Our analysis of farmer and tavern-keeper William Manning's 1798 "Key of Libberty" extends the concept of American republican rhetoric to include both elite and vernacular forms. We find that the key components of Manning's vernacular republicanism are: an aggressive use of the rhetoric of critique; the demand for transparency in public argument;…

A word may mean different things in different contexts. The current study explored the changing denotations of spatial terms, focusing on how the distance inferred from a spatial description varied as a function of the size of the objects being spatially related. We examined both terms that explicitly convey distance (i.e., topological terms such…

This research investigates preschoolers' use of desires for word learning. Three-year-old children were shown pairs of novel toys and were asked about their own desire and told about a researcher's desire. For half of the children the researcher liked the same object they did and for the other half the researcher liked a different object. The…

The authors examined the online construction of identity and sexuality in a large sample of conversations from monitored and unmonitored teen chat rooms. More than half of the 583 participants (identified by a distinct screen name) communicated identity information, most frequently gender. In this way, participants compensated for the text-based…

Previous studies have demonstrated that bilingualism among Latinos in the United States may not necessarily result in negative status attainment consequences. Such studies have typically overlooked gender differences in the consequences of bilingualism. Using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study (N=866 females; 737 males), we…

People frequently make assumptions about others because of their spoken or written use of a particular dialect or language. The varieties of English that people use are often regarded as indicators of corresponding intelligence, competence, motives, and morality. Such assumptions--frequently based on myths and misconceptions about the nature of…

In both the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle countries, books which provide examples of letters written in English and guidelines for writing these letters are available for students, business people, and any others who have an interest or need for writing such letters. These model letters are not only for business correspondence, but also…

The activation of arousal components for emotion-laden words in English (e.g. kiss, death) was examined in two groups of participants: English monolinguals and Spanish-English bilinguals. In Experiment 1, emotion-laden words were rated on valence and perceived arousal. These norms were used to construct prime-target word pairs that were used in…

Nearly 40 years have passed since the publication of Rubin's renowned study on Paraguayan bilingualism. The present study compares the results of surveys conducted in the years 2000-2001 with data from Rubin's 1960-1961 investigation. The main objective of this study is to examine the linguistic changes that have occurred in four decades and the…

While decline and/or extinction threaten an ever-increasing number of languages, most of these are minority tongues that struggle for survival against dominant languages. The present paper reports the case of Belarusian, a national and co-official language, which the great majority of the population of Belarus considers as its mother tongue, but…

This paper reports our findings and observations on the difficulties of university students learning Greek as a foreign language at the University of Thessaly. A group of medical students, whose native language was Arabic, answered two questionnaires concerning their use of and competence in Greek. The results showed that first and second year…

We studied the correlation between response to fluvoxamine and serotonin transporter gene promoter region polymorphism (5-HTTLPR). Eighteen children with autistic disorder completed a 12-week double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized crossover study of fluvoxamine. Behavioral assessments were obtained before and at 12 weeks of treatment.…

This study focuses on the use of electronic discussion boards with elementary-aged English as a Second Language (ESL) students. The purpose of the study is to investigate students' communicative competence in a computer-mediated communication environment. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyze 956 messages posted by 28 ESL…

Infants of 18 and 24 months acquiring English were tested in a preferential looking task on their ability to detect ungrammaticalities caused by manipulating a single function word in sentences. Infants heard grammatical sentences in which the determiner "the" preceded a target noun, as well as three ungrammatical conditions in which "the" was…

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These…