This study aimed at investigating EFL pre-service teachers' attitudes towards pronunciation and pronunciation teaching. Another purpose was to explore the outcomes of pronunciation instruction of EFL pre-service teachers' phonological development and, based on the findings, to provide suggestions taking learners' pedagogical needs into…

The debate on how to understand such expressions of multiplication entailing "times" as "n times more than" and "increase (by) n times" has been on and off in China since the 1980s. A review of literature seems to suggest that despite early-stage divergence in understanding, there is a general consensus among the…

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT)…

Understanding discourse connectives is an important step to achieving effective verbal communication. Yet, the ability of adult native speakers to understand the broad range of connectives found in most Indo-European languages has seldom been assessed. In this article we demonstrate that some adults have difficulties recognizing correct and…

Different words generally have different meanings. However, some words seemingly share similar meanings. An example are null and overt pronouns in Italian, which both refer to an individual in the discourse. Is the interpretation and processing of a form affected by the existence of another form with a similar meaning? With a pupillary response…

Although there is a wide range of studies on the use of PowerPoint Presentations (PPP) in different fields, few studies have investigated the effects of different aspects of multi-modal PowerPoint presentation on the language comprehension of foreign language students. This study was conducted to investigate the effect of PowerPoint-supported…

The present study extended research on the effectiveness of automated writing evaluation (AWE) systems. Sixth graders were randomly assigned by classroom to an AWE condition that used "Project Essay Grade Writing" (n = 56) or a word-processing condition that used Google Docs (n = 58). Effectiveness was evaluated using multiple metrics:…

The purpose of this longitudinal study was to examine whether young learners of varying reading and spelling performance, identified in Grade 2, can be distinguished retrospectively from kindergarten, based on their growth profiles in cognitive (planning, attention, working memory--WM) and linguistic (phonological--PA and naming speed--RAN)…

The first stage in the learning process is the perception of the learning input by the student. This perception, which develops due to many factors in the learning process, has also great importance in skill acquisition. Therefore, the perception of basic language skills by the students, determining how the students make sense of the skills may…

Purpose: Children with speech sound disorder (SSD) mispronounce more speech sounds than is typical for their age and a growing body of research suggests that a deficit in speech perception abilities contributes to development of the disorder. However, little work has been done to characterize the neurophysiological processes indexing speech…

We introduce a novel measure of abstractness based on the amount of information of a concept computed from its position in a semantic taxonomy. We refer to this measure as "precision". We propose two alternative ways to measure precision, one based on the path length from a concept to the root of the taxonomic tree, and another one based…

The question of whether humans represent grammatical knowledge as a binary condition on membership in a set of well-formed sentences, or as a probabilistic property has been the subject of debate among linguists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists for many decades. Acceptability judgments present a serious problem for both classical binary…

Two experiments were conducted to examine adult learners' ability to extract multiple statistics in simultaneously presented visual and auditory input. Experiment 1 used a cross-situational learning paradigm to test whether English speakers were able to use co-occurrences to learn word-to-object mappings and concurrently form object categories…

The present study examines how second language learners (L2) assign the thematic roles of agent/patient in Spanish passive sentences with "ser" (often referred to as the true passive) when it is their initial exposure to this structure. The target sentences were preceded by a contextual sentence. After hearing the two sentences,…

With the increasing refinement of language processing models and the new discoveries about which variables can modulate these processes, stimuli selection for experiments with a factorial design is becoming a tough task. Selecting sets of words that differ in one variable, while matching these same words into dozens of other confounding variables…