Derivational knowledge is associated with writing and speaking skills. These skills are essential for EFL students who express themselves in oral presentations or written assignments. Therefore, diagnostic measurement of productive derivational knowledge is of vital importance, especially in regard to the most frequent 1,000 word families that…

A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as "the" in English, or "los" in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite…

Arkansas schools have received changing and conflicting guidance for accommodating transgender students, and policies and practices within schools can critically impact this population. This mixed-methods, exploratory study investigated what official policies and unofficial but established practices exist in Arkansas high schools regarding…

Discourse markers, as words or phrases, play a significant role in promoting coherent segments of discourse. This paper investigates the use of discourse markers (DMs) in newspaper articles. By applying Fraser's framework, this study aims at investigating the functions and positions of DM "but" (English) and its equivalent…

Understanding language requires the ability to compose the meanings of words into phrase and sentence meanings. Formal theories in semantics have framed the hypothesis that all instances of meaning composition, irrespective of the syntactic and semantic properties of the expressions involved, boil down to a unique formal operation, that is, the…

This study aims at investigating how borrowed nouns from English are inflected for plural and gender in Colloquial Saudi Arabic (CSA). The attempt is also made to account for the possible linguistic factors which may affect this inflection in light of some theories in morphology. The analysis is based on more than 250 loanwords collected from…

Ambiguity in discourse is pervasive, yet mechanisms of production and processing suggest that it tends to be compensated in context. The present study sets out to analyze the combination of discourse markers (such as "but" or "moreover") with other discourse signals (such as semantic relations or punctuation marks) across three…

The aim of this comparative study is to investigate the deployment of interactional metadiscourse features in two different academic genres. For this purpose, a small, specialized corpus of 48 research articles and book reviews from seven different disciplines were collected. The conclusion sections of the texts written by non-native speakers of…

While the bulk of feedback studies have focused on written corrective feedback, oral feedback in teacher-student writing conferences in EFL context has been underexplored. This article investigated teacher oral feedback based on the tenets of sociocultural theory. It examined the impact of teacher-student writing conferences on students' accuracy…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to identify which morphological markers have the best diagnostic accuracy to identify developmental language disorders (DLD) in monolingual Spanish-speaking children. Method: The participants in this study included 50 Spanish-speaking monolingual children with (n = 25) and without (n = 25) DLD. Data…

The representational product of sentence comprehension is the result of the interplay between episodic and semantic memory and our knowledge of the grammatical devices of our language which guide how we retrieve information from these systems. Past participles, being a part of speech derived from verbs but used in a prenominal position (e.g. words…

Children achieve increasingly complex language milestones initially in gesture or in gesture+speech combinations before they do so in speech, from first words to first sentences. In this study, we ask whether gesture continues to be part of the language-learning process as children begin to develop more complex language skills, namely narratives.…

Children use pronouns in their speech from the earliest word combinations. Yet, it is not clear from these early utterances whether they understand that pronouns are used as substitutes for nouns and entities in the discourse. The aim of this study was to examine whether young children understand the anaphoric function of pronouns, focusing on the…

"Sophisticated senator" and "legislative onion." Whether or not you have ever heard of these things, we all have some intuition that one of them makes much less sense than the other. In this paper, we introduce a large dataset of human judgments about novel adjective-noun phrases. We use these data to test an approach to…

Text classification typically performs best with large training sets, but short texts are very common on the World Wide Web. Can we use resampling and data augmentation to construct larger texts using similar terms? Several current methods exist for working with short text that rely on using external data and contexts, or workarounds. Our focus is…