How the perceptions of novel figurative phrases change over the course of numerous presentations were addressed in three studies using rating tasks (Studies 1 and 3) and recall tasks (Study 2). The present set of studies replicated much of Schweigert et al.'s (J Psychol Res 32:455-475, 2003) findings of changes in correlations among figurative…

The aim of the article is to provide preliminary data on the use of auxiliaries and clitics in Serbian-speaking children with developmental language impairment. Two groups of children (a group of 30 children with developmental language impairment and a group of 30 typically developing children) aged between 48 and 83 months and matched on IQ took…

Professional and academic discourse is characterised by a specific phraseology, which usually poses problems for students. This paper investigates atypical verb+noun collocations in a corpus of English technical writing of Spanish students. I focus on the type of verbs that most frequently occurred in these awkward or questionable combinations and…

The central role played by language in mediating school experience and the prestige accorded to standard language varieties within the field of education provide the broad rationale for this paper. This qualitative study, based on a friendship focus-group design, was conducted in two groups of 12-year-old children from contrasting "ideal…

This paper proposes the identification and use of principle-based pedagogical patterns to help teachers to translate design principles into actionable teaching activities, and to scaffold student learning with sufficient flexibility and creativity. A set of pedagogical patterns for networked Second language (L2) learning, categorized and…

This study discusses cognitive processes when speakers produce language in real time, with its focus on cross-linguistic differences in the procedural aspect of language use. It demonstrates that the syntactic characteristics of a language shape the speakers' overall process of sentence planning and production: how they construct sentential…

Topic models like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) provide a framework for analyzing large datasets where observations are collected into groups. Although topic modeling has been fruitfully applied to problems social science, biology, and computer vision, it has been most widely used to model datasets where documents are modeled as exchangeable…

Three schemes for assessing stuttering were compared. They differed with respect to whether they included whole-word repetitions as characteristics more typical of stuttering. Persistent and recovered groups of children were examined to see whether: (1) one of the schemes differentiated the groups better than others; (2) more and less typical of…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…

The literature generally assumes that object clitic omission is equally allowed in all child languages. In this paper we challenge this claim by means of an elicitation experiment carried out with children acquiring two closely related languages, Catalan and Spanish. Our results show that while omission is high in young Catalan-speaking children,…

Hong Kong popular culture played an important role in the construction and consolidation of Hong Kong identity long before the handover to China. In the past few years leading up to the 10th anniversary of the handover, both Hong Kong and China have undergone numerous changes which seem to be changing their relations. Whilst Hong Kong people had…

Native English speakers tend to exclude regular plural inflection when producing English noun-noun compounds (e.g., "rat-eater" not "rats-eater") while allowing irregular plural inflection within compounds (e.g., "mice-eater") (Clahsen, 1995; Gordon, 1985; Hayes, Smith & Murphy, 2005; Lardiere, 1995; Murphy, 2000). Exposure to the input alone has…

An eye-tracking study explored Korean-speaking adults' and 4- and 5-year-olds' ability to recover from misinterpretations of temporarily ambiguous phrases during spoken language comprehension. Eye movement and action data indicated that children, but not adults, had difficulty in recovering from these misinterpretations despite strong…

One of the important themes that emerged from the CAL'07 conference was the failure of technology to bring about the expected disruptive effect to learning and teaching. We identify one of the causes as an inherent weakness in prevalent development methodologies. While the problem of designing technology for learning is irreducibly…

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…