This article reports on a mixed-method study that examined the washback of a local integrated theme-based high-stakes English language proficiency test that is used in a university English for Academic Purposes (EAP) program in Turkey. The assumption behind employing an integrated theme-based test, which resembles authentic language use, was that…

Morphological complexity (MC) is a relatively new construct in second language acquisition (SLA). After critically discussing existing approaches to calculating MC in first- and second-language acquisition research, this article presents a new operationalization of the construct, the Morphological Complexity Index (MCI). The MCI is applied in two…

Few questions concerning the character of our talk about the world are more basic than how predicates combine with names to form truth-evaluable sentences. One particularly intriguing fact that any account of predication needs to make room for is that natural language allows for quantification into predicate position, through constructions like…

Child gender has been proved to affect toddlers'/children's language development in several studies, but its effect was not found to be stable across different ages or various aspects of language ability. The effect of gender on toddler's, children's and adolescents' language ability was examined in the present meta-analysis of ten Slovenian…

Writing has been often viewed as a cognitive or social task and instructional practices are influenced by one or the other perspective. However, alternatives may need to be considered that are not as polarized and consider individuals, their environment, their development, their needs, and the role of community (Graham, in press). The purpose of…

Prepositions are small words that serve important functions in the meaning of sentences. They show relationships between persons, objects, places etc. They also act as vital markers to the sentence structure. This descriptive analysis measured and analyzed the common errors of 44 grade 9 students in the use of prepositions using an objective test.…

Both lack of time and the need to translate texts for numerous reasons brought about an increase in studying machine translation with a history spanning over 65 years. During the last decades, Google Translate, as a statistical machine translation (SMT), was in the center of attention for supporting 90 languages. Although there are many studies on…

The current study examined preschool children's ability to evaluate the entailment patterns yielded by sentences containing two downward entailing (DE) operators, "every" and "no." When "no" precedes "every," the entailment pattern typically licensed by "every" changes, but only if "no"…

This study investigates the relationship between three linguistic functions: thetics, miratives and exclamatives. Thetics are an information structure configuration that conveys that the information is new to the addressee. The thetic subtypes selected for this study are the following: existentials (e.g. "There are apples in the…

This paper examines the essential features of a group of constructions that belong to the family of complementary alternation discourse constructions in English. In this group of constructions, X and Y are two situations such that Y is less likely (or more likely) to happen than X. Each member of this group (X Let Alone Y, X Much Less Y, X Never…

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb…

This study explored noun and verb retrieval using a sentence completion task to expand upon previous findings from picture naming tasks. Participants completed sentences missing either a target noun or verb in the final position. Non-target responses were coded for substitution type, imageability and frequency. Like picture naming, nouns and verbs…

This study uses conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the coupling of specific linguistic items with specific gestures in second language (L2) learning over time. In particular, we are interested in how gestures accompany learning of new vocabulary. CA-informed studies of gesture have previously shown the importance of embodiment in L2 use and…

Expository writing--the kind of writing that explains and informs--is essential for success in school and the workplace. Students who cannot write at a competent level struggle in college. With the advent of e-mail and the Internet, an increasing number of jobs require solid writing skills. No matter what path students choose in life, the ability…

Different genres of writing entail various levels of syntactic and lexical complexity, and how this complexity influences the results of Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) programs like Grammarly in second language (L2) writing is unknown. This study explored the use of Grammarly in the L2 writing context by comparing error frequency, error types…