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This study examines word order variation in negative word + mas constructions in Caracas Spanish, with mas pre-posed or post-posed in relation to the negative word. We empirically analyze the effect of formal syntactic and semantic constraints, the contribution of priming and frequency, as well as several social factors on variable positioning of mas in NW + mas constructions in Spanish. Data for this study comes from the Estudio sociolinguistico de Caracas (Bentivoglio and Sedano 1993). This corpus contains half-hour interviews, conducted between 1987 and 1988 with 160 speakers of Caracas Spanish. Regarding the role of syntactic and semantic formal constraints in the variation of NW + mas constructions, the findings reveal that only polarity and the position of the NW + mas construction relative to the verb significantly constrained variation between pre-posed and post-posed NW + mas constructions. Garcia Cornejo (2008) and Gutierrez-Rexach and Gonzalez-Rivera (2012, 2014) argued that pre-posed mas only occurs with purely negative uses of these constructions. While our results are consistent with this observation, we also found that this pattern is not categorical, since pre-posed mas is used in 34.3% of affirmative sentences. In order to address variation not explained by formal analyses, we explore the role of frequency to account for the variable position of mas + NW. Frequency appears to be a factor in this variation: the most frequent NW + mas construction, with nada, showed the highest rate of post-posing and lowest rate of pre-posing. Priming did not have a significant effect, although it trends in the expected direction: in contexts with a pre-posed prime, the rate of pre-posed mas was higher (58.3%). We argue that analogical levelling with other pre-posed mas constructions has led to an increased use of pre-posed NW + mas constructions in Caracas Spanish and that the most frequent construction, nada mas, is resisting this analogical change due to its higher frequency and consequential entrenchment.

This article takes as its starting point the analysis of adjective complementation patterns and sets this in the context of other studies of phraseology, especially Construction Grammar. The article proposes that a large number of meaning–pattern combinations can be identified as constructions. This endeavour assists and is assisted by the derivation of a local grammar of evaluation. The grammar is made explicit in 22 ‘Analyses’, grouped into five main categories. It includes discussion around the process of mapping meaning on to pattern, the consideration of borderline cases, and the debate around naming of elements. This contributes to a comparison of different approaches to phraseology, and in particular to the place of Construction Grammar in relation to more output-oriented approaches. Suggestions for the application of this approach to language teaching are offered.

Studies on L1- and L2-acquisition of German and Dutch have shown that the particles too/also and again hamper the realization of finiteness while the particle not promotes it. In this study the authors ask whether adversative but also affects the realization of finiteness. By applying a structural-functional approach to finiteness and its acquisition they investigate the morpho-syntactic development of aber-clauses in the first 12 months of aber-production in four monolingual German children. The analysis reveals that finiteness becomes realized in aber-clauses considerably later than in auch-clauses. Syntactically well-formed aber-clauses appear when finiteness becomes realized in main clauses not containing any particle or connective. However, it takes the children two to four more months to realize finiteness in the aber-clauses. The authors argue that the information-structural properties assumed to cause the delay raised by the particles too/also and again are not fully applicable to but. Particle-specific effects also have to be taken into consideration. In case of but this includes the complexity of information-structural alignment and discourse integration of the twofold contrast established by aber-clauses. Managing this communicative task reduces the capacities for realizing primarily structural conditions which are still not automatized.

Para inserir-se na sociedade, a comunidade surda depende de programação audiovisual com legendas que atendam suas necessidades, mas quais os critérios para medir a qualidade destas legendas? Segundo apontaram pesquisas feitas pelo grupo Legendagem e Audiodescrição (LEAD) (Araújo; Nascimento, 2011; Araújo; Vieira; Monteiro, 2013), um fator importante é a qualidade da segmentação (divisão entre inserções de legenda ou quebra de linha), especialmente a segmentação linguística, feita segundo a sintaxe, tal que o respeito à estrutura dos sintagmas nas quebras de linhas parece facilitar a compreensão dos programas pelos surdos. Este artigo descreve os problemas de segmentação linguística das legendas do filme Virada Radical, propondo ressegmentações. Das 1074 legendas coletadas, 5,4% apresentaram problemas, principalmente nos sintagmas verbais e nominais.

This study measured the effectiveness of three tasks (cloze, editing and writing) on the learning of phrasal verbs for students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). A total of 72 l...

The focus of this paper is replication research in pedagogical approaches to spoken fluency and formulaic sequences, and in particular, a call for replication of two often cited studies: Wood (2009) and Boers, Eyckmans, Kappel, Stengers & Demecheleer (2006). We begin by presenting a brief background to fluency and formulaic language, and pedagogical approaches to the development of these two aspects of learning in a second (L2) or foreign language. We then move on to our two original studies of pedagogical interventions in formulaic sequences and spoken fluency – Wood (2009) and Boers et al. (2006) – and suggest possible approaches to replication for both.

