Aspect markers (AMs), temporal adverbs (TAs) and temporal nouns (TNs) are used by young Mandarin-speaking children to express time. However, the factors that affect the relative acquisition trajectories of these categories remains unclear. Accordingly, this study adopts Weist's time-concept model to examine the patterns of acquisition between and…

Iconicity is a relationship of resemblance between the form and meaning of a sign. Compelling evidence from diverse areas of the cognitive sciences suggests that iconicity plays a pivotal role in the processing, memory, learning, and evolution of both spoken and signed language, indicating that iconicity is a general property of language. However,…

Most of the previous studies focused on lexical and syntactic features in adapted texts while little attention has been paid to the structural complexity from the perspective of the amount of information. In this study, we intend to examine the differences in structural complexity in adapted texts from the perspective of the amount of information…

The manner in which educators use commands, a form of language that serves to guide and regulate behaviour, constitutes an essential component of children's learning experiences in relation to language and social interactions. This study investigated nine Chinese and nine Japanese educators' use of commanding language in educator-child free play…

We investigate German-Russian bilingual children's sensitivity to formal and semantic cues when assigning gender to nouns in German. Across languages, young children have been shown to primarily rely on phonological cues, whereas sensitivity to semantic and syntactic cues increases with age. With its semi-transparent gender assignment system,…

Research on the second language (L2) acquisition of the Spanish copulas has been central to our understanding of key concepts and issues in the field of SLA such as stages of development and variability in L2s. However, this research has focused nearly exclusively on native English-speaking learners. The present study examined native…

Using eye-tracking, we examined whether overspecification hinders or facilitates referent selection and the extent to which this depends on the properties of the attribute mentioned in the referring expressions and the underpinning processing mode. Following spoken instructions, participants selected the referent in a visual display while their…

Previous research on the effects of word-level factors on lexical acquisition has shown that frequency and concreteness are most important. Here, we investigate CDI data from 1,030 Dutch children, collected with the short form of the Dutch CDI, to address (i) how word-level factors predict lexical acquisition, once child-level factors are…

Despite having different semantic profiles, near synonyms are usually presented in dictionaries as being contextually interchangeable, which may lead EFL learners to assume their contextual interchangeability. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on how near synonyms are similar or different in their semantic and grammatical preferences.…

People frequently struggle with comprehending the text they read and require more intensive support to develop proficiency in reading comprehension. Some find it perplexing observing all the elements and constituents of the paragraph theory. Good readers, however, can understand what a paragraph is by studying the conjunction relationships between…

What is the processing cost of being garden-pathed by a temporary syntactic ambiguity? We argue that comparing average reading times in garden-path versus non-garden-path sentences is not enough to answer this question. Trial-level contaminants such as inattention, the fact that garden pathing may occur non-deterministically in the ambiguous…

While much effort has been devoted to the analysis of moves and hedging devices in research articles and graduate-level dissertation abstracts, little work has been done on the research paper abstracts of Thai EFL English-majored undergraduates. This research aimed to analyze the move structure and use of hedges in each of the identified moves in…

The term "Latinx" has sparked considerable debate in recent years. This article examines the adoption of the letter "x" in "Latinx" and the language debates this has created. It delves into how this gender-neutral term intersects with and informs our understanding of nonbinary and transgender identities. The…

Phrasal verbs present persistent challenges for second language (L2) learners due to their figurative meanings, multiple interpretations, and variable word order. This article reviews five strands of research that contribute to effective phrasal verb instruction: corpus-based studies, which identify what to teach, and four instructional…

Purpose: This study aims to investigate the learning potential of French-speaking children, either with typical development (TD) or with developmental language disorder (DLD), when learning an invented inflectional morphological rule. We tested the children's performance in learning pseudomorphemes of gender and number with dynamic assessment…