Three experiments tested theories of syntactic representation by assessing "stem-exchange" errors ("hates the record"[right arrow]"records the hate"). Previous research has shown that in stem exchanges, speakers pronounce intended nouns ("REcord") as verbs ("reCORD"), yielding syntactically well-formed utterances. By "lexically based" theories,…

Perception and action are influenced by the "possibilities for action" in the environment. Neuropsychological studies (e.g., Riddoch, Humphreys, Edwards, Baker, & Willson, 2003) have demonstrated that objects that are perceived to be interacting (e.g., a corkscrew going toward the top of a wine bottle) are perceptually integrated…

In the current study, idiom understanding was analyzed in relation to the ability to process the linguistic context in which the idiom is embedded with the hypothesis that there is a strong relationship between text and idiom comprehension. This hypothesis was derived from the global elaboration model. Nonfamiliar idioms, both transparent and…

Rodent studies have suggested that "pattern separation," the ability to distinguish among similar experiences, is diminished in a subset of aged rats. We extended these findings to the human using a task designed to assess spatial pattern separation behavior (determining at time of test whether pairs of pictures shown during the study were in the…

This article examines the acquisition of Spanish idioms in a classroom setting that was supplemented with explicit instruction over a 10-week period. The research design manipulated two variables: prior lexical knowledge and idiom organization. Sixty-five second language (L2) learners completed pre- and posttests that measured their ability to…

This study investigates the frequency and functions of "just" in British academic spoken English. It adopts the meanings of "just" established by Lindemann and Mauranen, 2001, taken from the occurrences of "just" across five speech events in the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) to see if they also apply to occurrences of "just"…

This study uses the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan's (1999) and Gardner and Davies' (2007) informative studies as a starting point and reference. The study offers a cross-English variety and cross-register examination of the use of English phrasal…

The study examined children's use of verbal -s marking (e.g., he "walks") in two nonmainstream dialects of English, African American English (AAE), and Southern White English (SWE). Verbal -s marking was of interest because there are gaps in the literature about the nature of this structure within and across typically developing children…

This paper documents the acoustic reflexes of ATR harmony in Kinande followed by an analysis of the dominance reversal found in class 5 nominals. The principal findings are that the ATR harmony is reliably reflected in a lowering of the first formant. Depending on the vowel, ATR harmony also affects the second formant. The directional asymmetry…

A number of recent studies have argued that grammatical illusions can arise in the process of completing linguistic dependencies, such that unlicensed material is temporarily treated as licensed due to the presence of a potential licensor that is semantically appropriate but in a syntactically inappropriate position. A frequently studied case…

This paper examines whether and to what extent data-driven learning (DDL) activities can improve the lexico-grammatical use of abstract nouns in L2 writing. A topic-based corpus was compiled to develop concordance learning activities, and 40 Chinese students majoring in English were randomly assigned to a control group or an experimental group. At…

The present paper shows the first results of a linguistic project devoted to the construction of web learning tools for reinforcing sensitivity to diaphasic varieties and for learning style variation in L2/LS learning. (Contains 1 figure and 1 footnote.) [Support for this research was provided by the VALERE Project.]

Idioms is a special culture which is shaped in the daily lives of the local people, particularly the idioms of diet has a close relation with various elements, such as the eating custom, history, fairy tales, geographic situations. Also, different ways of translation on different diet idioms in English and Chinese will be analyzed in this article.…

Search engines have been a major factor in making the web the successful and widely used information source it is today. Generally speaking, they make it possible to retrieve web pages on a topic specified by the keywords entered by the user. Yet web searching currently does not take into account which of the search results are comprehensible for…

This study explored how four groups of English learners used a mobile software application developed by the researcher for learning idiomatic expressions and collocations. A total of 45 learners in the study used the application for a period of one week. Data for this study was collected from a questionnaire, the application, and follow-up…