In a recent study, preschoolers adapted their syntactic expectations about a familiar phrase in French; this adaptation affected later word learning. In two experiments, we probed the generality of this finding by replicating the experiment and extending it to a different expression in English. We examined the ambiguous phrase "the…

Children's knowledge of referential dependency involved in the interpretation of reflexives has been investigated mainly from a purely syntactic perspective. However, syntax alone is insufficient to account for various kinds of referential dependencies, as many of them require discourse interpretations. To fill this gap, the present study…

This present study examines the lexical frames in natural disaster news with the goal to create a list of commonly-occurring lexical frames in this news genre as a resource for students and teachers. A lexical frame in this study is defined as a sequence of words with a slot of one word within the frame that can be filled by two or more variants.…

Little is known about the effect of pre-reading exposure on collocational learning. This study used eye-tracking and offline measures (form recall and recognition) to explore the effectiveness of pre-reading study and reading exposure on the processing and learning of novel collocations. Three learning conditions were evaluated: reading-only…

This study provides a multidimensional analysis of the structural and semantic peculiarities of phraseological units to identify the general, the similar, and the national-specific, which are different in terms of phraseological figurativeness. Most of the magical images and symbols became the basis of the symbolism of the numerals, which became…

Combining adjective meaning with the modified noun is particularly challenging for children under three years. Previous research suggests that in processing noun-adjective phrases children may over-rely on noun information, delaying or omitting adjective interpretation. However, the question of whether this difficulty is modulated by semantic…

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., "mind control," "carbon dioxide"; N =…

Research on prosody suggests it is an important consideration for both reading fluency and reading comprehension however research on how to teach prosody is limited. This systematic review expands the understanding of prosody by examining intervention studies of prosody focused on instruction to improve syntax and phrasing outcomes. A total of 18…

Research has shown that food metaphors play an important role in humans' conceptualization of various domains of experience. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the phraseology of food metaphors. This research aims to investigate food metaphors and their phraseology. Particularly, this paper focuses on the lemmas "consume"…

The paper discusses the interpretation of adversative clauses introduced by "pero" and concessive clauses introduced by "aunque" in Spanish. Specifically, the discussion centers around structures that exhibit the forms: (i) "A, pero B," (ii) "A, aunque B-INDICATIVE," and (iii) "A, aunque…

The availability of a first language translation equivalent (i.e., congruency) has repeatedly been shown to influence second-language collocation processing in decontextualized tasks. However, no study to date has examined how L2 speakers process congruent/incongruent collocations on-line in a real-world context. The present study aimed to fill…

While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive…

The meaning and emotional coloring of phraseology in the Tatar language may depend on the context and method of use. For example, the same phraseology may have different meanings and emotional connotations in different situations. In this study, we use a corpus provided by these researchers to analyze the expressions of emotions in the Tatar…

This paper investigates the comprehension of Relative Clauses (RCs) in 15 Mandarin children with suspected Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (aged between 4; 5 and 6; 0) and 29 typically developing (TD) controls. Results from a Character Picture Matching Task indicate that (i) the subject RC was better understood than the object RC in children…