This article reports on how, against a background of relatively stable patterns of second language negation, a Japanese-speaking adult learning English made use of a negative formula, "I don't know," and how, in and through interaction, analyzed it into its component parts and began using "don't" more productively.…

An eye tracking study investigated the effects of local and global discourse context on the processing of subject and object relative clauses, whereby the contexts favored either a subject relative clause interpretation or an object relative clause interpretation. The fixation data replicated previous studies showing that object relative clause…

Background & Aims: The present study examined how phonological and lexical knowledge influences memory in children with specific language impairments (SLI). Previous work showed recall advantages for typical adults and children due to word frequency and phonotactic pattern frequency and a recall disadvantage due to phonological similarity…

The main purpose of this study was to search for the occurrence of communicative and subcommunicative units and to identify the linguistic features commonly used by the authors to realize the communicative and subcommunicative units. Three groups of English RAs by Indonesian speakers were chosen for this study: 10 RAs from engineering science, ten…

The purpose of this descriptive paper was to explore and synthesize literature related to understanding modular learning and how it can be implemented effectively so faculty members embrace its use. An in-depth review of literature addressed topics including, Educational Theories supporting modular learning, the development of modular learning,…

We present the outcomes of a pronunciation training program conducted in a workplace setting with second language speakers who had lived in an English-speaking environment for an average of 19 years. The research questions concerned whether improvement would occur in the learners' perception of certain segments and prosody; in the…

This multiple case study examines patterns in the oral second language use of three Spanish-speaking English language learners in rehearsed presentations produced annually over 4 years (Grades 9-12) in a U.S. high school. Analysis focuses on students' changing use of transitional devices called frame markers (Hyland, 2005) as a lens for…

In a data set of 291 spontaneous utterances from German 5-year-olds, 7-year-olds and adults, nuclear pitch contours were labeled manually using the GToBI annotation system. Ten different contour types were identified.The fundamental frequency (F0) of these contours was modeled using third-order orthogonal polynomials, following an approach similar…

We investigated the mechanisms by which fillers, such as "uh" and "um", affect memory for discourse. Participants listened to and attempted to recall recorded passages adapted from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland". The type and location of interruptions were manipulated through digital splicing. In Experiment 1, we tested a processing time…

This study investigates the contribution of the left and right hemispheres to the comprehension of bilingual figurative language and the joint effects of salience and context on the differential cerebral involvement in idiom processing. The divided visual field and the lexical decision priming paradigms were employed to examine the activation of…

In typical development, children learn an extensive range of idioms and other figurative (non-literal) language expressions during childhood and adolescence. However, many children with autism fall far behind in their idiom comprehension and production and never fully reach adult levels. The current study measured the effectiveness of a group…

When studying verbal materials, both adults and children are often poor at accurately monitoring their level of learning and regulating their subsequent restudy of materials, which leads to suboptimal test performance. The present experiment investigated how monitoring accuracy and regulation of study could be improved when learning idiomatic…

The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that conversational perspective-taking is a determinant of unfamiliar ambiguous idiom comprehension. We investigated two types of ambiguous idiom, decomposable and nondecomposable expressions, which differ in the degree to which the literal meanings of the individual words contribute to the overall…

The acquisition of systematic patterns and exceptions in different languages can be readily examined using the causative construction. Persian allows four types of causative structures, including one productive multiword structure (i.e. the light verb construction). In this study, we examine the development of all four structures in Persian child…

Translation is an act of communication across dissimilar cultures. In as such, cultural expressions or idioms are a particularly salient translation challenge, especially when translating between two distinct languages spoken by two different nations. Idioms convey rich cultural connotations, and so require consideration of both cultural and…