How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…

Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

Multiple-choice question (MCQ) plays a significant role in educational assessment. Automatic MCQ generation has been an active research area for years, and many systems have been developed for MCQ generation. Still, we could not find any system that generates accurate MCQs from school-level textbook contents that are useful in real examinations.…

In "Subatomic Writing," Johns Hopkins University instructor Jamie Zvirzdin goes bravely into uncharted territory by offering a totally new kind of guide for writing about science--from the subatomic level up! "Subatomic Writing" teaches readers that the building blocks of language are like particles in physics. These particles,…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the growth of previously established clinical markers of developmental language disorder (DLD) in Spanish-speaking bilingual children with and without DLD. Method: Forty-three bilingual children with DLD and 57 typically developing children were tested 3 times over a 2-year period. Their average…

The current study concerns the new wave of pro-democracy activism in Thailand as an international political phenomenon in online news discourse. The investigation employs a critical discourse analysis approach to examine discourse strategies adopted to construct the representation of Thai pro-democracy activists and decode the underlying ideology…

Due in part to its complex nature, there is still much to uncover in the investigation of the neural processes that contribute to synchronization between speakers and listeners during communication in the context of social cognition, specifically between native and nonnative English speakers and listeners. This study used a novel method of…

Research on intelligibility in international encounters has long focused on issues of pronunciation to the detriment of factors such as linguistic co-text and extralinguistic context, which are comparatively well-studied variables in intelligibility research concerning L1 listeners. This paper seeks to expand the scope of international…

In order to better understand the role of syntactic similarity in a code-switched sentence, the current study explored the effect of similar and different syntactic structures on Chinese-English bilinguals' intra-sentential switching costs. L2 proficiency and switching directions as factors that potentially intervene in bilingual performance were…

The effects of learner- and task-related variables on second language (L2) writing syntactic complexity (SC) have been extensively investigated. However, previous research has rarely assessed the reliability of computational tools for analyzing the SC of L2 spoken production, and we know less about the effects of such variables on L2 speaking SC.…

Recent studies in the second language acquisition of negation have focused on polarity items and their licensing contexts. Although several studies show a correlation between higher degrees of second language (L2) proficiency and the acquisition of the target L2 structures, less attention has been given to the relation between the acquisition of…

Language immersion programs seek to develop multilingual, multiliterate individuals able to engage with academic content. Studies of immersion students' language development provide details regarding language proficiency and accuracy, yet they generally do not address how features of written, academic language, for example, syntactic and lexical…

The contribution of linguistic skills to reading has been reported in different languages; however, this contribution varies according to the specific features of each language. Arabic is characterized by diglossia, i.e. the existence of two distinct varieties: Spoken Arabic (SpA) and Standard Arabic (StA). This study examined the extent to which…

Given the important technology-assisted language learning (TALL)-empowered affordances, a comprehensive understanding of how these TALL tools facilitate learning across different language components, e.g., phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, could not only present the panoramic scenery of the subject matter but also inform…