Americans are increasingly concerned about academic quality (Hauptman & Kim, 2009). This concern about academic quality is a product of the relative decline of the American economy, American Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test scores, American baccalaureate attainment rates, and various other indicators of national…

Interpretation is the process by which we find meaning in the things in the world around us: clouds on the horizon, bones, street signs, hairbrushes, uniforms, paintings, letters, and utterances. But where does that meaning come from and on what basis are we justified in saying a particular meaning is the right meaning? Drawing from debates in the…

Lexical semantics provide many important resources in natural language processing, despite the recent preferences for distributional methods. In this dissertation we investigate an under-represented lexical relationship, that of scalarity. We define scalarity as it relates to adjectives and introduce novel methods to identify words belonging to a…

The current research investigates interactions between lexical and structural processing in the construction and interpretation of transitive and dative sentence structures, and relates speakers' choice of structure in sentence production to STM processes and recent/long-term language experience conditioned on lexical information. Study 1…

The present paper investigates semantics of human body part names (BPN) in languages of different structure. The lexemes under study are characterised by a high level of polysemy, frequent occurrence and primary role in the processes of world perception and categorisation. The empirical data comprise 438 lexemes (expressing 1438 meanings), which…

The main purpose of this paper is the functional analysis and argumentation of text connectors as tools for implementation of the textual connectivity not only in the local but also global context. Given the comparative nature of this paper, we will be comparing typology and relationships expressed by the connectors in some of the argumentative…

Language development requires children to learn how to understand ambiguous pronouns, as in "Panda Bear is having lunch with Puppy. He wants a pepperoni slice." Adults tend to link "he" with Puppy, the prior grammatical subject, but young children either fail to exhibit this bias (Arnold, Brown-Schmidt & Trueswell, 2007) or…

This paper presents a Vygotskian research device that focuses on collaborative activities based on the manipulation of linguistic objects in a primary school classroom, with 8-9-year-old children. Through social exchanges among the different points of view, the children were engaged in a dynamic process of building and negotiating mathematical…

This research investigated the impact of Scientix STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths) on female candidate teachers' attitudes towards STEM education, their semantic perceptions of STEM discipline scopes, specifying their needs in writing STEM projects, their learning outcomes from education, and the difficulties they face in the…

In a masked morphological priming experiment, we compared the processing of derived and inflected morphologically complex Turkish words in heritage speakers of Turkish living in Berlin and in native speakers of Turkish raised and living in Turkey. The results show significant derivational and inflectional priming effects of a similar magnitude in…

Vocabulary is the basis for all content area learning, including physical education. This article presents several easily implemented vocabulary strategies that support content learning within the cognitive domain of physical education by reinforcing conceptual understanding and relationships. These strategies include: concept circles,…

The goals of this research are to analyze, explore, disrupt, and (re)create modes of being and knowing in relation to text. In particular, we focus on the educational research text. We are asking author-readers to theorize materially: Who does this journal article think you are? And further, Who could I become if I use this as raw material, as…

This study compares the effectiveness of context clue strategy instruction to wide reading practices in terms of their impact on the vocabulary knowledge of students who read at frustration level. The participants were 44 sixth-grade students from a middle grades school. Students were randomly assigned to experimental and control conditions. The…

Coding is a process of assigning meaning to a given piece of evidence. Evidence may be found in a variety of data types, including documents, research interviews, posts from social media, conversations from learning platforms, or any source of data that may provide insights for the questions under qualitative study. In this study, we focus on text…

The degree to which meanings are related in memory affects ambiguous word processing. We examined irregular polysemes, which have related senses based on similar or shared features rather than a relational rule, like regular polysemy. We tested to what degree the related meanings of irregular polysemes ("wire") are represented with…