Idioms are phrases with figurative meanings that are not directly derived from the literal meanings of the words in the phrase. Idiom comprehension varies with: literality, whether the idiom is literally plausible; compositionality, whether individual words contribute to a figurative meaning; and contextual bias. We studied idiom comprehension in…

The discussion in this article offers a comparison between Relevance Theory as an account of human communication and Herbert Clark's (1996) sociocognitive Action Theory approach. It is argued that the differences are fundamental and impact analysis of all kinds of naturally occurring communicative data, including that produced by non-native…

Singapore's annual Speak Mandarin Campaign has been largely successful in shifting the language patterns of its Chinese citizens from Chinese dialects to Mandarin in all sectors. However, there has been a notable exception: the effort to have Chinese Singaporeans give their children Mandarin names, rather than dialect ones. In this paper, we…

College students' pronunciations of initial "c" and "g" were examined in English words and nonwords, both monosyllables and polysyllables. Pronunciations were influenced by adjacent context--whether the following letter was "e" or "i"--and by long-distance context--whether the item contained a suffix or spelling pattern characteristic of Latinate…

Contact with the English language, especially from the 20th century onwards, has had as a consequence an increase in the number of words that are borrowed from English into Spanish. This process is particularly noticeable in Spanish for Specific Purposes, and, more specifically, in the case of Spanish computer language. Although sociocultural and…

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses…

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this…

This paper describes the first prototype of an automated tool for detecting collocation errors in texts written by non-native speakers of English. Candidate strings are extracted by pattern matching over POS-tagged text. Since learner texts often contain spelling and morphological errors, the tool attempts to automatically correct them in order to…

This article describes two complementary research projects into lexical patterning and frequency in general and academic English. The research suggests that treating current popularly used wordlists such as the General Service List (GSL) and the Academic Word List (AWL) as distinct constructs is of questionable merit. Rather, there are strong…

How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and nonlinguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry…

This article explores the influence of idiomatic syntactic constructions (i.e., constructions whose phrase structure rules violate the rules that underlie the construction of other kinds of sentences in the language) on the acquisition of phrase structure. In Experiment 1, participants were trained on an artificial language generated from…

In this squib we examine the time course of children's acquisition of English to evaluate the basic insights of Kayne's (1981; 1984) proposals on preposition stranding. Kayne argued that the availability of preposition stranding (P-stranding) in English is parametrically linked to the availability of double object datives and the prepositional…

Purpose: There is a paucity of information detailing the phonological skills of Spanish-English bilingual children and comparing that information to information concerning the phonological skills of predominantly English-speaking (PE) and predominantly Spanish-speaking (PS) children. The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship…

A STRUCTURAL, LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO BILINGUAL DICTIONARIES WAS DESCRIBED. DETAILED DISCUSSIONS WERE INCLUDED FOR USES OF MORPHEMES, MORPHEMIC SEQUENCES, PHONEMES, PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS, AND ALLOPHONES. THIS REPORT IS ONE OF A SERIES OF 13 PAPERS PRESENTED AT A CONFERENCE ON LEXICOGRAPHY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, NOVEMBER 11-12, 1960. (GC)