Two studies investigated the effects of prosody and pragmatic context on off-line and on-line processing of sentences like "John greeted Paul yesterday and Ben today". Such sentences are ambiguous between the so-called "nongapping" reading, where "John greeted Ben", and the highly unpreferred "gapping" reading, where "Ben greeted Paul". In the…

Malaysian philosophy, purpose and objective of the education system are rooted and based on policies stated in the National Education Policy 1956 and Education Act 1961. Whereas the Education Ordinance 1952 urged all Chinese and Tamil schools to be given an equal opportunity to learn English and Malay language together with their L1 (mother…

The work presented here aims to account for the structure of intrasentential code switching between English and Afrikaans within the framework of feature checking theory, a theory associated with minimalist syntax. Six constructions in which verb position differs between English and Afrikaans were analysed in terms of differences in the strength…

Two off-line and on-line reading tasks investigated the real-time comprehension of doubly quantified sentences with sentential negation interaction. The results showed that perceivers experienced processing difficulty in assigning inverse-scope interpretations to the sentences with double operators, not only when such sentences appeared in…

Composing text is an essential skill for students. Assignments, tests, and emailing are a few examples of the many tasks which require students to generate thoughts and put them into prose. For many students, choosing a topic, creating an outline, generating an initial draft, and making edits to produce a final copy is a fluid process which poses…

To express object transfer, Cantonese-speakers use a "ditransitive" ([V-R-T] or [V-T-R] where V = Verb, T = Theme, R = Recipient), or a more complex prepositional/serial-verb (P/SV) construction. Clausal elements in Cantonese datives can be optional (resulting in "full" versus "non-full" forms) or appear in variant…

This study aims at arousing college students' metacognition in detecting lexical cohesion during online text construction as WordNet served as a lexical resource. A total of 83 students were requested to construct texts through sequences of actions identified as interaction chains in this study. Interaction chains are grouped and categorized as a…

This article explores aspects of early language and literacy that may predict later literacy development. It explores a range of assessment procedures used for oral language, vocabulary, sentence structure and phonology and early reading and writing. The article then describes a small-scale study which highlights the disconnections between the…

We assessed whether and under what conditions noncanonical agreement patterns occur in Russian, with the goal of understanding the factors involved in normal agreement. Russian is a morphosyntactically rich language in which agreement involves features for number, gender, and case. If consistent, overt specification of number and gender agreement…

Metonymic verbs like "start" or "enjoy" often occur with artifact-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started the picture") although semantically they require event-denoting complements (e.g., "The artist started painting the picture"). In case of artifact-denoting objects, the complement is assumed to be type shifted (or "coerced") into an…

This study claims that Arab ESL students writing in English transfer L1 rhetorical modes of text organization into their English compositions. Fifty academic research papers were analysed in terms of the transition words and cohesive devices used, on the assumption that differences at the level of these language forms reflect differences at the…

This paper is intended for early childhood caregivers--teachers in centers and those caring for children in homes. It is intended to help caregivers learn more about how children develop the ability to "use words" to communicate their thoughts and needs and ask questions, and to "understand language they hear" in conversations and in books. Why is…

Background: Many school-age children with specific language impairment produce sentences that appear to conform to the adult grammar. It may be premature to conclude from this, however, that their language formulation ability is age appropriate. Aims: To determine whether a more subtle measure of language use, speech disruptions during sentence…

Theoretical accounts of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) posit a prominent role for problems in response inhibition (Nigg 2006). A key avenue for impulsivity in children with ADHD is inappropriate language expression. In this study, we sought to determine whether poor inhibitory control affects language production in adolescents and…

In the tradition of work by Shaughnessy (1977) and Bartholomae (1980) applying concepts from second language acquisition research to developing writing, we explore the commonalities of L1 and L2 writers on the specific level of linguistic choices needed to order information within and across sentence boundaries. We propose that many of the kinds…