As society shifts towards spending more time online for business and leisure, examining human behavior in virtual environments is crucial. To better understand the role that games play in our society, I analyze social experience in World of Warcraft (WoW), one of the longest running massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMO). Since its…

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of a literacy-based intervention on the conventional pretend play skills of preschool children who are visually impaired. The intervention involved experience books, real objects, story-reading, and role-play, which are common strategies used to teach children with visual impairments. A…

Since at least Verkuyl (1972), aktionsart has been considered a property of phrasal configurations minimally resulting from a combination of a predicate and its internal argument. This has been demonstrated most clearly in the literature on telicity where certain predicate-argument configurations allow for a telic interpretation while others…

This work explores the use of multimodal communication in a community of expert "World of Warcraft"® players and its impact on politeness, identity, and relationships. Players in the community regularly communicated using three linguistic modes quasi-simultaneously: text chat, voice chat, and face-to-face interaction. Using the…

Despite the speed at which Second Life has been adopted by universities and schools to teach courses, little educational research and theory addresses this multiplayer online "world." This case study explored undergraduate university instructors' teaching methods and tools within a virtual environment. It also considered whether instructors are…