Electrophysiological techniques were used to assess the generalizability of concreteness effects on word processing across word class (nouns and verbs) and different types of lexical ambiguity (syntactic only and combined syntactic/semantic). The results replicated prior work in showing an enhanced N400 response and a sustained frontal negativity…

Purpose: The aim was to identify the source of idiom understanding difficulties in children with specific reading comprehension failure. Method: Two groups (ns = 15) of 9- to 10-year-olds participated. One group had age-appropriate word reading and reading comprehension; the other group had age-appropriate word reading but poor reading…

Purpose: The typicality treatment approach on improving naming was investigated within 2 inanimate categories ("furniture" and "clothing") using a single-subject experimental design across participants and behaviors in 5 patients with aphasia. Method: Participants received a semantic feature treatment to improve naming of either typical or…

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very reliably observed in the data, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. This article suggests that Zipf's law may result from a hierarchical organization…

Automatic Essay Assessor (AEA) is a system that utilizes information retrieval techniques such as Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), Probabilistic Latent Semantic Analysis (PLSA), and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) for automatic essay grading. The system uses learning materials and relatively few teacher-graded essays for calibrating the scoring…

This paper introduces a corpus-driven measure as a method to assess EFL learners' knowledge of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody here is defined as the tendency of some words to occur in a certain semantic environment. For example, the verb "cause" is associated with unpleasant things--death, problem and the like. Subjects were 60…

There has been considerable progress in second language (L2) research at the syntax-semantics interface addressing how syntax can inform phrasal semantics, in terms of interpretive correlates of word order (Slabakova, 2008). This article provides evidence of a flow of information ostensibly in the opposite direction, from meaning to grammar, at…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to report on one high school English-language-learner's (ELL) breadth and depth of vocabulary as he communicated with his teacher through e-mail across geographic boundaries for over 18 months. Design/methodology/approach: The authors began by separating 358 e-mails into three time periods (first beginning,…

Clinical Question: Would Spanish-speaking ELL students who struggle to learn to write (P) benefit more from a writing intervention that addresses cognitive (executive function) and social well-being (motivation, peer inclusion) (I), or writing intervention strategies that address written language text macrostructure or microstructure only (C), as…

The authors investigate the potential of semantic web technologies to enhance "Virtual Fieldwork" resources and learning activities in the Geosciences. They consider the difficulties inherent in the concept of Virtual Fieldwork and how these might be reconciled with the desire to provide students with "authentic" tools for…

This study focused on the role of bilingual versus monolingual preschool education in the development of lexical knowledge in Russian (L1) and Hebrew (L2) among second-generation Russian-Hebrew speaking immigrants in Israel. The study was designed as a longitudinal and comparative study. The lexical knowledge of children was measured three times…

This article provides a theoretical framework for a pedagogy of comedy that aids evaluation or instruction of the linguistic and social literacies that are part of speech act implicature and context. By understanding comedy's embeddedness in (an incongruence with) social and linguistic relationships and expectations, comedic texts and episodes can…

This dissertation studies the acquisition of verb argument structure in the basilectal subvariety of Jakarta Indonesian (henceforth, bJI). There are two characteristics of bJI that potentially affect the acquisition of verb argument structure. First, bJI sentences can surface not only in the full frame but also in truncated frames. Second, the…

A basic challenge for research into the neurobiology of language is understanding how the brain combines words to make complex representations. Linguistic theory divides this task into several computations including syntactic structure building and semantic composition. The close relationship between these computations, however, poses a strong…

This dissertation investigates the syntax-prosody interface in Standard Arabic, focusing on the ambiguity of a modifier (relative clause or adjective phrase) in relation to the two nouns in a complex noun phrase. Ambiguity resolution tendencies for this construction differ across languages, contrary to otherwise universal parsing tendencies. One…