Cohesion, or the connectedness of discourse, has been recognized as playing a crucial role in both language production and comprehension processes. Researchers have debated about the "right" number and classification of cohesive devices, as well as about their interaction with coherence and/or genre. The present study proposes an integrative model…

The present study examined the possibility that the language and response format used in self-report questionnaires influences how readily people endorse misconceptions. Four versions of a 40-item misconception test were administered to European ("n" = 281) and North American ("n" = 123) psychology and nonpsychology…

This paper investigates how learners interpret definite plural noun phrases (e.g., "the tigers") and bare (article-less) plural noun phrases (e.g., "tigers") in their second language. Whereas Spanish allows definite plurals to have both generic and specific readings, English requires definite plurals to have specific, nongeneric readings. Generic…

As the Greek verbal system has become the subject of various dissertations and monographs, the future tense-form has been generally overlooked in the discussion. This dissertation seeks to overcome this lacuna by suggesting that the future tense-form functions as a rhetorical feature that expresses the author's expectation of an alternative state…

Over the past decades, studies of EFL/ESL vocabulary acquisition have identified the significance of collocations in language learning. Due to the fact that collocations have been regarded as one of the major concerns of both EFL teachers and learners for many years, the present study attempts to shed light on the impact of corpus-based…

The proceedings of the first Language Testing Forum in 1980 were published in "ELT Documents 111: Issues in Language Testing" (Alderson & Hughes, 1981). Discussants at the 1980 Forum raised a number questions on Language for Specific Purposes (LSP) testing relating, notably, to test specificity, test content, the relationship between…

Previous research has furnished evidence that alliterative expressions (e.g. "a slippery slope") are comparatively memorable for second language learners, at least when these expressions are attended to as decontextualized items (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008a; Boers et al., 2012). The present study investigates whether alliteration…

This study investigates 2-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of the disjunction word "huozhe" ("or") in two positions in "ruguo" ("if")-conditional statements, i.e., in the antecedent clause versus in the consequent clause. The findings from three experiments show that the meanings…

Across the Germanic language family, we find a type of movement traditionally termed "topicalization," which may be realized in Germanic languages which possess the so-called Verb-Second (V2) constraint, as well as those without it. I will henceforward call this phenomenon "fronting" to avoid theoretical assumptions. This…

English-speaking children understand and produce generic expressions in the preschool years, but there are cross-linguistic differences in how generics are expressed. Three studies examined interpretation of generic noun phrases in three- to seven-year-old child (N=192) and adult speakers (N=163) of Mandarin Chinese. Contrary to suggestions by…

Event structure describes the relationships between general semantics ("Aktionsart") of the verb and its syntactic properties, separating verbs into two classes: telic verbs, which denote change of state events with an inherent end-point or boundary ("catch, rescue"), and atelic, which refer to homogenous activities ("tease, host"). As telic verbs…

This article examines the extent to which lexical bundles (LBs; i.e., frequently recurring strings of words that often span traditional syntactic boundaries) are stored and processed holistically. Three self-paced reading experiments compared sentences containing LBs (e.g., "in the middle of the") and matched control sentence fragments (e.g., "in…

This study utilized a paired priming paradigm to examine the influence of input features on case assignment in typically developing English-speaking children. The Input Ambiguity Hypothesis (Pelham, 2011) was experimentally tested to help explain why children produce subject pronoun case errors. Analyses of third singular "-s" marking on…

This article examines how form recall of target lexical items by learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) is affected (1) by repetition (1, 3 or 5 number of occurrences), (2) by the type of target item (single words versus collocations), and (3) by the time of post-test administration (immediately or one week after the learning session).…

The purpose of this study is to experimentally investigate the comprehension of elided phrases in Korean and English, focusing on the patterns exemplified below. (1) Korean a. VP-ellipsis: Sungki-ka phalan kabang-ul sa-ss-e-yo. Sunhuy-to-yey-yo Sungki-NOM blue bag-ACC buy-PST-DECL-POL Sunhuy-also-be-POL "Sungki bought a blue bag. Sunhuy did…