This study investigates the referential choice of Mandarin-speaking children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The data consist of narratives from 16 children with ASD and 16 typically-developing (TD) children. The narratives were elicited using the wordless picture book Frog, where are you? Participants’ referential expressions were coded in terms of referential form, function, and adequacy. The results revealed that, compared with the IQ- and language-matched TD children, the children with ASD used significantly more pronominal forms for subsequent mentions, showed insufficient ability to use definite and indefinite noun phrases to mark the information status of referents, and made fewer adequate reintroductions. Additionally, this study demonstrated the potential of the three-category classification to advance our understanding of referential choice in ASD. The outcomes underscore the importance of analyzing referential adequacy across referential functions, and suggest that referential functions are not equally difficult.

The aim of this work is to analyze word order variations of modern standard Arabic sentences within the linguistic framework of Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) by Gazdar, Pullum, Klein, and Sag (1985). This paper provides a direct interpretation as to the word order variations in Arabic either through a rule-to-rule formalism (including metarules in addition to other generalizations as for the rules of the grammar) or semantics. It tends not to suppose multistratal syntactic representations.

Software can facilitate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ self-correction of their free-form writing by detecting errors; this article examines the proportion of errors which software can detect. A corpus of 13,644 words of written English was created, comprising 90 compositions written by Spanish-speaking students at levels A2-B2 (inclusive) of the Common European Framework. A total of 1,310 language errors were detected by the researcher. It was found that approximately 21% of these errors were spelling errors. A further 58% were characterised as either two-word phrases (45%), three-word phrases (9%), or four- and five-word phrases (4%) which are either absent from or rare in a large corpus of English which is known to be correct. The nature of software which can detect such words and phrases and bring them to students’ attention with a view to self-correction is briefly described. Of the remaining 21% of errors not detected by such software, most were found to be either errors of te...

The present experimental study examined whether a different focus during a pre-task planning observation task affects learners’ subsequent oral task performance. Forty-eight ninth-grade students learning German as a foreign language were randomly assigned to two different planning conditions: video observations with a focus on language (FonL) and video observations with a focus on content (FonC). With a communicative oral task we measured the effects on oral task performance, in terms of attempted (accurate) use of the target structure and complexity, in terms of number of words, subordination and coordination. In addition we investigated whether there was a trade-off between attempted (accurate) use of the target structure and complexity. Results showed that the focus of the observations at the pre-task stage did indeed lead to different outcomes: students in the language condition used the grammatical target structure more often and more accurately, whereas students of the content condition generated more coordinate and subordinate clauses. Trade-offs were found between attempted (accurate) use of the target structure and the use of subordinate clauses. These findings imply that, depending on the purposes of the lesson, the observation of peer-model videos with different planning foci can be effectively used to promote (accurate) use of targeted grammatical structures and improve complexity during subsequent task performance.

Van Trijp (2013,2014) claims that Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG) and Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) are fundamentally different from Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG). He claims that the former approaches are generative ones while the latter is a cognitive-functional one. I argue that it is not legitimate to draw these distinctions on the basis of what is done in FCG. Van Trijp claims that there are differences in the scientific model, the linguistic approach, formalization, the way constructions are seen, and in terms of processing. This paper discusses all these alleged differences. Van Trijp also claims that his cognitive-functional approach is superior in terms of completeness, explanatory adequacy, and theoretical parsimony. In order to facilitate a discussion and comparison, I introduce the reader to basic assumptions made in FCG and the analyses suggested by Van Trijp: I first deal with the representations that are used in FCG, talk about argument structure constructions, the combination operations fusion and merging that are used in FCG, I than discuss the analysis of nonlocal dependencies and show that the suggested FCG analysis is not explanatorily adequate since it is not descriptively adequate and that a full formalization of approaches with discontinuous constituents is not more parsimonious than existing HPSG analyses either. After the discussion of specific analyses, I then provide a detailed comparison of FCG and SBCG/HPSG and discuss questions like the competence/performance distinction, mathematical formalization vs. computer implementation, fuzziness and fluidity in grammars, and permissiveness of theories. I conclude that HPSG, SBCG, and FCG belong to the same family of theories and that all claims to the contrary are unjustified.

Usage-based grammars have become increasingly prominent in recent years. In these theories usage is construed quantitatively and serves as a circumstance for the emergence and development of grammar. This paper argues that usage can go deeper than this, and may become a component of the semiotic resources of a language and a part of grammar. However, this semioticisation is restricted to interpersonal grammar, those semiotic resources of grammar that construe interpersonal meaning. Three apparently unrelated grammatical phenomena – optionality of grammatical markers, insubordination, and a range of repetition-based constructions – are shown to be unified by the notions of grammaticalised usage and interpersonal grammar. This has implications for the nature of interpersonal grammar: it represents the codification of the triadic actional frame, the basis of which is the idea that action on an interlocutor is effected via action on linguistic units.

This paper aims to connect recent corpus research on phraseology with current language testing practice. It discusses how corpora and corpus-analytic techniques can illuminate central aspects of speech and help in conceptualizing the notion of lexicogrammar in second language speaking assessment. The description of speech and some of its core features is based on the 1.8-million-word Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE) and on the 10-million-word spoken component of the British National Corpus (BNC). Analyses of word frequency and keyword lists are followed by an automatic extraction of different types of phraseological items that are particularly common in speech and serve important communicative functions. These corpus explorations provide evidence for the strong interconnectedness of lexical items and grammatical structures in natural language. Based on the assumption that the existence of lexicogrammatical patterns is of relevance for constructs of speaking tests, the paper then reviews rubrics of popular high-stakes speaking tests and critically discusses how far these rubrics capture the central aspects of spoken language identified in the corpus analyses as well as the centrality of phraseology in language. It closes with recommendations for speaking assessment in the light of this characterization of real-world spoken lexicogrammar.

