Recent research in language contact has investigated bilingual deviations from monolingual norms where syntax interfaces with the lexical and discourse components of the grammar (e.g. Iverson & Rothman 2008; Lozano 2006; Montrul 2004, 2005; Sorace & Filiaci 2006; Tsimpli et al. 2004). Such studies generally show that the…

The mechanisms by which the mind encodes meaning into words and reconstructs it from them has been the subject of philosophical speculations at least since Plato and Aristotle in the 4th century B.C. Our current understanding of how the brain is involved in these processes, however, only started in the 19 th century, with precise descriptions of…

Many Arab students are currently pursuing their education at Malaysian institutions and they have to study Bahasa Malaysia as a university requirement to be able to communicate with people in the local community. Therefore, this study aims to help Arab students learn Bahasa easily as Bahasa contains many loan words from Arabic and English. This…

Purpose: This investigation addressed two main questions: (a) How do toddlers' spoken utterances change during the first year of cochlear implant (CI) use? and (b) How do the time-courses for reaching spoken word milestones after implant activation compare with those reported for typically developing children? These questions were explored to…

What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic)…

A group of 20 patients with probable Alzheimer disease (AD) and a control group were tested in a verb generation task, in a verb synonym task and several cognitive tests. Three types of verbs and novel verbs were presented in simple sentence frames, in two different conditions. In one condition participants were presented with the verb in the…

The study examined the extent to which time-related gains in cognitive performance, so-called Flynn effects, generalize across sub-factors of episodic memory (recall and recognition) and semantic memory (knowledge and fluency). We conducted time-sequential analyses of data drawn from the Betula prospective cohort study, involving four age-matched…

Collaboration has long been considered an effective approach to learning. However, forming optimal groups can be a time consuming and complex task. Different approaches have been developed to assist teachers allocate students to groups based on a set of constraints. However, existing tools often fail to assign some students to groups creating a…

Semantic accounts of verb pattern alternations often rely on observations about "verb disposition": the preference of verbs with particular lexical semantic characteristics for one of two competing constructions is taken as a clue to the semantic differences between the two constructions. For instance, it has been observed with regard to the…

The use of semantic links or networks in L2 vocabulary acquisition has been a popular subject for numerous studies. On one hand, there is a strong theoretical background stating that presenting words in related fashion facilitates the learning of L2 vocabulary. On the other hand, research evidence indicates that semantically related vocabulary…

Abstract Does native language phonology influence visual word processing in a second language? This question was investigated in two experiments with two groups of Russian-English bilinguals, differing in their English experience, and a monolingual English control group. Experiment 1 tested visual word recognition following semantic…

Conceptual knowledge of our world is represented in semantic memory in terms of concepts and semantic relations between concepts. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the cortical regions underlying the processing of sequential and taxonomic relations. Participants were presented verbal cues and performed three tasks:…

A number of recent studies demonstrate that bilinguals with languages that differ in grammatical and lexical categories may shift their cognitive representation of those categories towards that of monolingual speakers of their second language. The current paper extended that investigation to the domain of colour in Greek-English bilinguals with…

Heritage language speakers constitute a unique cultural and linguistic resource in the United States while also presenting particular challenges for language educators and language programs. This paper examines the potential of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) in a curriculum for Spanish second language learners/heritage speakers, with…

Shared book reading, and the conversation that accompanies it, can facilitate young children's vocabulary growth. To identify the features of extratextual questions that help 3-year-olds learn unfamiliar words during shared book reading, two experiments explored the impact of cognitive demand level, placement, and an approximation to scaffolding.…