Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

We examined how reading mode (i.e., silent vs. oral reading) influences parafoveal semantic and phonological processing during the reading of Chinese sentences, using the gaze-contingent boundary paradigm. In silent reading, we found in 2 experiments that reading times on target words were shortened with semantic previews in early and late…

The paper presents the results of the pre-research conducted under the project entitled "Seniors in the Eyes of Children". The main objective of the project was to create and test a research tool in order to establish what the attitudes of pupils to old age and seniors were. Semantic differential was chosen for these purposes. Semantic…

Metonymic words have multiple related meanings, such as "college", as in the building ("John walked into the college") or the educational institution ("John was promoted by the college"). Most researchers have found support for direct access models of metonymy but one recent study, Lowder and Gordon (2013), found…

This study investigates how cohesion manifests in readers' thought processes while reading texts when they are instructed to engage in self-explanation, a strategy associated with deeper, more successful comprehension. In Study 1, college students (n = 21) were instructed to either paraphrase or self-explain science texts. Paraphrasing was…

This project used Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) to explore neurophysiological brain responses to prepositional phrases involving concrete and abstract reference nouns (e.g., "plate" and "moment," respectively) after the presentation of objects with varying spatial features. Prepositional phrases were headed by "in"…

The creation of crowd-sourced content in learning systems is a powerful method for adapting learning systems to the needs of a range of teachers in a range of domains, but the quality of this content can vary. This study explores linguistic differences in teacher-created problem content in ASSISTments using a combination of discovery with models…

The creation of crowd-sourced content in learning systems is a powerful method for adapting learning systems to the needs of a range of teachers in a range of domains, but the quality of this content can vary. This study explores linguistic differences in teacher-created problem content in ASSISTments using a combination of discovery with models…

The connective 'but' mainly represents two different contrastive relations (Lakoff, 1971; Van Dijk, 1979; Blakemore, 1989). One of them is semantic, which shows semantic opposition and where no expectation is denied. The other is pragmatic, which shows a denial of expectation. This study aimed to investigate the use of 'but' by Turkish EFL…

The recent increase in the number of English translations of the Quran has led to problematic misrepresentations, misinterpretations and even textual discrepancies in the translations of a number of Islamic concepts, principles and norms. This paper is an attempt to evaluate five different English versions of the translation of the Quran using…

Semantic priming effects at a short prime-target stimulus onset asynchrony are commonly explained in terms of an automatic spreading activation process. According to this view, the proportion of related trials should have no impact on the size of the semantic priming effect. Using a semantic categorization task ("Is this a living…

Previous studies suggest that people with aphasia have incomplete lexical-semantic representations with decreased low-importance distinctive (LID) feature knowledge. In addition, decreased LID feature knowledge correlates with ability to discriminate among semantically related words. The current study seeks to replicate and extend previous…

Statistical learning may be central to lexical and grammatical development. The phonological and distributional properties of words provide probabilistic cues to their grammatical and semantic properties. Infants can capitalize on such probabilistic cues to learn grammatical patterns in listening tasks. However, infants often struggle to learn…

Prior research has shown that readers are sensitive to causal relations between sentences. In addition, the extent to which readers put weight on causal relations seems to depend on their reading skill. Very little attention, however, has been given to the perception of causal relations linguistically expressed by different types of causal verbs…

The requirement that candidates in studio-based or practice-led higher degrees by research should formulate a research question has been found to be problematic by some writers. The present article argues that this stance, particularly as it is articulated by proponents of the influential category of "performative research" (Haseman,…