The lexical mapping of abstract functional words like modal verbs is an open problem in acquisition (e.g., Gleitman et al. 2005). In diachronic linguistics it has been proposed that learner mapping errors are responsible for innovations in the historical record (see Kiparsky 1974; Roberts & Roussou 2003, among others). This suggests that child…

An implicit word learning paradigm was designed to test the hypothesis that children who came to the task of L2 vocabulary acquisition with poorer L1 phonological awareness (PA) are less capable of extracting phonological patterns from L2 and thus have difficulties capitalizing on this knowledge to support L2 vocabulary learning. A group of…

Based on the principles of critical discourse analysis this contrastive study sought to investigate the effect of culture on the journalistic style and the strategies used to report news in the American and Persian newspaper editorials. To this end, articles were selected from the New York Times, the Washington Post, Kayhan and Ettelaat, taking…

English language has become unavoidable being a global language in the present era. Whether it is a field of business, technology or education, its significance can't be denied. Thus, majority of the world is learning and speaking English owing to its dire need. Unfortunately, despite staining through different reforms, the orthography of English…

By taking Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) as research approach, this study analyzes and discusses two news reports related to the event that a Uyghur man was sentenced to death by the Intermediate People's Court in Xinjiang, a western province of China. Both news reports on that event are taken respectively from two newspapers published in…

After a very broad description of what language policy and planning is about this paper presents an overview of some of the current preoccupations of researchers focusing on language policy and planning as one of the blooming fields of applied linguistics. The current issues in language policy and planning research that are dealt with include…

In a large scale study on 843 transcripts of Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) talks, the authors address the relation between word usage and categorical affective ratings of lectures by a large group of internet users. Users rated the lectures by assigning one or more predefined tags which relate to the affective state evoked in the…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to investigate the influence of phonomotor treatment on the types of errors produced during a confrontation naming task for people with aphasia (PWA). Method: Ten PWA received 60 hr of phonomotor treatment across 6 weeks. Confrontation naming abilities were measured before and after treatment, and responses were…

An ongoing debate on second language (L2) processing revolves around whether or not L2 learners process syntactic information similarly to monolinguals (L1), and what factors lead to a native-like processing. According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a), L2 learners' processing does not include abstract syntactic…

This study examined the nature of bilinguals' conceptual representations and the links from these representations to words in L1 and L2. Specifically, we tested an assumption of the Bilingual Dual Coding Theory that conceptual representations include image representations, and that learning two languages in separate contexts can result in…

Does spatial language influence how people think about space? To address this question, we observed children who did not know a conventional language, and tested their performance on nonlinguistic spatial tasks. We studied deaf children living in Istanbul whose hearing losses prevented them from acquiring speech and whose hearing parents had not…

This study investigates "Prateritumschwund," one of the most salient developments in the Upper German dialect area during the Early Modern period. Drawing on a wide range of text types originating in Nuremberg and its surrounding areas from the 13th to the 17th centuries, this study tests various hypotheses put forward as alleged causes…

Technically Speaking: On the Structure and Experience of Interaction Involving Augmentative Alternative Communications examines the ways that communication is structured and experienced by looking at interactions involving augmented communicators--people with severe speech disabilities who use forms of assistive technology in order to communicate…

The focus of this thesis is the description and analysis of clausal complementation in Sundanese, an Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia. The thesis examined a range of clausal complement types in Sundanese, which consists of (i) "yen/(wi)rehna" "that" complements, (ii) "pikeun" "for" complements,…

This thesis explores how predictions about upcoming language inputs are computed during real-time language comprehension. Previous research has demonstrated humans' ability to use rich contextual information to compute linguistic prediction during real-time language comprehension, and it has been widely assumed that contextual information can…