This study examines the word order phenomenon of optional scrambling in Ukrainian. It aims to test factors such as semantic features and object type that have been shown to affect scrambling in other languages. Forty-one children between 2 ; 7 and 6 ; 0, and twenty adult speakers participated in an elicited production experiment. The picture…

Research related to online discussions frequently faces the problem of analyzing huge corpora. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies may allow automating this analysis. However, the state-of-the-art in machine learning and text mining approaches yields models that do not transfer well between corpora related to different topics. Also,…

This study investigated the stability of propositional density (PD) in written texts, as this aspect of language shows promise as an indicator and as a predictor of language decline with ageing. This descriptive longitudinal study analysed written texts obtained from the Australian Longitudinal Study of Women's Health in which participants were…

This experimental study examined how the reading and writing development of sixth-grade L2 students was affected by syntactic enhancement. Visual-syntactic text formatting (VSTF) technology, which visualizes syntactic structures, was used to convert a textbook to the one with syntactic enhancement. The sample (n = 282), which was drawn from a…

Students seldom think about language unless they are instructed to do so or are made to do so during learning activities. To arouse students' awareness while learning English for Specific Purposes (ESP), this study formed a computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) community to engage teachers and students from different domains and…

This paper compares explicit instruction in second-language Spanish with a control treatment on a written picture description task and a timed auditory grammaticality judgment task. Participants came from two intact, third-year US high school classes, with one experiencing a week of communicative lessons on the Spanish clitic "se"…

Writing and literacy development are crucial for the academic and social success of new language learners in the primary grades. Over the last 25 years, several terms have been used to describe the talents and needs of children learning new languages in early childhood settings. The term that the author prefers, and which he uses in this article,…

The purpose of this study was to determine the effects of the combination of word prediction and text-to-speech software on the writing process of translating. Participants for this study included 10 elementary and middle school students who had a diagnosis of disorder of written expression. A modified multiple case series was used to collect data…

The overall objective of this article is to examine how oral language abilities relate to reading profiles in English language learners (ELLs) and English as a first language (EL1) learners, and the extent of similarities and differences between ELLs and EL1s in three reading subgroups: normal readers, poor decoders, and poor comprehenders. The…

Understanding the syntactic structure of a sentence is a necessary preliminary to understanding its semantics and therefore for many practical applications. The field of natural language processing has achieved a high degree of accuracy in parsing, at least in English. However, the syntactic structures produced by the most commonly used parsers…

This dissertation considers the problem of the semantic function of verbal aspectual morphology in Polish and other Slavic languages in the framework of generative syntax and semantics. Three kinds of such morphology are examined: (i) prefixes attaching directly to the root, (ii) "secondary imperfective" suffixes, and (iii) three prefixes that…

"Do so" anaphora is a fairly widely used in English, but has received relatively little treatment in the literature (especially when compared with verb phrase ellipsis). There are, however, two aspects of this anaphor that have gained prominence: (i) its use as a test for constituency within the verb phrase, and (ii) the semantic restriction it…

While affix ordering often reflects general syntactic or semantic principles, it can also be arbitrary or variable. This article develops a theory of morpheme ordering based on local morphotactic restrictions encoded as weighted bigram constraints. I examine the formal properties of morphotactic systems, including arbitrariness, nontransitivity,…

Learning through repetition is a fundamental form and also an effective method of language learning critical for achieving proficient and automatic language use. Massive repetition priming as a common research paradigm taps into the dynamic processes involved in repetition learning. Research with this paradigm has so far used only emotionally…

In a corpus analysis of spontaneous speech Jaeger and Snider (2007) found that the strength of structural priming is correlated with verb alternation bias. This finding is consistent with an implicit learning account of syntactic priming: because the implicit learning model implemented by Chang (2002), Chang, Dell, and Bock (2006), and Chang,…