This paper investigates the comprehension of Relative Clauses (RCs) in 15 Mandarin children with suspected Specific Language Impairment (SLI) (aged between 4; 5 and 6; 0) and 29 typically developing (TD) controls. Results from a Character Picture Matching Task indicate that (i) the subject RC was better understood than the object RC in children…

Data from whole-class discussions in Dutch upper primary school show that teachers occasionally explicitly take downgraded epistemic stances through epistemic disclaimers such as 'ik weet het niet' (English: "I don't know (it)"), which contrasts with their institutionally assigned epistemic authority. In the current study, we have…

Collocations are understood to be integral building blocks of language processing, alongside individual words, but thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a…

Using the tools of praxeological analysis and didactical transposition analysis, the treatments of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus in one Norwegian, Grade 13 textbook is analysed, with a particular focus on the development of the logos block of the FTC. The terms structure, functioning and utility, first introduced by Chevallard in 2022, is…

To develop theories of how comprehenders extract the message from a linguistic stream, it is critical to understand how they conceptually represent referents. The experiments reported here focus on singular collective nouns (e.g., "committee," "team"), which introduce a single group into the discourse and test whether they…

Two studies were conducted to investigate how self-ratings on questionnaire items reflect the underlying real-scores. Participants gave numerical information about personal attributes (the real-scores), such as age, height, and weight, and subsequently rated themselves regarding these attributes. In Study 1, they rated themselves on a five-point…

Language forecasting, i.e., predicting the future state of a language, has long been regarded with a fair amount of skepticism. This is partly due to language change often being considered sudden, random, unpredictable, and viewed as the result of complex interacting factors that are not well understood (e.g., Keller 1994:72; Bauer 1994:25; Labov…

The degree of collocational knowledge influences learners' competence in the production of L2 speech and text. However, collocation learning is complex because learners might co-produce words incorrectly according to L1 inference. This study aims at the design of an online video-assisted collocation learning system, VACLS, that integrated video…

Arguably, the most contentious debate in the field of eye movement control in reading has centered on whether words are lexically processed serially or in parallel during reading. Chinese is character-based and unspaced, meaning the issue of how lexical processing is operationalized across potentially ambiguous, multicharacter strings is not…

This paper examines recent lexical expansion in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) in the context of change in the status of the language and ongoing contact with other (spoken and signed) languages. We categorised 917 new signs documented in the past five years according to their source, semantic field, and sign formation mechanism(s), both…

Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as "key…

Recursive NPs are difficult to produce and late to emerge. We compare prosodic and syntactic abilities in Japanese-speaking five- and six-year-olds (n = 28) and adults (n = 10). It is reported that syntactic structure in Japanese is prosodically marked via downstep and metrical boost. Results of an elicited imitation task suggested that children…

It has been reported for decades that preschool children (age 4-7) tend to assign non-adult-like interpretations for sentences with pre-subject exclusive only. This study reports findings from two experiments investigating (1) the effects of (in)congruent implicit questions in discourse contexts and (2) word order transformation on children's…

Finite complement clauses (FCCs) are an understudied syntactic structure of L2 advanced academic writing. The present study cross-investigated FCCs in qualitative (QUALI) and quantitative (QUANTI) research articles written by Filipino academic writers (FAWs) in Applied Linguistics (APPLING), Communication (COMM), and Measurement and Evaluation…

To avoid plagiarism, students have to learn the appropriate and effective ways of source text use, such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and citation. However, few studies have investigated how learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) employ copy and paraphrase as source text use strategies in completing writing tasks involving reading…