Describes an experimental attempt to verify meaning hypotheses for four Dutch single-accent pitch patterns as postulated in the linguistic literature. Results show a distinct effect of orientation on appropriateness of two of the investigated pitch accent types; the other two pitch accent types are associated with predicted context types well…

Discusses some of the distinctive features of topic termination/transition sequences in conversation with which figurative closings are associated, focusing on how they reflect the participants' orientation to their moving to new topics. Interactional use of figurative expressions is considered in contexts where their use fails to secure topical…

Details BootLex, a model using distributional cues to build a lexicon and achieving significant segmentation results with English, Japanese, and Spanish; child- and adult-directed speech, and written text; and variations in coding structure. Compares BootLex with three groups of computational models of the infant segmentation process. Discusses…

This paper explores patterns of language that construct causal reasoning in history textbooks used in the U.S. Two representative passages are analyzed to show how causality can be realized both explicitly and implicitly, and how the resources of the language contribute to highlighting some causal factors and downplaying others, particularly…

Phonological representation for adult speakers is generally assumed to include sub-lexical information at the level of the phoneme. Some have suggested, however, that young children operate with more holistic lexical representations. If young children use whole-word representation and adults employ phonemic representation, then a component of…

Our study explores the similarities and differences between a discourse completion task (DCT) and corpus data and discusses potential implications for using the two in a pedagogic context. The DCT has traditionally been used as an instrument for the study of interlanguage pragmatics while both spoken and written corpora have mainly been used to…

This paper presents a four-subject study that examines the relative influence of syllable position and stress, together with vowel context on the colouring of the dark-l characteristic of speakers of General American English. Most investigators report lighter /l/ tokens in syllable onsets and darker tokens in coda positions. The present study…

The current study investigates the learning of nonnative suprasegmental patterns for word identification. Native English-speaking adults learned to use suprasegmentals (pitch patterns) to identify a vocabulary of six English pseudosyllables superimposed with three pitch patterns (18 words). Successful learning of the vocabulary necessarily…

It is cross-linguistically common for languages to undergo a diachronic increase in the range of adverbial notions that can be expressed by means of infinitival constructions, and the Romance languages are a good example of this process. Examining the development of adverbial "prepositional infinitive" constructions in Spanish, Portuguese and…

This article describes a qualitative research project that examined pen pal letters exchanged between children in Virginia, USA, and Malawi in Sub-Saharan Africa. The goal was to study the nature of communication between students living in these two very different cultural contexts. The results of this study indicated that there were three primary…

This article describes the language patterns of eight preschool students in a computer environment. Videotaped interactions at the computer center were analyzed to examine the nature of the verbal interaction that took place among peers. Using Halliday's functional framework, the authors found that regulatory was the most popular language pattern,…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this…

This paper describes the first prototype of an automated tool for detecting collocation errors in texts written by non-native speakers of English. Candidate strings are extracted by pattern matching over POS-tagged text. Since learner texts often contain spelling and morphological errors, the tool attempts to automatically correct them in order to…

This article describes two complementary research projects into lexical patterning and frequency in general and academic English. The research suggests that treating current popularly used wordlists such as the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL) as distinct constructs is of questionable merit. Rather, there are strong…