Through examining all instances of the nontarget "be" before verbs in the written interlanguage of Chinese learners at different proficiency levels, the present study reveals that nontarget "be" performs different functions, and there is a function shift from low to high proficiency levels. At the lowest levels, "be"…

The Katzenberger Hebrew Language Assessment for Preschool Children (henceforth: the KHLA) is the first comprehensive, standardized language assessment tool developed in Hebrew specifically for older preschoolers (4;0-5;11 years). The KHLA is a norm-referenced, Hebrew specific assessment, based on well-established psycholinguistic principles, as…

Previous work leaves open the question of whether children with autism spectrum disorders aged 6-12?years have delay in producing gestures compared to their typically developing peers. This study examined gestural production among school-aged children in a naturalistic context and how their gestures are semantically related to the accompanying…

Conference interpreters form a special case of language users because the simultaneous interpretation practice requires very specific lexical processing. Word comprehension and production in respective languages is performed under strict time constraints and requires constant activation of the involved languages. The present experiment aimed at…

In an effort to document demographic changes in the academic linguistics community, the Linguistic Society of America (LSA) has commissioned an annual report detailing information about job titles, students, degrees awarded, average salaries, and more. The report offers information about trends in student enrollment and employment by industry.…

Two off-line and on-line reading tasks investigated the real-time comprehension of doubly quantified sentences with sentential negation interaction. The results showed that perceivers experienced processing difficulty in assigning inverse-scope interpretations to the sentences with double operators, not only when such sentences appeared in…

This dissertation presents a novel method of sentence generation, drawing on the insight from Cognitive Semantics (Talmy, 2000a,b) that the effect of uttering a sentence is to evoke a Cognitive Representation in the mind of the listener. Under the assumption that this Cognitive Representation is also present in the speaker and defines (part of)…

This dissertation investigates the patterning of Macedonian direct object DPs with respect to clitic pronouns. The occurrence of clitics with direct objects in Macedonian varies along two dimensions, the type of DP and the position of DP. Two broad classes are considered, regular and wh DPs, and positions both within IP and at the left periphery.…

The goal of this dissertation is to investigate the nature of word order variation in declarative and interrogative clauses in Turkish within the framework of the generative syntax. The specific issue that will be examined in this dissertation concerns the role of discourse-pragmatics in word order variation. I will argue that all movement…

Two experiments examined preschoolers' ability to learn novel words using others' expertise about objects' nonobvious properties. In Experiment 1, 4-year-olds (n = 24) endorsed individuals' labels for objects based on their differing causal knowledge about those objects. Experiment 2 examined the robustness of this inference and its development.…

This article argues that while a semiotic analysis of composition in the screen, page and image has significant heuristic value, this would be further enhanced were it also to take into account surface and depth. It is argued that these two aspects of composition are critical for successful reading/viewing of images, and especially for digital…

Behavior analysis has exploited conceptual tools whose experimental validity has been amply demonstrated, but their relevance to large-scale and fine-grained behavioral phenomena remains uncertain, because the experimental analysis of these domains faces formidable obstacles of measurement and control. In this essay I suggest that, at least at the…

A divided visual field (DVF) experiment examined the semantic processing strategies employed by the cerebral hemispheres to determine if strategies observed with written word stimuli generalize to other media for communicating semantic information. We employed picture stimuli and vary the degree of semantic relatedness between the picture pairs.…

It is demonstrated that the meaning given to an ambiguous word (e.g., "stick") can be biased by the masked presentation of a polymorphemic word derived from that meaning (e.g., "sticky"). No bias in interpretation is observed when the masked prime is a word that is semantically related to the target with no morphological…

The Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) of bilingual language processing dominates current thinking on bilingual language processing. Recently, basic tenets of the model have been called into question. First, there is little evidence for separate lexicons. Second, there is little evidence for language selective access. Third, the inclusion of…