This study investigated comprehension of indirect meaning among learners of L2 Spanish via an original computer-delivered multimedia listening test. The comprehension of implied speaker intention is a type of indirect communication that involves the ability to understand implied intention by using linguistic knowledge, contextual cues, and the…

Writers use intensity markers as one of strategies in order to negotiate their claims and to make their writings persuasive and credible. This study is an attempt to examine the type, frequency, and functions of intensity markers in research articles of two disciplines of Applied Linguistics and Electrical Engineering by analyzing surface…

Russian legal-administrative documents from the early fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth century (Middle Russian) show extensive variation in expressing possessivity within the noun phrase. Possessor expressions can be conveyed by morphologically derived possessive adjectives, adnominal genitives, or by combinations of those constructions…

Given the impossibility of withholding language from children to assess sensitive period effects on syntactic acquisition, the study of second language learning has been seen as an alternate method that can be used to understand the natural time course of language acquisition. In order to do so, both the age at which immersion is begun and the…

Quantity and quality of caregiver input was examined longitudinally in a sample of 50 parent-child dyads to determine which aspects of input contribute most to children's vocabulary skill across early development. Measures of input gleaned from parent-child interactions at child ages 18, 30, and 42 months were examined in relation to children's…

Are there individual differences in children's prediction of upcoming linguistic input and what do these differences reflect? Using a variant of the preferential looking paradigm (Golinkoff, Hirsh-Pasek, Cauley, & Gordon, 1987), we found that, upon hearing a sentence like, "The boy eats a big cake," 2-year-olds fixate edible objects…

This article discusses the acquisition of gender in Russian, focusing on some exceptional subclasses of nouns that display a mismatch between semantics and morphology. Experimental results from twenty-five Russian-speaking monolinguals (age 2 ; 6-4 ; 0) are presented and, within a cue-based approach to language acquisition, we argue that children…

As is the case in traditional second language (L2) acquisition research, a major question in the field of L2 real-time sentence processing is the extent to which L2 learners process the input like native speakers. Where differences are observed, the underlying causes could be the influence of the learner's first language and/or differences…

This study looks at the real and perceived effects of inter-candidate variation in linguistic ability during pair-tested oral examinations in a southern Italian context. Pair testing has not been taken up in schools and universities in southern Italy despite its wide use in international testing systems. Colleagues and prospective candidates often…

The present study aimed at identifying core components of reading instruction in Chinese within the framework of the tiered intervention model. A curriculum with four teaching components of cognitive-linguistic skills was implemented in a Program school for 3 years since Grade 1. The findings showed that the Tier 1 intervention was effective in…

This research investigates children's knowledge of how surface pronunciations of lexical items vary according to their phonological and morphological context. Dutch-learning children aged 2.5 and 3.5 years were tested on voicing neutralization and morphophonological alternations. For instance, voicing does not alternate between the pair…

The language of non-native speakers is less reliable than the language of native speakers in conveying the speaker's intentions. We propose that listeners expect such reduced reliability and that this leads them to adjust the manner in which they process and represent non-native language by representing non-native language in less detail.…

There is a discrepancy between the brain regions revealed by functional neuroimaging techniques and those brain regions where a loss of function, either by lesion or by electrocortical stimulation, induces language disorders. To differentiate between essential and non-essential language-related processes, we investigated the effects of linguistic…

Translation theory has faced criticism from professional translators for adopting an ivory tower stance to the "real world" challenges of translation. This article argues that a case can be made for considering the challenges of translation as it takes place in the school classroom. In support of such an argument the pedagogue as translator is…

Largely due to technological advances, methods for analyzing readability have increased significantly in recent years. While past researchers designed hundreds of formulas to estimate the difficulty of texts for readers, controversy has surrounded their use for decades, with criticism stemming largely from their application in creating new texts…