Multiclause sentences with the temporal adverbs "while" or "when" referring to simultaneous events (e.g., "While [when] John was writing a letter, Mary comes into the room") were compared in German and Spanish. Following Talmy (2001), we assumed that the event in the main clause is the figure (F; the event to be located in time), and the event in…

This paper presents an empirical study of how different "wh"-words behave in English speakers' L2 Chinese "wh"-questions. Our results indicate that L2 Chinese "wh"-questions are specified by the Chinese "wh" -particle ne and that there is neither variability nor L1 transfer in this aspect of L2 grammars as no "wh"-movement is found in English…

In the last two decades, La Heij and colleagues have presented accounts of a number of context effects in Stroop-like word-production tasks. Roelofs (2007 this issue) criticises various aspects of our proposals, ranging from the number of processing stages assumed to details of simulation results. In this reply we first argue that we do not…

This article describes how English and Japanese children interpret empty categories in Verb Phrase Ellipsis contexts as in (1):(1) The penguin [sat on his chair] and the robot did [delta], too. To obtain an adultlike interpretation of (1), English children have to do two things. First, they need to find a suitable antecedent for the empty verb…

Many students believe that math is something one learns about, but they do not understand that it is a tool for learning about other concepts. Mathematics is a language used to describe the relationship between objects, events, and time. Learning math requires that a student interacts with a system of symbols just as a person interacts with…

The authors address the need to teach students to become more word aware by focusing on metasemantic awareness, alongside morphological and syntactic awareness, as a basis for developing metacognition about words. They extend the concept of a definition map to other forms of vocabulary learning and provide several helpful graphic organizers.…

Purpose: This study examined the independent and combined effects of two sources of linguistic knowledge (alphabet cues and semantic predictability) on the intelligibility of speakers with dysarthria. The study also examined the extent to which each source of knowledge accounted for variability in intelligibility gains. Method: Eight speakers with…

This study examined whether singular/plural marking in a language helps children learn the meanings of the words "one," "two," and "three." First, CHILDES data in English, Russian (which marks singular/plural), and Japanese (which does not) were compared for frequency, variability, and contexts of number-word use.…

The French language has a grammatical gender system in which all nouns are assigned either a masculine or a feminine gender. Nouns provide two types of gender cues that can potentially guide gender attribution: morphophonological cues carried by endings and semantic cues (natural gender). The first goal of this study was to describe the…

This paper uses a corpus approach to investigate disciplinary variation in the construction of stance using nouns which are followed by "that" and a complement clause, "e.g. the argument that the Justices exhibit strategic behaviour..." Two corpora of theses written in English are examined: approximately 190,000 words in politics/international…

A study assessed the effect of American/Western culture on English-speaking Japanese bilinguals as reflected in differences in the connotative meanings of certain kinds of words. Differences in culturally determined meanings were examined in translation-equivalent concrete concepts, abstract words, and personality attributes, as measured on a…

After hemispherectomy (removal or disconnection of an entire cerebral hemisphere) in childhood for treatment of intractable epilepsy, gross speech and language functions are often rescued. Whether more complex functions, such as syntactic processing, are selectively impaired, remains controversial. Here we present a cross-sectional study of…

Deaf and hearing students' knowledge of English sentences containing universal quantifiers was compared through their performance on a 50-item, multiple-picture task that required students to decide whether each of five pictures represented a possible meaning of a target sentence. The task assessed fundamental knowledge of quantifier sentences,…

Vietnamese has a group of semantically amorphous indefinite words and phrases whose meanings appear to be refined according to the particular syntactic or pragmatic context in which they are embedded. In appropriate environments, they are the functional equivalents of the English "who, someone, anyone, whoever, everyone." Analysis of the…

Studies have investigated and proposed different potential influences on children's initial mappings of object words to referents. Each proposal is a variant on the idea that children use one source of evidence about the structure of word meanings or of grammar to discover other forms of structure, and in doing so they "bootstrap" their…