Research investigating corpora of English learners’ language raises new questions about how syntactic complexity is defined theoretically and operationally for second language (L2) writing assessment. I show that syntactic complexity is important in construct definitions and L2 writing rating scales as well as in L2 writing research. I describe the operationalizations of syntactic complexity measurement in corpus-based L2 writing research, focusing on the Biber Tagger (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, & Finegan, 1999), Coh-Metrix (McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014), and L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010), which are three tools commonly used to automate syntactic complexity analysis. A review of findings from recent corpus-based L2 writing studies on the relationship of syntactic complexity to L2 writing quality follows. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of these multiple perspectives on the definition of syntactic complexity in L2 studies.

(ProQuest: ... denotes formulae omitted.)Music theorists have conventionally held the view that the expressiveness of music originates from compositional features such as the arrangement of tonal and rhythmic structures (Rothfarb, 2002). More recently, it has been argued that the idea of music should not be constrained to the written score, but should also take into account the act of music-making (Dogantan-Dack, 2014). Deviation from existing compositional structures is an essential aspect of musical performance (Leech-Wilkinson & Prior, 2014), and each musician's musical interpretations of the score may also affect their body movement. (Davidson, 2007, 2012; Desmet et al., 2012). From this perspective, body movement in music performance appears to be one of the most important considerations. Wanderley, Vines, Middleton, Mckay, and Hatch (2005) categorized musicians' movements based on their functions including producing sound (instrumental movement), conveying expressive intention (ancillary movement), and communicating with their coperformers (communicative movement). These categories of musicians' movements bear a relationship to compositional structures. When musicians produce sounds according to the instructions in the score, their instrumental movement, such as cellists' bowing and percussionists' accented strokes, must be organized in relation to compositional structure (Dahl, 2000; Winold, Thelen, & Ulrich, 1994). Musicians' ancillary body movements are also associated with compositional features such as phrase structure (MacRitchie, Buck, & Bailey, 2013; Vines, Krumhansl, Wanderley, & Levitin, 2006). In addition to this, evidence has shown that music listeners' body movements reflect compositional structures of music including metrical hierarchical levels and rhythm (Burger, Thompson, Luck, Saarikallio, & Toiviainen, 2013; Leman & Naveda, 2010; Toiviainen, Luck, & Thompson, 2010).Conductors' movements direct the performance in relation to selected compositional features according to their interpretational intentions. The kinematic features of these movements, including baton and hand position, velocity, acceleration, jerk, and trajectory, can regulate musicians' synchronization (Luck & Nte, 2008; Luck & Sloboda, 2007, 2008; Luck & Toiviainen, 2006), as well as communicate expressive qualities to an audience (Gallops, 2005; Luck, Toiviainen, & Thompson, 2010; Mathers, 2009; WOllner, 2008). In addition, as suggested by educational manuals concerned with conducting and orchestral direction (Green & Malko, 1987; Rudolf, 1994), conductors use a particular gestural repertoire to communicate compositional features they have selected to highlight. However, such discussions of the correspondence between conducting movement and compositional elements have been based on subjective, qualitative descriptions of movement. It is still not clear how kinematic features of conducting movements deliver melodic, rhythmic, and dynamic aspects of a composition at particular time-points in the score. More research is needed to provide knowledge of how these kinematics in conducting movement can communicate such compositional features and the conductor's musical interpretations.Conductors each display their own features in movement kinematics, and variability of movement between different conductors should be anticipated. Therefore, the present study aimed to examine the similarity level of kinematic features within and between conductors. Furthermore, the aforementioned studies have focused on the overall characteristics of the entire movement (Burger et al., 2013; Leman & Naveda, 2010; Toiviainen et al., 2010). The present study, on the other hand, sought to associate conductors' actual conducting movements with their stated expressive intentions of compositional structures at specific time-points in the musical score.Accordingly, the research questions were: (a) In kinematic aspects, how do conducting movement kinematics vary within and between each conductor? …

According to the Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH), second language (L2) speakers, unlike native speakers, build shallow syntactic representations during sentence processing. In order to test the SSH, this study investigated the processing of a syntactic movement in both native speakers of English and proficient late L2 speakers of English using pupillometry to measure processing cost. Of particular interest were constructions where movement resulted in an intermediate gap between clauses. Pupil diameter was recorded during auditory presentation of complex syntactic constructions. Two factors were manipulated: syntactic movement (such that some conditions contained movement while others did not), as well as syntactic movement type (either causing an intermediate gap or not). Grammaticality judgments revealed no differences between the two groups, suggesting both were capable of comprehending these constructions. Pupil change slope measurements revealed a potential sensitivity to intermediate gaps for only native speakers, however, both native and late L2 speakers showed similar facilitation during processing of the second gap site. Acoustic analysis revealed potential acoustic cues that may have facilitated the processing of these constructions. This suggests that, contrary to the predictions of the SSH, late L2 speakers are capable of constructing rich syntactic representations during the processing of intermediate gap constructions in spoken language.

