Stoel-Gammon (this issue) highlights the close and symbiotic association that exists between the lexical and phonological domains in early linguistic development. Her comprehensive review considers two bodies of literature: (1) child-centred studies; and (2) studies based on adult psycholinguistic research. Within the child-centred studies, both…

Ten mothers were observed prospectively, interacting with their infants aged 0 ; 10 in two contexts (picture description and noun description). Maternal communicative behaviours were coded for volubility, gestural production and labelling style. Verbal labelling events were categorized into three exclusive categories: label only; label plus…

In this paper I use two case studies to show how corpus linguistics can be used to help in the teaching of business English. Senior managers in global companies often find themselves having to do their job in a foreign language. Given that language is one of the key tools of management, the senior managers are normally very keen to develop a…

To describe a scene, speakers must map visual information to a linguistic plan. Eye movements capture features of this linkage in a tendency for speakers to fixate referents just before they are mentioned. The current experiment examined whether and how this pattern changes when speakers create atypical mappings. Eye movements were monitored as…

This paper presents a solution to extend the IEEE LOM standard with ontology-based semantic annotations for efficient use of learning objects outside Learning Management Systems. The data model corresponding to this approach is first presented. The proposed indexing technique for this model development in order to acquire a better annotation of…

This paper views Nigeria as a multilingual country with diverse languages and cultures to the extent that the total number of languages spoken right now in Nigeria is about 500 (See Adegbite 2010). This linguistic diversity in the country has occasioned the development and the spread of the concepts of bilingualism, multilingualism, diglossia and…

Religious sermons play a very significant role in a pluralist setting like Nigeria, as organs of social, political and moral education. The fulfilment of these functions is partly contingent on the effective use of language. If the sermon-giver and his audience draw from the same pool of lexis, communication in the genre will not only be enhanced…

This study is designed to investigate whether the sequence of input is influential in the recollection of the retained information. Eighty first year students, 40 girls and 40 boys, studying in ELT department participated in the study. Three tasks were administered to the participants. In the first test three different lists of words and their…

Our cultural lenses can blind us not only to other cultures but also to what we take for granted in our own culture. Thus, we are often unaware of how and why our cultural background can easily lead to a biased interpretation of others, and we are also often unaware of how even a high level of competence in a foreign language might fail to…

Different computational models for generating analogies of the form "A is to B as C is to D" have been proposed over the past 35 years. However, analogy generation is a challenging problem that requires further research. In this article, we present a new approach for generating analogies in Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) format that can be used…

This dissertation provides a comprehensive analysis of the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych-verbs (e.g. "gustar" "to like") across four different proficiency levels. In particular, psych-verbs constitute a testing ground for the predictions of the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace and Filiaci, 2006; Tsimpli, Sorace, Heycok &…

Clause connectives are linguistic forms that convey relations between clauses in a sentence. They are typically compared, whether within a language or across languages, on the basis of a shared syntactic category, such as coordination and subordination, or a semantic one, such as sequence, cause, or addition. While the inadequacy of the…

This dissertation investigates second language (L2) development in the domains of morphosyntax and semantics. Specifically, it examines the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian within the Feature Re-assembly framework (Lardiere, 2009), according to which the hardest L2 learning task is not to reset parameters but to reconfigure,…

The existing literature views the phenomenon of language shift mostly on the societal, or macro, level, which takes the focus away from individual cases. This investigation provides an alternative perspective to the currently prevalent view. The purpose of this phenomenological study is to develop an understanding of the role of personal choice in…

In this literature review I have first provided an introduction in which I've clarified the meaning of focus on form issue and some debates about its advantages and disadvantages and the needed degree of focus on form in teaching structures in classroom. Then I have stated some features of focus on form and the ways that focus on form can…