The current study examined preschool children's ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, "every" and "no." When "no" precedes "every," the entailment pattern typically licensed by "every" changes, but only if "no"…

The environmental context of verbs addressed by adults to young children is claimed to be uninformative regarding the verbs' meaning, yielding the Syntactic Bootstrapping Hypothesis that, for verb learning, full sentences are needed to demonstrate the semantic arguments of verbs. However, reanalysis of Gleitman's (1990) original data regarding…

Successful anaphor comprehension in reading is related to the explicitness of the antecedent--anaphor relation. It mirrors one of the purposes of textual enhancement (TE), which is that it raises learners' awareness of linguistic forms by enhancing the salience of input. Therefore, learners notice the enhanced form and discover the rule or…

The public's concern with the fate of the standard language has been well documented in the history of the complaint tradition. The print media have for centuries featured letters to the editor on questions of language use. This study examines a corpus of 258 language-related letters to the editor published in the English-speaking print media. By…

This study investigates the relationship between three linguistic functions: thetics, miratives and exclamatives. Thetics are an information structure configuration that conveys that the information is new to the addressee. The thetic subtypes selected for this study are the following: existentials (e.g. "There are apples in the…

In this paper, we applied the crowdsourcing approach to develop an automated popularity summary scoring, called wild summaries. In contrast, the golden standard summaries generated by one or more experts are called expert summaries. The innovation of our study is to compute LSA (Latent Semantic Analysis) similarities between target summary and…

We investigated whether cross-language activation is sensitive to shifting language demands and language experience during first and second language (i.e., L1, L2) reading. Experiment 1 consisted of L1 French-L2 English bilinguals reading in the L2, and Experiment 2 consisted of L1 English-L2 French bilinguals reading in the L1. Both groups read…

This study set out to compare patterns of relationships among phonological skills, orthographic skills, semantic knowledge, listening comprehension, and reading comprehension in English as a first language (EL1) and English language learners (ELL) students and to test the applicability of the lexical quality hypothesis framework. Participants…

This paper describes HASbot, an automated text scoring and real-time feedback system designed to support student revision of scientific arguments. Students submit open-ended text responses to explain how their data support claims and how the limitations of their data affect the uncertainty of their explanations. HASbot automatically scores these…

The article discusses the link between a curriculum based on academic subjects derived from disciplinary knowledge and a progressive pedagogy that endeavours to engage students from all backgrounds with it. Section 1 describes the realist theory of knowledge which justifies the argument for this accommodation between curriculum and pedagogy.…

Native-English speaking adults use morphological decomposition to understand complex words (e.g. "farmer" becomes "farm-er"). Whether decomposition is driven by semantic organization is still unclear. It is also unclear whether ESL adults and elementary age children use the same word processing strategies as native speaking…

Because many words of a language have more than one meaning, readers regularly need to disambiguate words during sentence comprehension. Using priming, eye-tracking, and event-related brain potentials, this thesis tested whether readers differently disambiguate words with semantically related meanings like "wire" and "cone,"…

Purpose: This investigation was designed to examine the generalization effects of semantic treatment for word retrieval deficits in people with aphasia. Semantic feature analysis (SFA; Boyle & Coelho, 1995), typicality treatment (Kiran & Thompson, 2003), and mediating strategy training were combined to maximize potential generalization effects.…

Why do we lose, or have trouble accessing, an idea that was in the focus of attention only a moment ago, especially in the absence of any apparent distraction? We tested the hypothesis that accessing a single item that is already active is affected by implicit interference (interference of which we have little or no awareness). We presented masked…

Kousta, Vigliocco, Del Campo, Vinson, and Andrews (2011) questioned the adequacy of dual coding theory and the context availability model as explanations of representational and processing differences between concrete and abstract words. They proposed an alternative approach that focuses on the role of emotional content in the processing of…