Speakers use speech and gestures to represent referents in discourse. Depending on referents’ information status, in speech speakers will vary richness of expression (e.g., lexical noun phrase [NP]/pronoun), nominal definiteness (indefinite/definite), and grammatical role (subject/object). This study tested whether these three linguistic markers of information status interact with presence of gestures and gestural viewpoint (observer/character). The results show that gestures are more frequent with less accessible referents expressed with richer spoken forms but that richness of expression does not interact with viewpoint. In contrast, nominal definiteness and grammatical role interact with both presence and viewpoint of gestures. Gestures occur mainly with indefinite lexical NPs and objects. Character viewpoint gestures occur mainly with indefinite lexical NPs and objects plus predicates. The results shed light on when and how speakers use gestures in connected discourse and specifically highligh...

The Spanish mood contrast is a good test case for research on acquiring form-meaning connections in contexts where input is variable and multiple areas of the grammar are implicated (e.g., syntax, semantics, pragmatics). Nevertheless, research on interpretation of this contrast lags and little is known about how individual lexical items and patterns of co-occurrence of adverbial clauses with subjunctive forms influence interpretation. Addressing this void, we compare interpretation of the present subjunctive by native speakers (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) at three relatively high levels of experience. Participants completed an interpretation task containing clauses with indicative and subjunctive forms paired with one of six adverbial conjunctions, categorized as co-occurring with subjunctive, indicative, or both forms. Our analysis suggests individual lexical items play a role in morphosyntactic variation and that nuanced differences in interpretation exist for NSs and highly advanced NNSs, even on items that prescriptively co-occur with only one form.

This study investigated the effects of word frequency, collocational frequency, L1 congruency, and L2 proficiency, on L2 collocational processing. Two groups of L1 Japanese speakers of English (intermediate and advanced) and one group of English native speakers (NSs) performed an online acceptability judgment task on four types of adjective-noun constructions: (1) congruent collocations, (2) English-only collocations, (3) Japanese-only collocations, and (4) baseline items. Response times were analyzed using mixed-effects modeling and correlations. In contrast to NSs, nonnative speakers (NNSs) processed congruent collocations significantly faster than English-only collocations. As for frequency, all three groups demonstrated sensitivity to both word-level and collocation-level frequency. However, the distributions differed across the three groups. We concluded that age/order of acquisition effects (Carroll & White, 1973) provided the best explanation for the congruency results. Regarding the frequency results, we concluded that the findings conflict with claims that NNSs may process formulaic sequences differently than NSs (e.g., Wray, 2002, 2008).

The present study explores the under-researched area of collocation use with learners from different proficiency levels. The study investigates different types of collocations and the learners’ elaboration of their collocation use. A total of 194 students from three different years of study in a Chinese university wrote compositions on the same topic, and 42 of them were invited to post-writing interviews on collocation use. The compositions were used to retrieve collocations, and the interviews to explore each learner’s reflections on collocation use. The results showed that learners fail to demonstrate consistent improvement in the use of collocation in terms of frequency and association strength. The overwhelming majority of the collocations in learner writing are below the MI threshold. The present study also found that learners at the advanced stage of learning need both awareness for collocations, and more importantly, awareness for low-frequency collocations with high MI scores.

Non-obligatory control constructions (NOC) are sentences which contain a non-finite clause with a null subject whose reference is determined pragmatically. Little is known about how children assign reference to these subjects, yet this is important as our current understanding of reference-resolution development is limited to less complex sentences with overt elements, such as pronouns. This study explores how seventy-six children (aged six to eleven) consult pragmatic leads when assigning reference in two examples of NOC. Children undertook three picture-selection tasks, containing no lead, a weak lead, and a strong lead, and their reference choices in the critical sentences were monitored. The novel results pinpoint children's baseline interpretations of the ambiguous sentences and expose an age trend in the degree to which they consult strong pragmatic leads when resolving reference. These trends illustrate how reference assignment in more complex discourse-governed contexts progresses, thereby contributing an important dimension to the pragmatics acquisition literature.

The article focuses on the omission of locative prepositions in child Russian. We report on two experiments: a production task and a comprehension task. Results from the elicited production task sh...

Previous research has shown that information referring to a named character or to information in the main clause of a sentence is more accessible and facilitates the processing of anaphoric references. We investigated whether the use of such cues are maintained in healthy aging. We present two experiments investigating whether information contained in the main clause of a sentence is more accessible compared with information contained in the subordinate clause. We present two further experiments that explored whether proper names act as controllers of discourse focus. Experiment 1 showed that information contained in the subordinate clause of a sentence decreased the processing efficiency of anaphoric references (more so for older adults), and Experiment 2 found that main clauses facilitated probe recognition. Experiments 3 and 4 showed that named characters increased the processing efficiency of anaphoric references and facilitated probe recognition (younger adults only), whereas older adults dis...

