures by 8 children (age range: 8;2-9;5) with developmental language disorders (DLD). Another 8 age-matched (age range: 8;4-10;0) typically developing (TD) children served as controls. The results demonstrated that children with DLD had lower performance…

This dissertation delves into second language acquisition, sociophonetic variation, and speech perception, investigating how prior linguistic experiences and exposure to regional variations in a second language influence the decoding of dialectal linguistic cues. It aims to enhance the understanding of words pronounced with different phones and…

Research has shown that food metaphors play an important role in humans' conceptualization of various domains of experience. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the phraseology of food metaphors. This research aims to investigate food metaphors and their phraseology. Particularly, this paper focuses on the lemmas "consume"…

This research explored the mental representation of media and digital literacy (MDL) in 242 Mexican high school students through a definitional task based on the natural semantic networks technique. The participants defined ten target concepts related to MDL, using verbs, nouns, and adjectives as definers, and then they rated each definer with a…

In recent years, knowledge tracing (KT) within intelligent tutoring systems (ITSs) has seen rapid development. KT aims to assess a student's knowledge state based on past performance and predict the correctness of the next question. Traditional KT often treats questions with different difficulty levels of the same concept as identical…

This paper discusses the application of Karl Maton's notion of 'semantic waves' to the teaching of geography at the post-16 phase (A-level) in England. Drawing on evidence generated through a 2-year close-to-practice case study, it illustrates its potential as a scaffold in two ways. Firstly, one that can help teachers face both ways: Towards…

Five-to-six-year-olds' abilities to detect and solve ambiguities in spoken language have been found to be a predictor of their later reading abilities in first-to-third grade. However, the origins of this relationship remain unclear. Success in ambiguity detection may be reflective of overall language attainment, which varies with socioeconomic…

This chapter examines the lexical availability of students of Spanish as a foreign language (SFL) and observes how their semantic networks change as their proficiency in Spanish increases. The analysis focuses on 150 students with different levels of proficiency and the two centres of interest: "acciones y actividades habituales"…

Extensive research has shown that children's early words are learned through sensorimotor experience. Thus, early-acquired words tend to have more concrete meanings. Abstract word meanings tend to be learned later but less is known about their acquisition. We collected meaning-specific concreteness ratings and examined their relationship with…

Previous studies showed that word learning is affected by children's existing knowledge. For instance, knowledge of semantic category aids word learning, whereas a dense phonological neighbourhood impedes learning of similar-sounding words. Here, we examined to what extent children associate similar-sounding words (e.g., rat and cat) with objects…

Purpose: This study examined learning via perception, learning via production, and semantic depth as contributors to word learning in preschool-aged children. There is broad evidence that semantic depth is an important contributor to word learning, especially when semantic cues are repeated and spaced out over time. Perceptual learning and…

Conventional metaphors are a fundamental component of everyday communication, yet they are often overlooked in post-secondary German-language programs. This study examines the extent to which vocabulary breadth influences 19 L2 German learners' comprehension of conventional German metaphors, particularly those that exhibit cross-linguistic…

Reading morphologically complex words requires analysis of their morphemic subunits (e.g., play + er); however, the positional constraints of morphemic processing are still little understood. The current study involved three unprimed lexical decision experiments to directly compare the positional encoding of stems and affixes during reading and to…

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems…

Filler-gap dependency resolution is often characterized as an active process. We probed the mechanisms that determine where and why comprehenders posit gaps during incremental processing using Norwegian as our test language. First, we investigated why active filler-gap dependency resolution is suspended inside "island" domains like…