In South Africa, democratic consolidation involves not only building a new state, but also new interfaces between state and society. To strengthen the agency of citizens at these interfaces, recent approaches to development stress the notion of "participatory citizenship." The purpose of this article is to explore the links, rarely…

What exactly has changed in the production of secondary school English over the last decade? To provide one part of an answer to that question, this paper takes the practice of annotation--a defining activity of the subject English in the UK seldom researched--and uses it as a device for uncovering aspects of changes in the subject. The…

Most research involving the analyses of discourses targets particular points in time or relatively short durations (i.e., one semester, one year). Failure to recognize the ways discourses operate over long periods of time limits the ability of educators and researchers to recognize the temporal nature of meaning construction. Through this…

In daily activities, humans must attend and respond to a range of important items and inhibit and not respond to unimportant distractions. Our current understanding of these processes is largely based on perceptually simple stimuli. This study investigates the interaction of conceptual-semantic categorization and inhibitory processing using Event…

Humans have knowledge about the properties of their native language at various levels of representation; sound, structure, and meaning computation constitute the core components of any linguistic theory. Although the brain sciences have engaged with representational theories of sound and syntactic structure, the study of the neural bases of…

This parent-research article juxtaposes two theoretical frameworks in support of an analysis of a young child's uses of color in her sign-making; that is, in her efforts at writing and drawing. Perspectives from both social semiotics and the idea of literacy learning as social practice frame the examination and interpretation of the early…

Background: Traits and mental states are considered to be inter-related parts of theory of mind. Attribution research demonstrates the influential role played by traits in social cognition. However, there has been little investigation into how individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) understand traits. Method: The ability of individuals…

Bilinguals report more tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) failures than monolinguals. Three accounts of this disadvantage are that bilinguals experience between-language interference at (a) semantic and/or (b) phonological levels, or (c) that bilinguals use each language less frequently than monolinguals. Bilinguals who speak one language and sign another…

The influence of phonological (i.e. individual sounds), lexical (i.e. whole-word forms) and semantic (i.e. meaning) characteristics on the words known by infants age 1;4 to 2;6 was examined, using an existing database (Dale & Fenson, 1996). For each noun, word frequency, two phonological (i.e. positional segment average, biphone average), two…

Contextual synonym is a linguistic phenomenon often applied but rarely discussed. This paper is to discuss the semantic relationships between contextual synonyms and the requirements under which words can be used as contextual synonyms between each other. The three basic relationships are embedment, intersection and non-coherence. The requirements…

Digital technologies surround our lives today and many adolescent students are actively engaged in reading and writing through multimodal digital technologies. The omnipresence of digital technologies in today's society inevitably influences students' literacy practices. Thus, there is an imminent need on the teacher's part to infuse technologies…

The article describes and discusses the learning potential of unofficial techno-literacy activities in the classroom with regards to Swedish 7-8-year-olds' exploration of semiotic resources when interacting with computers. In classroom contexts where every child works with his or her own computer, such activities tend to take up a substantial…

"Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frameworks have been based on spoken code-switching. This volume presents a collection of new work on the alternation of…

It is broadly agreed that the processing of a word triad with a common remote associate (coherent triad) leads to its partial activation, which is the process underlying intuitive coherence judgments. The present studies demonstrate that this process not only is independent of the intention to find the common associate (CA), but rather may be…

The authors investigated linguistic relativity effects by examining the semantic effects of grammatical gender (present in Italian but absent in English) in fluent bilingual speakers as compared with monolingual speakers. In an error-induction experiment, they used responses by monolingual speakers to establish a baseline for bilingual speakers…