Statements containing quantity information are commonplace. Although there is literature explaining the way in which quantities themselves are conveyed in numbers or words (e.g., many, probably), there is less on the effects of different types of quantity description on the processing of surrounding text. Given that quantity information is usually conveyed to alter our understanding of a situation (e.g., to convey information about a risk), our understanding of the rest of the quantified statement is clearly important. In this article texts containing quantified statements expressed numerically versus verbally are compared in two text change experiments to assess how the entire quantified noun phrase is encoded in each case. On the basis of the results it is argued that numerical quantifiers place focus on the size of a subset, whereas verbal quantifiers are better integrated with nouns leading to more focus on the subset itself.

I examine whether teaching formulaic language raises English as a foreign language learners’ awareness of pragmatic resources when expressing requests. To carry out this research I adopt a qualitative self-reflective approach which encourages students to use formulaic language when making requests. By responding to discourse completion tasks, learners were given the opportunity to reflect on whether the use of formulaic language enhances their ability to come across in acceptable and appropriate ways. Results indicate that by developing learners’ knowledge and via the use of pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic resources, students at all levels have a much greater chance of achieving their communicative objectives and of becoming more pragmatically competent in the target language when making requests. Examino la enseñanza de lenguaje formulaico para expresar peticiones con el objetivo de aumentar los recursos pragmáticos de los alumnos de inglés como lengua extranjera. Para llevar a cabo esta investigación adopto un enfoque cualitativo y auto-reflexivo que alienta a los estudiantes a utilizar el lenguaje formulaico para expresar peticiones. Al responder a textos con situaciones discursivas, los estudiantes tuvieron la oportunidad de examinar si el uso de lenguaje formulaico mejora su habilidad para interactuar en formas aceptables y apropiadas. Los resultados indican que al desarrollar sus conocimientos y el uso de recursos pragmalingüísticos y sociopragmáticos, los estudiantes en todos los niveles tienen una mayor probabilidad de alcanzar sus objetivos comunicativos y de ser pragmáticamente más competentes cuando expresan peticiones en la lengua meta.

Collocations are word combinations essential for achieving fluency in a given language. Considerable emphasis should therefore be placed on teaching collocations as a part of vocabulary instruction in language teaching. However, there is no current consensus on how best to teach collocations, and few studies have addressed the issue. This quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of online tools for learning English adjective-noun collocations compared to learning collocations via traditional activities. A quasi-experimental design with a pretest and immediate and delayed posttests was applied to 53 participants (n = 25 for the control group; n = 28 for the experimental group). The test results reveal that participants in the experimental group who learned collocations with online tools performed significantly better on both immediate and delayed posttests, demonstrating the effectiveness of these tools on learning adjective-noun collocations.

Purpose In this study, we examined syntactic complexity in the spoken language samples of young adults. Its purpose was to contribute to the expanding knowledge base in later language development and to begin building a normative database of language samples that potentially could be used to evaluate young adults with known or suspected language impairment. Method Forty adults (mean age = 22 years, 10 months) with typical language development participated in an interview that consisted of 3 speaking tasks: a general conversation about common, everyday topics; a narrative retelling task that involved fables; and a question-and-answer, critical-thinking task about the fables. Each speaker's interview was audio-recorded, transcribed, broken into communication units, coded for main and subordinate clauses, entered into Systematic Analysis of Language Transcripts (Miller, Iglesias, & Nockerts, 2004), and analyzed for mean length of communication unit and clausal density. Results Both the narrative and critical-thinking tasks elicited significantly greater syntactic complexity than the conversational task. It was also found that syntactic complexity was significantly greater during the narrative task than the critical-thinking task. Conclusion Syntactic complexity was best revealed by a narrative task that involved fables. The study offers benchmarks for language development during early adulthood.

Frequency and contingency are two primary statistical factors that drive the acquisition and processing of language. This study explores the role of phrasal frequency and contingency (the co-occurrence probability/statistical association of the constituent words in multiword sequences) during online processing of multiword sequences. Meanwhile, it also examines language users’ sensitivity to the two types of statistical information. Using the eye-tracking paradigm, native and advanced nonnative speakers of Chinese were instructed to read 80 disyllabic two-word Chinese adverbial sequences embedded in sentence contexts. Eye movements of the participants were recorded using both early and late measures. Mixed-effects modeling revealed that both phrasal frequency and contingency influenced the processing of the adverbial sequences; however, they were likely to function in different time windows. In addition, both native and nonnative speakers were sensitive to the phrasal frequency and contingency of the sequences, though their degrees of such sensitivity differed. Our findings suggest that adult language learners retain the statistical learning ability in second language acquisition and they may share a general statistical learning mechanism with native speakers when processing multiword sequences.

Taking a Teacher Language Awareness (TLA) perspective, this paper examines how the concept of deixis is employed in oral discourse in two secondary science and mathematics classes in the southwestern part of the US. Drawing on audio and videotaped data from two classrooms, we examine how verbal deixis, or words and phrases that cannot be fully understood without additional context, serves as a potential resource for the organisation of learning processes. We further consider how deixis may act as an impediment to the organisation of learning processes. We outline implications for preparation of teachers of English Language Learners in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics areas, with a specific focus on middle and high school science and mathematics.

