The present study used a Truth Value Judgment Task to investigate whether changes in sentence structure lead to corresponding changes in the assignment of scope relations by Mandarin-speaking children and adults. In one condition, participants were presented with ordinary negative sentences containing disjunction; this condition was designed to…

The National Research Council's report, "Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering" (Singer, Nielsen, & Schweingruber, 2012), states that discipline-based education research (DBER), such as geoscience education research (GER), is informed by research about…

This paper shows the need to triangulate different approaches in Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research to fully understand late bilinguals' interlanguage grammars. Methodologically, we show how experimental and corpus data can be (and should be) triangulated by reporting on a corpus study (Lozano and Mendikoetxea in…

The variable success in learning a second language (L2) may be best explained by varying degrees of motivation. This study investigated whether individual differences in appraisal dimensions of motivation explained explicit and implicit syntactic knowledge. Participants learned three syntactic structures under implicit and explicit training…

Some errors in the learning of algebra suggest that students might have difficulties giving meaning to algebraic symbolism. In this paper, we use problem posing to analyze the students' capacity to assign meaning to algebraic symbolism and the difficulties that students encounter in this process, depending on the characteristics of the algebraic…

Purpose: This study was specifically designed to examine how verb variability and verb overlap in a morphosyntactic priming task affect typically developing children's use and generalization of auxiliary IS. Method: Forty typically developing 2- to 3-year-old native English-speaking children with inconsistent auxiliary IS production were primed…

The last 15 years has seen a tremendous growth in research on structural priming among second language (L2) speakers. Structural priming is the phenomenon whereby speakers are more likely to repeat a structure they have recently heard or produced. Research on L2 structural priming speaks to key issues regarding the underlying linguistic and…

One area of writing that may be particularly problematic, causing both academic and behavioral challenges for writers with learning disabilities, is constructing sentences. Sentences are the building blocks of coherent and effective writing and constructing syntactically correct and complex sentences is a critical skill characterizing expert…

How important is the ability to freely control eye movements for reading comprehension? And how does the parser make use of this freedom? We investigated these questions using coregistration of eye movements and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) while participants read either freely or in a computer-controlled word-by-word format (also known…

Purpose: Although there is evidence that emotional valence of stimuli impacts lexical processes, there is limited work investigating its specific impact on lexical retrieval. The current study aimed to determine the degree to which emotional valence of pictured stimuli impacts naming latencies in healthy younger and older adults. Method: Eighteen…

This paper presents an analysis of the structure of relative clauses with an indirect object or adjunct gap in two Mundaka Basque varieties ("Mundaka Basque I" and "Mundaka Basque II"). In Mundaka Basque I, relativization of indirect objects and adjuncts is grammatical when the relative clause is in subject or direct object…

In Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture, the well-formed expressions of a language are licensed by correspondences between phonology, syntax, and conceptual structure. I show how this architecture can be used to make sense of the existence of parasitic gap constructions. A parasitic gap is one that is rendered acceptable because of the presence of…

This study explored pronominal resolution as a measure of reading comprehension beyond single sentences. Specifically, it was hypothesized that the ability to specify the referents of pronouns like "this" and "these" that have variable antecedents would be a good probe of the quality of the reader's mental model. This idea was…

Following Swales' (1990) influential study on research article (RA) introductions, some attention has increasingly been paid to other rhetorical units of both expert and learners' writing, including titles. A key and effective discursive means through which titles are constructed and presented is the syntactic configuration. The present study,…

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…