Research indicates that the use of metaphors to organize and frame questions concerning the teaching/learning process can be an effective tool. More problematic, however, has been the use of metaphor in framing policy questions, especially those metaphors employed to frame national education reform ideas. This article explores several research…

The role of the anterior temporal lobe (ATL) in semantic memory is now firmly established. There is still controversy, however, regarding the specific role of this region in processing various types of concepts. There have been reports of patients suffering from semantic dementia (SD), a neurodegenerative condition in which the ATL is damaged…

In two studies, we investigated how skilled readers use contextual and morphemic information in the process of incidental vocabulary acquisition during reading. In Experiment 1, we monitored skilled readers' eye movements while they silently read sentence pairs containing novel and known English compound words that were either semantically…

The lexical decision (LD) and naming (NAM) tasks are ubiquitous paradigms that employ printed word identification. They are major tools for investigating how factors like morphology, semantic information, lexical neighborhood and others affect identification. Although use of the tasks is widespread, there has been little research into how…

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech…

While considerable attention has been paid to collocation, and the development of the collocational competence of L2 learners in recent years, very little has been said about a related concept in teaching journals, namely semantic prosody, and L2 learner awareness of this phenomenon. In this paper the concept of semantic prosody is introduced, and…

What are the mechanisms underlying search in social memory (e.g., remembering the people one knows)? Do the search mechanisms involve dynamic local-to-global transitions similar to semantic search, and are these transitions governed by the general control of attention, associated with working memory span? To find out, we asked participants to…

We describe a multiple-route model of reading development in which coarse-grained orthographic processing plays a key role in optimizing access to semantics via whole-word orthographic representations. This forms part of the direct orthographic route that gradually replaces phonological recoding during the initial phases of reading acquisition.…

The aim of this research was to test whether there is an inherent difficulty in understanding prohibition signs rather than obligation signs. In the experiment conducted, participants decided whether simple car movements presented on a computer screen were allowed or not according to either obligation or prohibition traffic signs. The information…

This study investigated the development of second language online auditory processing with ab initio German learners of Dutch. We assessed the influence of different levels of background noise and different levels of semantic and syntactic target word predictability on word-monitoring latencies. There was evidence of syntactic, but not…

This article reports on a study examining the language practice opportunities that occurred during a range of paired and small group interactive tasks in an intensive English as a Second Language (ESL) class of francophone Grade 6 students. The analysis focussed on the opportunities the tasks provided for the use of two complex and challenging…

Second language (L2) learners' awareness of first language-second language (L1-L2) semantic differences plays a critical role in L2 vocabulary learning. This study investigates the long-term development of eight university-level Chinese English as a foreign language learners' cross-linguistic semantic awareness over the course of 10 months. A…

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…

Selecting a good conference location within budget constraints to attract paper authors and participants is a very difficult job for the conference organizers. A conference location is also very important along with other issues such as ranking of the conference. Selecting a bad conference location may reduce the number of paper submissions and…

Translation is the process to transfer written or spoken source language (SL) texts to equivalent written or spoken target language (TL) texts. Translation studies (TS) relies so heavily on a concept of meaning, that one may claim that there is no TS without any reference to meanings. People's understanding of the meaning of sentences is far more…