Differences in the sequence with which children pass the tasks in Wellman and Liu's (2004) theory of mind (ToM) battery is increasingly bringing into question the universal and cultural specifics of children's developing understanding of others' minds. Children from China, Iran, and Turkey pass the knowledge access (KA) task of the battery earlier…

The introduction of modal verbs in English textbooks across levels in China was surveyed and compared with Chinese learners' use in writing to explore the potential impact of textbook introduction on learners' real use. The results have revealed: (1) divergences between the sequence of modal verb presentation in textbooks and their frequency order…

This study explores whether English-dominant (ED) speakers and speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL) perceive the same degrees of formality in combinations of (in)formal greetings (Hi/Dear) and address forms (informal First Name/Ms. Last Name) with (in)formal nouns, verbs, and adjectives (Latinate/Germanic). It also explores which of…

Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

As one of the text categories, opinion texts have distinctive characteristics compared to any other texts in newspapers, including the choice of verb usage. This study then aims at preliminarily examining the verbs used in opinion articles in "The Jakarta Post" to find out the relation between frequency and text characteristics. This…

This concept paper highlights the problem of the lack of a unified Arab list of Bloom's taxonomy to be used in teacher-preparation programs across Arab universities. The paper illustrates the current problem and offers steps needed for completing a project that would produce a unified list. The unified list would have both the required validity…

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However,…

Adopting the framework of projection from Systemic Functional Linguistics, the present study explored the deployment of projection in summary writing by three levels of college EFL learners from a university in mainland China. Data were collected from one summary writing by three classes of different levels' learners in an English program from a…

Modifying and hedging one's claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express "epistemic possibility" to avoid making strong statements, viz., "may", "might", and "could". The purpose of this corpus-based study is…

In order to facilitate the instruction and acquisition of EFL writing, this paper compares the uses of the light verb "get" in English writing by Chinese and L1 undergraduates by drawing on insights from the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE). Corpus pattern analysis (CPA) is conducted to analyze the data taken from two comparable…

This article seeks to contribute to an early childhood specific conceptualisation of physics education. The article is a collaboration between a researcher in science education and two preschool teachers and revolves around the teachers' work with 2-4 year old children. Grounded in a posthumanist understanding of the world, we focus on physics…

Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants' initial…

The delayed acquisition of Spanish "ser" and "estar" is generally understood as rooted in the cognitive demands imposed by the integration of semantic-pragmatic and world-knowledge factors associated with their lexical meanings. Here we ask (1) what is the nature of this language world-knowledge integration? and (2) what is the…

Heritage speakers (HS) have been shown to experience difficulties with inflectional morphology (particularly with irregular morphology) and to frequently overapply regular morphology. The present study seeks to get further insight into the inflectional processes of HS by investigating how these are generalized to nonce words in language…

"Call to Action 93" requests revision of the Canadian citizenship materials to include more information about treaties and residential schools. Although the citizenship materials have been analyzed in terms of how they present the concepts of citizenship, multiculturalism, and Canadian values, little work has been done on how…