This study investigates the impact that study in Australia has on the lexical knowledge of Saudi Arabian students. It focuses on: 1) the effects that the length of study in Australia has on the acquisition of lexical collocations, as reflected by lexical knowledge tests, and 2) whether there is a significant gender difference in the acquisition of lexical collocation knowledge. The results indicate that there is a positive correlation between the length of stay in Australia and the knowledge of lexical collocation, since the overall mean scores of the entire sample increased with the number of the years spent in Australia. Participants who stayed for one year had the lowest mean score of 7.39, whereas those with the longest length of stay of four years had the highest mean score of 8.76. Participants staying for two or three years had minimal improvements, with mean scores of 7.64 and 7.68 respectively. The results indicate that there was only a slight difference between male and female participants in their knowledge of lexical collocations, with overall mean scores of 7.56 and 8.35 out of 12 respectively.

In order to build a natural language processing system first the words are placed into a structured form that leads to a syntactically correct sentence. Syntactic analysis of a sentence is performed by parsing technique. This paper explores the novel approach that how the shift reduce parsing technique is used for translating English sentences into a grammatically correct Kannada sentences by reordering of English parse tree structure, generating and implementing phrase structure grammar(PSG) for kannada sentences. Recursive Descent Parsing technique is used to generate English phrase tree structure and terminal symbols are tagged with Kannada equivalent words then Shift-Reduce Parsing technique is used to construct a Kannada sentence. Part-of-Speech (POS) tagger is used to tag Kannada words to English words. It is implemented by using supervised machine learning approach

It has proven hard to force a decision between rival analyses of Universal 20. This is because new typological data are scarce, and the number of syntactic tests applicable in the noun phrase is relatively small. I therefore consider a related set of facts that involve language-internal word order variation in the verb phrase. I first show that the pattern of grammatical and ungrammatical orders in Dutch verb phrases containing three PPs closely matches the pattern of attested and unattested orders in the noun phrase. I then use the distribution of the particle pas ‘only’ to argue that PP extraposition results from variation in the linearization of sister nodes. This means that the symmetric account of Universal 20 in Abels and Neeleman (Syntax 15:25–74, 2012) extends to the Dutch data, but the antisymmetric account in Cinque (Linguist Inquiry 36:315–332, 2005) does not.

This study examined the linguistic dimensions of comprehensibility and perceived fluency in the context of L2 argumentative speech elicited from 40 Japanese-speaking learners of English. Their speaking performance was judged by 10 inexperienced native speakers of English for comprehensibility and perceived fluency, and was also objectively analyzed in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency as well as pronunciation and discourse features. The results showed that comprehensibility and fluency judgments strongly correlated with each other and that native listeners were significantly more severe when they judged fluency. Furthermore, multiple regression analyses revealed that both constructs were commonly associated with a set of underlying linguistic dimensions (grammatical accuracy, breakdown fluency, and pronunciation). However, comprehensibility was best predicted by articulation rate (speed fluency) whereas perceived fluency was most strongly associated with the frequency of mid-clause pauses (breakdown fluency).

This article deals with the analysis of the factors influencing the formation of communicative and pragmatic competence in the process of teaching foreign students of the Faculty of Philology, Department of Russian Phraseology. The authors prove that the system of training future teachers of Russian has no sections and courses aimed at the formation of communicative and pragmatic competence in Russian phraseology. The study of the assimilation of phraseological units was carried out in several stages. The first is related to the definition of the level of knowledge of the phraseological system of the Russian language. The second is the level of understanding of certain phraseological units by philology students. The third is the ability to express an evaluative attitude towards someone using phraseological units. The fourth is related to the ability to use phraseological units when evaluating something, any event, phenomena. This article deals with the analysis of the factors influencing the formation of communicative and pragmatic competence in the process of teaching foreign students of the Faculty of Philology, Department of Russian Phraseology. The authors prove that the system of training future teachers of Russian has no sections and courses aimed at the formation of communicative and pragmatic competence in Russian phraseology. The study of the assimilation of phraseological units was carried out in several stages. The first is related to the definition of the level of knowledge of the phraseological system of the Russian language. The second is the level of understanding of certain phraseological units by philology students. The third is the ability to express an evaluative attitude towards someone using phraseological units. The fourth is related to the ability to use phraseological units when evaluating something, any event, phenomena.

A well-designed game can offer enormous opportunities for pragmatics learning by providing an immersive environment where learners can practice L2 in a variety of social contexts. To examine the applicability of gaming to L2 pragmatics learning, this study used the platform Unity to develop a scenariobased digital game (Questaurant) to teach Chinese formulaic expressions. In the game, the player took the role of a robot who works in a restaurant in China and runs quests by interacting with built-in characters. The game incorporated four key gaming attributes: context (representation), goals, feedback, and interactivity. This paper reports the usability of these gaming attributes based on interview data collected from 12 learners of Chinese who completed the game. Results showed that the combination of context and interactivity in Questaurant delivered an engaging learning experience, while explicit feedback directly contributed to learning. Participants raised some concerns regarding the motivational appeal of goals and implicit feedback in the game. This paper further discusses implications for developing and utilizing digital games for pragmatics learning.

