Three experiments investigated listeners' ability to detect disfluency in spontaneous speech. All three employed gated word recognition with judgments of disfluency for spontaneous utterances containing disfluencies and for three kinds of fluent control utterances from the same six speakers. (Author/JL)

Presents a framework for studying the effects of the Maturation Hypothesis on the problem of language learning, parametrically conceived, and offers a method for finding all existing maturational solutions for any parametric hypothesis space and any learning algorithm that differs from Gibson and Wexler's Triggering Learning Algorithm. (27…

Based on coexistence frequency of pairs of words or phrases, coword analysis is used to discover linkages among subjects in a research field and thus to trace the development of science. This article reviews the development of coword analysis, summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of this method, and discusses several research issues.…

Argues that simplified or graded readers are an essential part of a language learning program if learners of all proficiency levels are to have the opportunity to do incidental language learning through reading, and to develop fluency in reading. Evidence is provided to support this from a corpus study of versions of "Dracula." (Adjunct ERIC for…

A great deal has been written about the ways in which lawyers' questioning strategies, particularly during cross-examination, may be considered coercive and intimidating for witnesses, even potentially contributing to the wrongful acquittal of guilty defendants. The primary focus of analytical attention in identifying such practices has been the…

This paper questions the assumption that corpora are authentic, with particular reference to their application in language pedagogy. The author argues that, because of the form the corpus takes, authentic source texts forfeit a crucial criterion for authenticity, namely context, in the transition from source to electronic data. Other authentic…

A psycholinguistic hypothesis regarding the use of interjections in spoken utterances, originally formulated by Ameka (1992b, 1994) for the English language, but not confirmed in the German-language research of Kowal and O'Connell (2004 a & c), was tested: The local syntactic isolation of interjections is paralleled by their articulatory isolation…

This paper evaluates the effect of Chinese non-native English-speaking teachers (NNESTs) on Chinese ESL students' struggles with English syntax. The paper first classifies Chinese learners' syntactic errors into 10 common types. It demonstrates how each type of error results from an internal attempt to translate a common Chinese construction into…

This contribution investigates the frequency patterns of the modal verbs as they occur in the one-million-word corpus of Cameroon written English. An analysis of dominant senses of some of the modals is also attempted. I have used results and statistical figures from British and American English (as reported in studies such as Biber et al. 1999…

Although Keenan and Comrie's (1977) noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH) has been shown to predict the difficulty order of relative clauses (RCs) in SLA, most studies of the NPAH have been on European languages. This paper tests the prediction for Japanese. Study 1 analyzes RCs in an oral interview corpus from 90 learners of Japanese at four…

A reliable index of lexical diversity (LD) has remained stubbornly elusive for over 60 years. Meanwhile, researchers in fields as varied as "stylistics," "neuropathology," "language acquisition," and even "forensics" continue to use flawed LD indices--often ignorant that their results are questionable and in…

Online templates have the potential to scaffold complex writing processes and to provide information and language prompts for writers. The purpose of this study is threefold. First, for assisting students in their scholarly writing, an online Scholarly Writing Template (SWT) was designed and developed. SWT includes two major features: (1) an…

Despite the important role the personal statement plays in the graduate school application processes, little research has been done on its functional features and little instruction has been given about it in academic writing courses. The author conducted a multi-level discourse analysis on a corpus of 30 medical/dental school application letters,…

This study examines and compares the production of discourse markers by native speakers and learners of English based on a pedagogic sub-corpus from CANCODE, a corpus of spoken British English, and a corpus of interactive classroom discourse of secondary pupils in Hong Kong. The results indicate that in both groups discourse markers serve as…

This article introduces conceptual grammar as an approach to the analysis and teaching of grammar in foreign and second language contexts through a combination of paradigms: corpus, discourse analysis, and cognitive linguistics. Although the approach is applicable to virtually any language and any construction within that language at various…