Effectively constructing a confident authorial stance and framing one's argument in the context of the ongoing scholarly conversation are important skills for writers to acquire as they gain expertise writing in an academic discipline. Construction of an effective authorial stance is complicated by conventions of avoiding first-person pronouns in…

The perfective aspect marker in Chinese is partly functionally similar to inflectional suffixes in Indo-European languages but is non-inflectional and lexical in nature, lying thus at the semantics-syntax interface. This provides us with the opportunity to compare directly the syntactic and semantic constraints during second language (L2) sentence…

This study examined subject-object asymmetry and developmental sequence in the second language (L2) acquisition of three types of "wh"-extraction, i.e., English headed relatives, headless relatives, and embedded "wh"-questions. Sixty-four L1 Korean learners of English completed an elicited imitation task and a grammaticality…

The process of learning a second language requires vulnerability, and vulnerability demands trust. To put students into a language-learning environment where they are unsure of their abilities, do not know their classmates, and are getting a grade for their performance can lead to an atmosphere of hesitation and fear. It has been said that…

We investigate an apology format, "I'm sorry about it/that," where indexical terms (pronouns) refer to the offense rather than naming it. We identified two subsets in our collection of indexical apologies. In one, indexicals are subsequent either to the offense formulation or to an apology-relevant event; in the second, indexicals are…

It is a robust finding that ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous words. More recent studies (e.g., Rodd et al. in "J Mem Lang" 46:245-266, 2002) now indicate that this "ambiguity advantage" may in reality be a "polysemy advantage": caused by related senses (polysemy) rather than unrelated meanings…

The relevance of the presented problems due to the fact that reinterpreted the values producing the foundations and formation of the lexical meaning of the derived adjective occurs according to the laws of associative thinking and it should be explained through semantic-cognitive analysis. The goal of the article is the description and comparison…

The difficulties that students face when reading science texts go beyond understanding vocabulary and syntactic structures. Comprehension of science texts requires students to infer how these texts function as a unit to communicate scientific meaning. To help students in this process, science texts sometimes employ logical connectives (e.g.,…

This study investigates the influence of grammatical role and discourse-level cues on the interpretation of different pronominal forms in native speakers of French, native speakers of Turkish, and Turkish learners of French. In written questionnaires, we found that native speakers of French were influenced by discourse-level cues when interpreting…

According to previous research, speakers of European languages parse regularly-inflected, morphologically-complex words into stems and grammatical affixes during word recognition. In contrast, some studies suggest that late second language (L2) learners do not. We ask how these types of words are processed in Arabic, a language whose primary…

The purpose of this study was to find out, whether three methods of presenting input, were effective in relation to language aptitude. Persian-speaking learners of English were provided with 20 grammatical collocations (verb-preposition collocations) embedded in authentic passages, lexically/grammatically elaborated passages, and…

The revived interest in the notion of 'evaluative judgement' in higher education is motivated by commitment of researchers and practitioners to effectively implement learning-oriented assessment and cultivate this high-order cognitive ability to develop students' capacity for self-regulated learning. Recent studies have examined the affordances…

An essential component for assessing the accuracy and fluency of language learners is understanding how mode of communication and task type affect performance in second-language (L2) acquisition. This study investigates how text-based synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) and face-to-face (F2F) oral interaction can influence the…

This article explores the use of two epistemic adverbs in Argentine Spanish, "quizás" and "capaz". While scholars have noted the existence of "capaz" as an epistemic adverb, it had not been systematically studied prior to this investigation. To examine the epistemic stance of the adverbs, 117 participants completed an…

Research with native speakers indicates that, during word recognition, regularly inflected words undergo parsing that segments them into stems and affixes. In contrast, studies with learners suggest that this parsing may not take place in L2. This study's research questions are: Do L2 Spanish learners store and process regularly inflected,…