We report three experiments that investigated whether the linguistic behavior of participants in a dialogue is affected by their role within that interaction. All experiments were concerned with the way in which speakers choose between syntactic forms with very similar meanings. Theories of dialogue assume that speakers address their contributions…

The purpose of this study was to expand the current literature on word definitions by focusing on definitions of idioms provided by several age groups. Preadolescents, young adolescents, older adolescents, and adults wrote definitions for 10 frequently used idioms and also rated their familiarity with the idiomatic expressions. Participants'…

A theoretical variable such as integrity, conscientiousness, or academic honesty may correspond to either a construct or a concept, but the standard idiom does not distinguish the two. One can describe the difference between constructs and concepts in terms of set theory. Constructs extend over actual cases, whereas concepts extend over both…

Three cued-recall experiments examined the effect of category typicality on the ordering of words in sentence production. Past research has found that typical items tend to be mentioned before atypical items in a phrase--a pattern usually associated with lexical variables (like word frequency), and yet typicality is a conceptual variable.…

What are the chances of a dyad of Spanish-speaking strangers using informal address in casual, initial interactions in Buenos Aires, Argentina, today? To discover the pattern(s) of contemporary address, the Principal Investigator (PI) conducted a sociolinguistic experiment focusing on strangers' initial interactions to minimize the influence of…

This article explores the impact of Hong Kong's transition from British colony to Chinese Special Administrative Region on patterns of language use in the domain of professional employment. In particular, it presents the findings of a large-scale multifaceted investigation into the roles of Putonghua, Cantonese, written Chinese and English in the…

With the dramatic growth of text information, there is an increasing need for powerful text mining systems that can automatically discover useful knowledge from text. Text is generally associated with all kinds of contextual information. Those contexts can be explicit, such as the time and the location where a blog article is written, and the…

This study examines pragmatic differentiation in early trilingual development through a longitudinal analysis of language choice in a developing Tagalog-Spanish-English trilingual child. The child's patterns of language choice with different language users are analyzed at age 1 ; 10 and 2 ; 4 to examine: (1) whether evidence for pragmatic…

In order to explore the impact of a degraded semantic system on the structure of language production, we analysed transcripts from autobiographical memory interviews to identify naturally-occurring speech errors by eight patients with semantic dementia (SD) and eight age-matched normal speakers. Relative to controls, patients were significantly…

The recognition of second language (L2) development as a dynamic process has led to different claims about how language development unfolds, what represents a learner's linguistic system (i.e., interlanguage) at a certain point in time, and how that system changes over time (Verspoor, de Bot, & Lowie, 2011). Responding to de Bot and…

In this study we investigated the recovery patterns of language and cognitive functions in patients with post-traumatic language processing deficits and in patients with aphasia following a stroke. The correlation of specific language functions and cognitive functions was analyzed in the acute phase and 6 months later. Significant recovery of the…

Technologically enhanced learning environments raise complex challenges for their designers, developers and users. Design patterns and pattern languages have recently emerged as a potential framework for addressing some of these challenges. However, the uptake of design patterns has been slow outside of the computer science community. We argue…

The role of language contact in linguistic change remains a polemic issue in the field of contact linguistics. Many researchers (Weinreich, 1953; Lefebvre, 1985; Prince, 1988; Silva-Corvalan, 1994; King, 2000; Sankoff, 2002; Labov, 2007) believe that there are limits on the types of linguistic patterns that can be transmitted across languages,…

Thirty-one chat reference conversations were linguistically analyzed, compared to twenty-three instant messaging (IM) conversations held between students, and further correlated to students' satisfaction with the reference interaction. Conversations between librarians and students in chat reference are more formal than those solely involving…

Recent event-related potential studies report a P600 effect to incongruous verbs preceded by semantically associated inanimate noun-phrase (NP) arguments, e.g., "eat" in "At breakfast the eggs would eat...". This P600 effect may reflect the processing cost incurred when semantic-thematic relationships between critical verbs and their preceding NP…