Some syllables are louder, longer and stronger than other syllables at the lexical level. These prominent prosodic characteristics of certain syllables are captured by suprasegmental features including fundamental frequency, duration and intensity. A language like English uses fundamental frequency, duration and intensity to distinguish stressed…

Educators often do not recognize biliteracy and bidialectalism in African American Language (AAL) speakers. Chronicling the experiences of twin four/five-year old AAL and emergent Standard English speakers, we discuss the importance of recognizing and building on the routines and identities of African American children and families. We present…

Previous research on finiteness has been dominated by the studies in tensed languages, e.g. English. Consequently, finiteness has been identified with tense. The traditional definition influences the morphological, semantic, and syntactic characterization of finiteness which has also been equated with tense and its realization. The present study…

The article is written in the tradition of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's theory of basic color terms. According to this theory there is a universal inventory of eleven basic color categories from which the basic color terms of any given language are always drawn. The number of basic color terms varies from 2 to 11 and in a language having a fully…

In this article, the author describes an art project wherein students make fanciful connections between art and medicine. This project challenges students to interpret "ear idioms" (e.g. "blow it out your ear," "in one ear and out the other") by relying almost entirely on realistic ear drawings, the placement of them, marks, and values. In that…

This study examines a major linguistic event underway in New York City. Of its 10 million inhabitants, nearly a third are speakers of Spanish. This community is socially and linguistically diverse: Some speakers are recent arrivals from Latin America while others are lifelong New Yorkers. Some have origins in the Caribbean, the historic source of…

What makes a discourse coherent? One potential factor has been discussed in the linguistic literature in terms of a Question under Discussion (QUD). This approach claims that discourse proceeds by continually raising explicit or implicit questions, viewed as sets of alternatives, or competing descriptions of the world. If the interlocutor accepts…

Vocabulary is an essential element of every second/foreign language teaching and learning program. While the goal of language teaching programs is to focus on explicit vocabulary teaching to promote learning, "materials which provide visual and aural input such as movies may be conducive to incidental vocabulary learning." (Webb and Rodgers, 2009,…

The study examined the acquisition of two morphological procedures of noun pluralization in Palestinian Arabic: "Sound Feminine Plural" (SFP) and "Broken Plural" (BP). We tested if noun pluralization was affected by (1) the type of morphological procedure, (2) the degree of familiarity with the singular noun stem, and (3) the…

Abstract is of a pivotal genre in scientific communication, assisting not only highly selective readers with judgment of the pertinent articles but also researchers in disseminating new knowledge and intellectual discoveries. Difficult yet challenging, however, is the task of writing effective abstracts particularly among non-English speaking…

This article investigates whether and how L2 sentence processing is affected by memory constraints that force serial parsing. Monitoring eye movements, we test effects of working memory on L2 relative-clause attachment preferences in a sample of 75 late-adult German learners of English and 25 native English controls. Mixed linear regression…

In this study it was researched whether visualized proverbs, idioms and epigrams have effect of primary school 3rd, 5th and 7th grade students' speaking skills. The study was executed in spring semester of the academic year of 2010-2011, with 30 students studying at primary school in 3rd, 5th and 7th grade. The students who participated in the…

This study employs a relational database consisting of thousands of Old High German (OHG) nominal attestations to reconstruct noun class paradigms found primarily in the four OHG texts extensive enough to provide complete nominal paradigms: "Isidor", "Benediktinerregel", "Tatian" and Otfrid von Weissenburg's "Evangelienbuch". This study captures…

Dynamic and interactive uses of personal pronouns are usually not as neat as traditional grammar describes in that the first and second person pronoun index speakers and addressees in a speech event. Devoted to a prevalent feature of Mandarin Chinese conversation--the switch of the first person singular pronoun "wo", "I", and the second person…

A common characteristic of subject-predicate agreement errors (usually termed attraction errors) in complex noun phrases is an asymmetrical pattern of error distribution, depending on the inflectional state of the nouns comprising the complex noun phrase. That is, attraction is most likely to occur when the head noun is the morphologically…