Although previous research has observed a facilitative influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition and processing of gender agreement in a second language (L2), particularly in language pairs with similar gender agreement marking, the question of whether knowledge of two languages with gender can confer an additional advantage for…

Three categories of audio recordings, a web service platform, and commercial software were involved in this analysis process. The three categories of audio recordings included eight filtered student recordings, an audio recording provided by a Mandarin instructor from University Malaysia Sabah, and an audio recording generated by Text-to-Speech…

This article focuses on claims about the origin and evolution of language from the point of view of the formalist-functionalist debate in linguistics. In linguistics, an account of a grammatical phenomenon is considered "formal" if it accords center stage to the structural properties of that phenomenon, and "functional" if it…

The Patch workshop explores creative/critical analyses that can map the collectively relevant topoi of semiosis in linguistic texts according to the three ecologies as articulated by Félix Guattari. As creative pedagogues both in service and critical of creative economics, we valourize a generative practice, one that results in successive creative…

Infant-directed speech (IDS) is a specific register that adults use to address infants, and it is characterised by prosodic exaggeration and lexical and syntactic simplification. Several authors have underlined that this simplified speech becomes more complex according to the infant's age. However, there is a lack of studies on lexical and…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

Purpose: Analysis of spontaneous speech samples is important for determining patterns of language production in people with aphasia. To accomplish this, researchers and clinicians can use either hand coding or computer-automated methods. In a comparison of the two methods using the hand-coding NNLA (Northwestern Narrative Language Analysis) and…

Children tend to produce words earlier when they are connected to a variety of other words along the phonological and semantic dimensions. Though these semantic and phonological connectivity effects have been extensively documented, little is known about their underlying developmental mechanism. One possibility is that learning is driven by…

People segment their continuous stream of experience into events, or temporal segments that have a beginning and an endpoint. But how are such event boundaries defined? Linguistic theories of event encoding draw a distinction between bounded events that are non-homogeneous, structured temporal developments leading to an inherent endpoint (e.g.,…

The second language (L2) acquisition of tense, aspect, and mood/modality (TAM) has been widely explored as it holds the promise of a better understanding of the L2 learners' linguistic competences, particularly semantically and morpho-syntactically. This study focuses on the acquisition of the subjunctive mood by L1 English learners of L2 French…

Age of acquisition (AoA) is a measure of word complexity which refers to the age at which a word is typically learned. AoA measures have shown strong correlations with reading comprehension, lexical decision times, and writing quality. AoA scores based on both adult and child data have limitations that allow for error in measurement, and increase…

Linguistic alignment--the contingent reuse of our interlocutors' language at all levels of linguistic structure--pervades human dialogue. Here, we design unique measures to capture the degree of linguistic alignment between interlocutors' linguistic representations at three levels of structure: lexical, syntactic, and semantic. We track these…

The question of whether second languages (L2s) are best learned implicitly or explicitly has been a topic of much empirical discourse, with the majority of studies pointing to the benefits of explicit instruction when learning L2 grammar rules. However, given the focus on grammar, it is unclear how generalizable these findings are to other…

This study aimed to investigate gender variations in letters of recommendation. It used the metadiscourse theory with respect to the following resources: hedges, boosters, attitude markers, engagement markers, and self-mentions. The findings showed that hedges devices were the least frequent in both groups, but at the same time were used more by…

The widespread, theoretically-informed practice of curricula embedded academic language and learning development is generally acknowledged as the most productive method of improving tertiary student outcomes. University-wide comprehensive support, however, for the collaborative processes of interdisciplinary research, design, resource and staff…