This dissertation compares the knowledge of Russian Verbal Aspect in two types of learners enrolled in college level Russian courses: foreign language learners of Russian whose native language is English and heritage language speakers of Russian whose dominant language at the time of study is English. Russian Aspect is known to be problematic both…

Self-regulated learning processes have a potential to enhance the motivation of knowledge workers to take part in learning and reflection about learning, and thus contribute to the resolution of an important research challenge in workplace learning. An equally important research challenge for the successful completion of each step of a…

The authors present a computational model that builds a holographic lexicon representing both word meaning and word order from unsupervised experience with natural language. The model uses simple convolution and superposition mechanisms to learn distributed holographic representations for words. The structure of the resulting lexicon can account…

This study discusses cognitive processes when speakers produce language in real time, with its focus on cross-linguistic differences in the procedural aspect of language use. It demonstrates that the syntactic characteristics of a language shape the speakers' overall process of sentence planning and production: how they construct sentential…

Phraseological phenomena--ranging from idioms to collocations to discourse organizers--have received increasing attention in second language acquisition (SLA), and examinations of such strings are characterized by two distinct perspectives on formulaic language. On the one hand, different speech acts seem to be commonly realized using certain…

Prosodic information aids segmentation of the continuous speech signal and thereby facilitates auditory speech processing. Durational and pitch variations are prosodic cues especially necessary to convey prosodic boundaries, but alaryngeal speakers have inconsistent control over acoustic parameters such as F0 and duration, being as a result noisy…

There is growing consensus that, for trained readers, poetic-text processing involves a genre decision, which triggers genre-based conventional expectations and directs attention to the textual devices. This research examines how students recognize and process texts in poetic versus prose form at different points during their literary education.…

This paper describes the development of the Wildcat Corpus of native- and foreign-accented English, a corpus containing scripted and spontaneous speech recordings from 24 native speakers of American English and 52 non-native speakers of English. The core element of this corpus is a set of spontaneous speech recordings, for which a new method of…

Introduction: The objective of this study is understand the information needs that businesses have while seeking Library and Information Science professionals and analyse how they formulate those needs. Method: The analysis is performed by examining the professional skills and capabilities demanded in job offers published. A total of 1,020 job…

This study examines the effect of contextual clues on the use of strategies (inferencing and ignoring) and knowledge sources (semantics, morphology, world knowledge, and others) for processing unfamiliar words in listening comprehension. Three types of words were investigated: words with local co-text clues, global co-text clues and extra-textual…

Fundamental learning abilities related to the implicit encoding of sequential structure have been postulated to underlie language acquisition and processing. However, there is very little direct evidence to date supporting such a link between implicit statistical learning and language. In three experiments using novel methods of assessing implicit…

This paper explores whether the poor mastery of morphosyntax exhibited by second language (L2) learners can be tied to difficulties with non-syntactic processing. Specifically, we examine whether problems with English regular and irregular past tense are related to poor L2 phonological ability and lexical access, respectively. In Experiment 1, L2…

As part of an evaluation of a web-based early literacy intervention, ABRACADABRA, a small exploratory study was conducted over one term in three primary schools in the Northern Territory. Of particular concern was the relationship between attendance and the acquisition of early literacy skills of Indigenous and non-Indigenous children. Using the…

Most empirical research in L2 vowel perception focuses on the development of groups of learners. However, recent studies indicate that individual learners' developmental paths in L2 vowel perception may not be uniform (e.g., Escudero, 2001; Escudero and Boersma, 2004; Morrison, 2009). The aim of the present study is to add to this line of research…

This article presents a study of a between-subjects design experiment on the comprehension of telicity in simple telic predicates (e.g., "John filled the bucket") and locatum predicates (e.g., "the water filled the bucket") in L1 Spanish. Weist, Wysocka, and Lyytinen (1991) for English and Finnish, and Van Hout (1997, 1998b) for English and Dutch…