Teachers' instructional language is often described as key in facilitating the learning of children with disabilities. This article explored two teachers' instructional language as used in interactions with children with mild and severe language difficulties in one-on-one instructional sessions. The results showed that teachers used more…

Plant lexicons in Sundanese proverbs have symbolized the ethnic group's identity since they have existed in the Sundanese natural environment, and represented Sundanese worldview. The objectives of the research were to discover the plant lexicons in Sundanese proverbs, their use, and their representation of human beings in the Sundanese ethnic…

Good sentence construction, the act of writing multiple words into sentence types that make semantic and syntactic sense, is needed for clear and meaningful written expression. The present study investigated the effects of a multi-component writing intervention, sentence instruction and frequency building to a performance criterion, on the simple…

This paper analyzes some of the ambiguities that arise among statements with the copular verb "is" in the mathematical language of textbooks as compared to day-to-day English language. We identify patterns in the construction and meaning of "is" statements using randomly selected examples from corpora representing the two…

The present research explored the awareness that readers have of the difficulty of negative text and aimed to determine whether rereading could impact comprehension and metacomprehension. Participants read passages that sometimes contained negative words such as 'no' and 'not', rated their comprehension, and answered a comprehension question about…

What is the relation between factual conditionals: "If A happened then B happened," and counterfactual conditionals: "If A had happened then B would have happened?" Some theorists propose quite different semantics for the two. In contrast, the theory of mental models and its computer implementation interrelates them. It…

The processing advantage of Subject-gapped relative clause (SRC) versus Object-gapped relative clause (ORC) has been advocated by competing processing accounts. Using a self-paced listening paradigm, this study investigates what Chinese RC online processing asymmetry looks like under concurrent memory load manipulation. Both On-line listening…

This study addresses how Chinese learners of English as a second language (L2) perceive conversations in English materials as compared to speakers of English as a first language (L1). Data were collected through questionnaires completed by 48 participants (28 L2 English learners in China and 20 L1 English speakers in the UK), eliciting evaluations…

Norwegian allows filler-gap dependencies into embedded questions, which are islands for filler-gap dependency formation in English. We ask whether there is evidence that Norwegian learners of English transfer the functional structure that permits island violations from their first language (L1) to their second language (L2). In two acceptability…

Readability systems have once more become prominent in policy and practice because of recommendations in the Common Core State Standards. This study revisited two features of current text analysis (readability) systems: their generalizability to all grade levels and to all content areas. A database that encompassed texts across the grade bands and…

This article provides a Poverty of Stimulus argument for the participation of a dedicated linguistic module in second language acquisition. We study the second language (L2) acquisition of a subset of English infinitive complements that exhibit the following properties: (a) they present an intricate web of grammatical constraints while (b) they…

The English Resultative Construction (ERC) is a satellite-framed structure with no identical equivalent in Spanish. In a series of studies, we analyzed and compared recognition (acceptability judgment task) and comprehension (sentence comprehension task) of three ERC subtypes with the English Depictive Construction (EDC) (which has a Spanish…

We investigated biases in the organization of imagery by asking participants to make stick-figure drawings of sentences containing a man, a woman and a transitive action (e.g. "she kisses that guy"). Previous findings show that prominent features of meaning and sentence structure are placed to the left in drawings, according to reading…

Purpose: Growing evidence suggests that sentence formulation is affected in Parkinson's disease (PD); however, how speakers with PD coordinate sentence planning and speaking remains unclear. Within 2 competing models of sentence production, this study examined whether speakers with PD show advanced buffering of words to minimize disfluencies and…

The abstract is an important part of a research article; it is a research summary that must be attached, presented together with the research article. Therefore, the quality of an abstract is explicitly significant. This article aims to determine the similarities and differences of the rhetorical moves and linguistic features of abstracts of…