Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions, as a subtype of Chinese multiword sequences, are challenging to acquire for second language (L2) learners. However, little is known about L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative DCs. This study investigated whether the acquisition of…

This study investigates whether statistical learning ability, conceptualized as a cognitive ability to learn regularities implicitly, is a good predictor for L2 learners' online language processing performance. Native-English-speaking adults, as a control group, and native-Korean-speaking adult L2 learners of English participated. They completed:…

Purpose: This study examined the frequency, direction, and structural characteristics of code-switching (CS) during narratives by Spanish-English bilingual children with and without developmental language disorder (DLD) to determine whether children with DLD exhibit unique features in their CS that may inform clinical decision-making. Method:…

This research investigates disciplinary variations using syntactic features in Pakistani academic writing (AW). The corpus of this research is developed from 160 dissertations across four disciplinary divisions and analyzed through AntConc. Results reveal heterogeneous and homogenous use of the said features. Heterogeneity is seen in relation to…

Many students plagiarize unintentionally. Students are told that plagiarizing is claiming someone else's ideas or information as their own, and they are told to cite sources because failure to do so is dishonest and plagiarism has serious consequences. So, students are told to paraphrase, not plagiarize, but are they taught explicitly how to…

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students' development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, "Reflection";…

Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…

To examine whether children's acquisition of perspective-marking language supports development in their ability to reason about mental states, we conducted a longitudinal study testing whether proficiency with complement clauses around age 3 explained variance in false-belief reasoning 6 months later. Forty-five English-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds…

Purpose: The readability and comprehensibility of Learner's Permit Knowledge Test practice questions and the relationship with test failure rates across states and the District of Columbia were examined. Method: Failure rates were obtained from department representatives. Practice test questions were extracted from drivers' manuals and department…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to examine the degree to which quantitative aspects of dosage (dose, dose frequency, and total intervention duration) have been examined in intervention studies for children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Additionally, to establish the optimal quantitative dosage characteristics for phonology,…

This article is dedicated to the issue of morphological analysis and synthesis of word forms in a linguistic analyzer, which is a significant feature of corpus linguistics. The article discourses in detail the morphological analysis, the creation of artificial language, grammar and analyzer, the general scheme of the analysis program that…

This meta-analysis examined associations between the quantity and quality of parental linguistic input and children's language. Pooled effect size for quality (i.e., vocabulary diversity and syntactic complexity; k = 35; N = 1,958; r = .33) was more robust than for quantity (i.e., number of words/tokens/utterances; k = 33; N = 1,411; r = .20) of…

Constructivist approaches to language acquisition predict that form-function mappings are derived from distributional patterns in the input, and their contextual embedding. This requires a detailed analysis of the input, and the integration of information from different contingencies. Regarding the acquisition of morphology, it is shown which…

Measures of syntactic complexity such as mean length of T-unit have been common measures of language proficiency in studies of second language acquisition. Despite the ubiquity and usefulness of such structure-based measures, they could be complemented with measures based on usage-based theories, which focus on the development of not just…

In a body of empirical research, it has been observed that young children from across different linguistic communities adhered to a particular type of nonadult interpretation of disjunction: They appear to interpret disjunction conjunctively. Through three experiments with Japanese-speaking preschoolers, we investigate the source of this nonadult…