Readers' decisions about the relevance and significance of research presented in a journal article are often influenced by the introduction section. Several factors contribute to authors' writing of effective introductions. This descriptive study aimed to explore strategies used by English and Turkish authors in the introduction section of…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as "wh"-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a "gap-driven" interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that "feed" is transitive may notice…

The majority of task repetition studies have focused on learners' oral production, but whether task repetition can promote learning in other skill areas such as writing remains to be seen. The current study compared the effect of procedural and content repetition on French learners' accurate production of the passé composé during collaborative…

The paper focuses on the semantic derivation models of irrational vocabulary -- a semantic class of words that denote the situation of experience that is not based on logical reasoning or clear thinking. The study shows the characteristics of the development of an irrational vocabulary semantic paradigm and reveals semantic derivation models of…

The relation between caregiver follow-in utterances with verbs presented in different states of dyadic engagement and later child expressive verb vocabulary in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) was examined in 29 toddlers with ASD and their caregivers. Caregiver verb input in follow-in utterances presented during higher order supported…

It has been argued that the distinction between factivity and non-factivity is more fundamental to mental state understanding than that between false beliefs and reality. The present study examined children's growing understanding of all possible contrasts between the factive verb "know" and the non-factive verbs "think" and…

Children learning a verb may benefit from hearing it across situations . At the same time, in everyday contexts, situations in which a verb is heard will be interrupted by distracting events. Using Structural Alignment theory as a framework, Study 1 asks whether children can learn a verb when irrelevant, interleaved events are present. Two½- and…

The objective of this paper is to analyze the impact of the factors that stimulate inspiration in the design process. An empirical study is proposed in this paper. Three factors were summarized, including knowledge, knowledge relations and innovative strategies. Representations of these three factors that were extracted from the international…

Adults create and update predictions about what speakers will say next. This study asks whether prediction can drive language acquisition, by testing whether 3- to 4-year-old children (n = 45) adapt to recent information when learning novel words. The study used a syntactic context which can precede both nouns and verbs to manipulate children's…

Verbs are often uttered before the events they describe. By 2 years of age, toddlers can learn from such an encounter. Hearing a novel verb in transitive sentences (e.g. "The boy lorped the cat"), even with no visual referent present, they later map it to a causative meaning (e.g. "feed") (e.g. Yuan & Fisher, [Yuan, S.,…

The objective of this research is to build automated models that emulate VerbNet, a semantic resource for English verbs. VerbNet has been built and expanded by linguists, forming a hierarchical clustering of verbs with common semantic and syntactic expressions, and is useful in semantic tasks. A major drawback is the difficulty of extending a…

In two visual world experiments we disentangled the influence of order of mention (first vs. second mention), grammatical role (subject vs object), and semantic role (proto-agent vs proto-patient) on 7- to 10-year-olds' real-time interpretation of German pronouns. Children listened to "SVO" or "OVS" sentences containing active…

This study was conducted at a university based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The purpose of the study was to determine if the explicit instruction of selected grammar aspect, modal auxiliary verbs, improved students' ability to write English. The study was qualitative in nature and a case study design was adopted. The focus was in relation to a…

The present study investigated the role of morphosyntactic information in the acquisition of transitive and intransitive verb argument structures (VAS) in the Japanese language, which allows massive omissions of arguments and case markers. In particular, we investigated how the 'variation sets' proposed by Küntay and Slobin work in Japanese.…