Background: Significant progress has been made in the identification of language impairment in children are bilingual. Bilingual children's vocabulary knowledge may be distributed across languages. Thus, when testing bilingual children it is difficult to know how to weigh each language for diagnostic purposes. Even when conceptual scoring is used…

The present study explored the differences among the process times for sentences containing one of the three kinds of linguistic ambiguities namely, lexical, grouping, and functional ambiguities. A reaction time program of a 30- item multiple-choice test of translation was developed. Forty-three Persian undergraduate students took the test. The…

For many students in engineering and engineering technology programs in the US, senior capstone design courses require students to form a team, define a problem, and find a feasible technical solution to address this problem. Students must integrate the knowledge and skills acquired during their studies at the college or university level. These…

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of…

Purpose: The purpose of this study is to determine whether deficits in executive function and lexical-semantic memory compromise the linguistic performance of young adults with specific learning disabilities (LD) enrolled in postsecondary studies. Method: One hundred eighty-five students with LD (n = 53) or normal language development (ND, n =…

This study evaluates the way in which interpreters activate the source language and the target language (TL) when they perform the interpreting task. We focused on syntactic ambiguities. In sentences like "Someone shot the servant of the actress who was on the balcony," two antecedents ("servant" and "actress") are…

Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study's research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected,…

Semantic memory is relatively stable across the lifespan (LaBarge, Edwards, & Knesevich, 1986). However, most research has been conducted at the single concept level (LaBarge et al., 1986, Spaniol et al., 2006). Few researchers have examined how semantic knowledge is used in discourse. The purpose of the study, then, was to determine the…

Sleep fosters the generation of explicit knowledge. Whether sleep also benefits implicit intuitive decisions about underlying patterns is unclear. We examined sleep's role in explicit and intuitive semantic coherence judgments. Participants encoded sets of three words and after a sleep or wake period were required to judge the potential…

Tolerance of ambiguity has been referred to as "the indispensable component of symbolic competence" (Kramsch, 2006, p. 251) and the recommendation was later made for college-level language instructors interested in emphasizing symbolic competence in their classrooms to "bring up every opportunity to show complexity and…

Introduction: We investigated the meaning of sixteen achievement emotion words--anger, anxiety, boredom, contentment, despair, disappointment, frustration, guilt, hope, hopelessness, joy, pride, relief, sadness, shame, and surprise--, specifically in terms of their action tendencies component, through a modified version of the CoreGRID…

The present study is an attempt to investigate the problems resulting from the lexical choice in the translation of the Holy Qur'an to emphasize the importance of the theory of "Frame Semantics" in the translation process. It has been conducted with the aim of measuring the difference in concept between the two languages Arabic and…

Compound surnames in Japanese show complex phonological patterns, which pose challenges to current theories of phonology. This dissertation proposes an account of the segmental and prosodic issues in Japanese surnames and discusses their theoretical implications. Like regular compound words, compound surnames may undergo a sound alternation known…

Researchers have identified sources of individual differences in writing across beginning and developing writers. The aim of the present study was to further clarify the sources of this variability by investigating the extent to which there are differences in genetic and environmental factors underlying the associations between lexical diversity,…

Negative sentences with epistemic modals (e.g., John "might" not come/John "can" not come) contain two logical operators, negation and the modal, which yields a potential semantic ambiguity depending on scope assignment. The two possible readings are in a subset/superset relation, such that the strong reading ("can…