A number of previous studies have indicated that Broca's area has an important role in understanding and producing syntactically complex sentences and other language functions. If Broca's area is critical for these functions, then either infarction of Broca's area or temporary hypoperfusion within this region should cause impairment of these…

This paper presents an alternative approach to discourse structure according to which topicality is the general organizing principle in discourse. This approach accounts for the fact that the segmentation structure of discourse is in correspondence with the hierarchy of topics defined for the discourse units. (52 references) (JL)

Bakhtin claims that students must learn to write lively prose, but they will not until teachers have a grammar of style that links syntax to stylistic qualities such as "lively" and "creative." It is, however, unlikely that such a grammar could be written, because particular rhetorical effects too often depend on context, perceived intention, and…

In instructional multimedia design, it is often recommended that text accompanying pictures be presented in a personalised style to promote learning. The superiority of personalised over formal text is may be explained using social agency theory (Mayer, 2005b), but it has not been investigated empirically whether such effects are valid in…

One central question in the formal linguistic study of adult multilingual morphosyntax (i.e., L3/Ln acquisition) involves determining the role(s) the L1 and/or the L2 play(s) at the L3 initial state (e.g., Bardel & Falk, Second Language Research 23: 459-484, 2007; Falk & Bardel, Second Language Research: forthcoming; Flynn et al., The…

Success in reading comprehension is usually seen as fundamental to the academic success of foreign language learners. Many language factors affect second language learners' reading comprehension, such as vocabulary, and syntactic or grammatical knowledge. In practice, vocabulary breadth and depth knowledge can not be discussed separately with…

Recent research on monolingual (L1) and bilingual (2L1) language acquisition is exploring the idea that children's early deviant structures involving omission of obligatory subjects and objects might be due not so much to performance limitations or purely syntactic deficits, but rather to an immature interface between syntax and discourse. For…

In researching the potential of cognitive diagnostic assessment, researchers concur that the quality of diagnostic inferences is subject to the extent to which the construct representations based on cognitive skills are theoretically compelling, empirically sound, and relevant to test use. In this paper, I argue that the construction of a Q matrix…

Using the self-paced reading paradigm, the present study examines whether highly proficient second language (L2) speakers of German (English first language) use case-marking information during the on-line comprehension of unambiguous "wh"-extractions, even when task demands do not draw explicit attention to this morphosyntactic feature in German.…

This paper presents a new version of Robo-Sensei's NLP (Natural Language Processing) system which updates the version currently available as the software package "ROBO-SENSEI: Personal Japanese Tutor" (Nagata, 2004). Robo-Sensei's NLP system includes a lexicon, a morphological generator, a word segmentor, a morphological parser, a syntactic…

This study investigates ultimate attainment at the syntax-discourse interface in adult second-language (L2) acquisition. In total, 91 L1 (first-language) English, L1 Dutch and L1 Russian advanced-to-near-native speakers of German and 63 native controls are tested on an acceptability judgement task and an on-line self-paced reading task. These…

This study examined the relationship of different measures of syntactic complexity with rated quality for two genres of text produced by middle school students. It was hypothesized that different measures would be associated with distinct aspects of syntactic complexity; words per clause with greater use of structures more typical of expository…

Several previous studies (B. C. Adams, C. Clifton, & D. C. Mitchell, 1998; D. C. Mitchell, 1987; R. P. G. van Gompel & M. J. Pickering, 2001) have explored the question of whether the parser initially analyzes a noun phrase that follows an intransitive verb as the verb's direct object. Three eye-tracking experiments examined this issue in more…

This paper presents an analysis of the pragmatic use of concessive constructions in business letter discourse. In linguistics concession has been analyzed primarily within concessive clauses which have been widely studied, either alone or compared with other syntactic categories such as adversative, causal or conditional clauses. The term…