© 2018, The Author(s) 2018. The present study examined the interaction effects between teachers’ choice of language in lexical explanation and second language (L2) learners’ proficiency level on the learning of phrasal verbs and listening comprehension in a meaning-focused listening activity. Undergraduate L2 learners with two different levels of proficiency (intermediate and advanced) were assigned to three different conditions. These conditions included (1) code-switching, in which teachers briefly switched to learners’ first language for vocabulary teaching purposes, (2) L2-only, in which teachers maintained L2 for overall instruction and vocabulary teaching, and (3) control condition, in which learners were not given instruction about target vocabulary. The results revealed that teachers’ instruction about target vocabulary brought about more gains in learning of phrasal verbs than lack thereof. In addition, teachers’ use of code-switching benefited intermediate-level learners most, who were able to gain similar levels of vocabulary learning and listening comprehension to advanced learners.

Infants acquiring their native language are adept at discovering grammatical patterns. However, it remains unknown whether these learning abilities are limited to language, or available more generally for sequenced input. The current study is a conceptual replication of a prior language study, and was designed to ask whether infants can track phrase structure-like patterns from nonlinguistic auditory materials (sequences of computer alert sounds). One group of 12-month-olds was familiarized with an artificial grammar including predictive dependencies between sounds concatenated into strings, simulating the basic structure of phrases in natural languages. A second group of infants was familiarized with a grammar that lacked predictive dependencies. All infants were tested on the same set of familiar strings vs. novel (grammar-inconsistent) strings. Only infants exposed to the materials containing predictive dependencies showed successful discrimination between the test sentences, replicating the results from linguistic materials, and suggesting that predictive dependencies facilitate learning from nonlinguistic input.

Neural oscillations track linguistic information during speech comprehension (e.g., Ding et al., 2016; Keitel et al., 2018), and are known to be modulated by acoustic landmarks and speech intelligibility (e.g., Zoefel & VanRullen, 2015). But, it is unclear what information (e.g., timing, rhythm, or content) the brain utilizes to generate linguistic structure and meaning beyond the information that is present in the physical stimulus. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate whether oscillations are modulated by linguistic content over and above the speech stimulus’ rhythmicity and temporal distribution. We manipulated the presence of semantic and syntactic information apart from the timescale of their occurrence, and controlled for the acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information in the signal. EEG was recorded while 29 adult native speakers of all genders listened to naturally-spoken Dutch sentences, jabberwocky controls with a sentence-like prosodic rhythm and morphemes, word lists with lexical content but no phrase structure, and backwards acoustically-matched controls. Mutual information (MI) analysis revealed sensitivity to linguistic content: Phase MI was highest for sentences at the phrasal (0.8-1.1 Hz) and lexical timescale (1.9-2.8 Hz), suggesting that the delta-band is modulated by lexically-driven combinatorial processing beyond prosody, and that linguistic content (i.e., structure and meaning) organizes the phase of neural oscillations beyond the timescale and rhythmicity of the stimulus. This pattern is consistent with neurophysiologically-inspired models of language comprehension (Martin, 2016, 2020; Martin & Doumas, 2017) where oscillations encode endogenously-generated linguistic content over and above exogenous or stimulus-driven timing and rhythm information.Significance StatementBiological systems like the brain encode their environment not only by reacting in a series of stimulus-driven responses, but by combining stimulus-driven information with endogenous, internally-generated, inferential knowledge and meaning. Understanding language from speech is the human benchmark for this. Much research focusses on the purely stimulus-driven response, but here, we focus on the goal of language behavior: conveying structure and meaning. To that end, we use naturalistic stimuli that contrast acoustic-prosodic and lexical-semantic information to show that, during spoken language comprehension, oscillatory modulations reflect computations related to inferring structure and meaning from the acoustic signal. Our experiment provides the first evidence to date that compositional structure and meaning organize the oscillatory response, above and beyond acoustic and lexical controls.

Agreement is a morphosyntactic dependency which is sensitive to the hierarchical structure of the clause and is constrained by the structural distance that separates the elements involved in this relation. In this paper we present two experiments, providing new evidence that Italian-speaking children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), as well as Typically Developing (TD) children, are sensitive to the same hierarchical and locality factors that characterise agreement in adult grammars. This sensitivity holds even though DLD children show accrued difficulties in more complex agreement configurations. In the first experiment, a forced-choice task was used to establish whether children are more affected in the computation of S-V agreement when an element intervenes hierarchically or linearly in the agreement relation: DLD children are more subject to attraction errors when the attractor intervenes hierarchically, indicating that DLD children discriminate between hierarchical and linear configurations. The second experiment, also conducted through a forced-choice task, shows that the computation of agreement in DLD children is more ‘fragile’ than in TD children (and also in children with a primary impairment in the phonological domain), in that it is more sensitive to the factors of complexity identified in Moscati and Rizzi's (2014) typology of agreement configurations. To capture the agreement pattern found in DLD children, we put forth a novel hypothesis: the Fragile Computation of Agreement Hypothesis. Its main tenet is that DLD children make use of the same grammatical operations employed by their peers, as demonstrated in Experiment 1, but difficulties increase as a function of the complexity of the agreement configuration.

