While synonymy has been extensively studied, few studies have examined the ditransitive construction of synonyms across English varieties. Informed by construction grammar viewing pattern-meaning combinations as constructions and using a 1.9-billion-word corpus of texts from 20 countries, this article analyzes four different ways of expressing…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

The process of spoken word recognition is influenced by both bottom-up sensory information and top-down cognitive information. These cues are used to process the phonological and semantic representations of speech. Several studies have used EEG/ERPs to study the neural mechanisms of children's spoken word recognition, but less is known about the…

Metalinguistic Awareness is the ability to consciously reflect on and manipulate language, from the level of the phoneme, to words, to whole phrases. Research has shown that engaging in metalinguistic activities can have a positive impact on reading. This article details some of the component skills of metalinguistic awareness (in this case,…

Comparing legal, policy, and statute writing--from stone records of ancient Britain civil servants to opinions of the U.S. Supreme Court--this article demonstrates how weaving threads of textual language variation and change can innervate writing in the disciplines and history of the English language courses, particularly courses designated for…

In today's fast-changing world, it is essential to equip English as a Second Language learners with strong literacy skills, empowering them to critically assess information, adjust to technological shifts, and engage in global discussions. However, what remains questionable is the suitable pedagogical practices and the teachers' and the learners'…

With the emergence of short video and the development of mobile internet, short video software, such as TikTok and Kwai, has emerged. Based on the semantic understanding technology of teaching short videos, a teaching management platform was built to push healthy and positive short video for students' content in a targeted way. Taking the 21st…

Explanatory item response models (EIRMs) have been applied to investigate the effects of person covariates, item covariates, and their interactions in the fields of reading education and psycholinguistics. In practice, it is often assumed that the relationships between the covariates and the logit transformation of item response probability are…

Explanatory item response models (EIRMs) have been applied to investigate the effects of person covariates, item covariates, and their interactions in the fields of reading education and psycholinguistics. In practice, it is often assumed that the relationships between the covariates and the logit transformation of item response probability are…

To pinpoint difficulties in the second language (L2) processing of temporarily ambiguous sentences, this study investigates first language (L1) effects and effects of verb bias, i.e. frequency information about preferential verb complements, on semantic persistence effects in L2 sentence comprehension. We tested 32 L1 German and 32 L1 Turkish…

Polysemy has always become a significant issue in interdisciplinary studies, mainly because particular words or phrases tend to have multiple meanings and the way to decide on the intended meanings involves cultural understanding that may be problematic for different groups of people. This paper divides the main research questions into two…

Concreteness ratings are frequently used in a variety of disciplines to operationalize differences between concrete and abstract words and concepts. However, most ratings studies present items in isolation, thereby overlooking the potential polysemy of words. Consequently, ratings for polysemous words may be conflated, causing a threat to the…

During acquisition, children must learn both the meanings of words and how to interpret them in context. For example, children must learn the logical semantics of the scalar quantifier "some" and its pragmatically enriched meaning: 'some but not all'. Some studies have shown that 'scalar implicature' -- that "some" implies…

How do children acquire exact meanings for number words like three or forty-seven? In recent years, a lively debate has probed the cognitive systems that support learning, with some arguing that an evolutionarily ancient "approximate number system" drives early number word meanings, and others arguing that learning is supported chiefly…

Semantic ambiguity has been shown to slow comprehension, although it is unclear whether this ambiguity disadvantage is attributable to competition in semantic activation or difficulties in response selection. We tested the two accounts by examining semantic relatedness decisions to homonyms, or words with multiple unrelated meanings (e.g.,…