In Modern Standard Arabic punctuation marks are less frequent than in European languages. Using discourse markers is instead preferred, which tends to yield long clauses. This, in turn, is assumed to foster sentence splitting in translation from Arabic into English and into Spanish. This assumption was tested on a sample of 470 554 words from a…

Under the noisy-channel framework of language comprehension, comprehenders infer the speaker's intended meaning by integrating the perceived utterance with their knowledge of the language, the world, and the kinds of errors that can occur in communication. Previous research has shown that, when sentences are improbable under the meaning prior…

Adults learning a new language tend to judge unconventional utterances more leniently than fluent speakers do; ratings on acceptable utterances, however, tend to align more closely with fluent speakers. This asymmetry raises a question as to whether unconventional utterances can be statistically preempted by conventional utterances for adult…

In academic performance assessments, citations and citation-based metrics play a pivotal role. Among the elements that influence the success of an article, the title stands out as the first point of contact for editors, reviewers, and readers. Consequently, the title length-citation relationship is an extensively studied issue. While the dominant…

Interpreting a sentence can be characterized as a rational process in which comprehenders integrate linguistic input with top-down knowledge (e.g., plausibility). One type of evidence for this is that comprehenders sometimes reinterpret sentences to arrive at interpretations that conflict with the original language input. Does this reflect a…

With the proliferation of corpora, various syntactic analysis methodologies have been developed. However, syntactic analysis of Chinese sentences demands a theory that focuses more on word order and the interaction between content and function words, which is satisfied by pattern grammar theory. This study investigates the effectiveness of pattern…

In a seminal study, Cameron-Faulkner et al. made two important observations about utterance-level constructions in English child-directed speech (CDS). First, they observed that canonical in/transitive sentences are surprisingly infrequent in child-direct speech (given that SVO word order is often thought to play a key role in the acquisition of…

The current study combined sentence plausibility judgment and self-paced reading tasks to examine the comprehension strategies and processing patterns of Chinese deaf individuals when comprehending written Chinese sentences with syntactic-semantic cue conflicts. Similar to findings from previous crosslinguistic studies on deaf readers, the Chinese…

Much research in the functional linguistics literature suggests that the use of zero pronouns is driven by the degree of interclausal connection. Kim (1990, 1992) claims that in clause chain languages such as Korean and Japanese, zero pronouns are primarily used following an interclausal connective with a tight interclausal connection that…

This study aimed to design a task in an everyday context to support high school students' exploration of the truth values of propositional conditionals and to understand their difficulties. The results showed that students could identify that the truth value of a propositional conditional is determined by two variables (the truth values of the…

Background: Early intervention is recommended for pre-school children with low language. However, few robustly evaluated language interventions for young children exist. Furthermore, in many interventions the theoretical underpinnings are underspecified and the 'active ingredients' of the interventions not tested. This paper presents a…

This study examined and compared the comprehension of Mandarin ditransitive constructions in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) and children with autism spectrum disorder plus language impairment (ALI). Eighteen children with DLD, 17 children with ALI, and 27 age-matched typically developing (TDA) children, participated in a…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the linguistic content of the Spanish HINT and the Spanish AzBio sentence tests. The results revealed that the Spanish AzBio is linguistically more complex as compared with the Spanish HINT in terms of sentence length, complexity, and grammatical structure.

Many bilinguals switch languages in daily-life conversations. Although this usually happens within sentence context and with another speaker, most research on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the production of language switches has studied individual words. Here, we examined how context influences both switching frequency and the temporal cost…

We consider the reference-based approach for Automatic Short Answer Grading (ASAG) that involves scoring a textual constructed student answer comparing to a teacher-provided reference answer. The reference answer does not cover the variety of student answers as it contains only specific examples of correct answers. Considering other language…