The study of the Research Article (RA) genre has been dominated by genre analysis and corpus linguistics focusing on rhetorical moves and, or lexicogrammar, with little attention to the level of the message and the realization of different types of Theme and progression patterns. To the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of comparative studies investigating similarities/differences in the use of theme in electrical engineering RA Introductions written by native English-speaking (NES) scholars and non-native English-speaking (NNES) Saudi scholars. We address this gap using Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) approach to analyze the texture of electrical engineering RA Introduction sections written by NES scholars and NNES Saudi scholars from a message perspective. The research questions aimed to quantitatively and qualitatively investigate (1) Theme types, (2) thematic markedness, and (3) thematic progression patterns in the two data sets. After reviewing comparative research on message structure, we analyzed 117 RA Introductions written by experienced NES/NNES authors. The results accord with research comparing thematic organization in native English scholars’ writings and those from cultural background other than Arabic. The findings showed that NESs’ and Saudi NNESs’ introductions overlap at a clause level, but they start to diverge beyond the clause. This study provides a good starting point for understanding NNES Saudi scholars’ use of underexplored linguistic items. The results of the current study offer insights for academic writing instruction and material developers.

A problem in automatically generated stories for image sequences is that they use overly generic vocabulary and phrase structure and fail to match the distributional characteristics of human-generated text. We address this problem by introducing explicit representations for objects and their relations by extracting scene graphs from the images. Utilizing an embedding of this scene graph enables our model to more explicitly reason over objects and their relations during story generation, compared to the global features from an object classifier used in previous work. We apply metrics that account for the diversity of words and phrases of generated stories as well as for reference to narratively-salient image features and show that our approach outperforms previous systems. Our experiments also indicate that our models obtain competitive results on reference-based metrics.

This study aims to establish whether the processing of different connectives (e.g., and, but) and different coherence relations (addition, contrast) can be modulated by a structural feature of the connected segments—namely, parallelism. While but is mainly used to contrast two expressions, and occurs in many different relations and has been shown to come with a processing cost. We report three self-paced reading experiments in which we manipulate whether the connected segments share a common verb phrase. Such parallel constructions frequently occur in contrastive relations, although they are typically treated as additive in comprehension research. We expect that parallelism will compensate for the cognitive complexity of contrast and for the ambiguity of and by further signaling the coherence relation. Our results indicate that parallelism speeds up processing and provides further evidence for priming in comprehension. However, parallelism interacted with connective ambiguity in an overt disambiguation task (Experiment 3) but not in a more natural reading task (Experiment 2). We argue that the processing of contrast remains shallow unless disambiguation is explicitly required.

We investigated whether readers use the low-level cue of proper noun capitalization in the parafovea to infer syntactic category, and whether this results in an early update of the representation of a sentence's syntactic structure. Participants read sentences containing either a subject relative or object relative clause, in which the relative clause's overt argument was a proper noun (e.g., The tall lanky guard who alerted Charlie/Charlie alerted to the danger was young) across three experiments. In Experiment 1 these sentences were presented in normal sentence casing or entirely in upper case. In Experiment 2 participants received either valid or invalid parafoveal previews of the relative clause. In Experiment 3 participants viewed relative clauses in only normal conditions. We hypothesized that we would observe relative clause effects (i.e., inflated fixation times for object relative clauses) while readers were still fixated on the word who, if readers use capitalization to infer a parafoveal word's syntactic class. This would constitute a syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effect. Furthermore, we hypothesized that this effect should be influenced by sentence casing in Experiment 1 (with no cue for syntactic category being available in upper case sentences) but not by parafoveal preview validity of the target words. We observed syntactic parafoveal-on-foveal effects in Experiment 1 and 3, and a Bayesian analysis of the combined data from all three experiments. These effects seemed to be influenced more by noun capitalization than lexical processing. We discuss our findings in relation to models of eye movement control and sentence processing theories. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The present study explores the incidental learning of formulaic sequences (FS) from audio-visual input and factors affecting the learning of FS. A pretest-posttest, within-participant design was adopted. English-as-a-foreign-language learners (L1 = Dutch; n = 42) watched a one-hour English language documentary without subtitles. Learning gains were measured at the level of form recall and meaning recall. Significant learning gains were found in both the form recall and meaning recall tests, indicating that several knowledge aspects of FS can be learned incidentally from audio-visual input. The findings also revealed a positive relationship between learners’ prior vocabulary knowledge and the learning gains. Further, several item-related factors affected the learning gains (e.g., collocate-node relationship, frequency). Finally, the findings showed the incremental nature of learning FS, as pre-knowledge of the meaning of the FS prior to the TV viewing was the strongest predictor of learning the form of FS. ispartof: Studies In Second Language Acquisition vol:42 issue:3 pages:525-549 status: published

WOS: 000520798900001 PubMed: 32189183 The goal of this study is to investigate whether or not Turkish has a particular preference in ambiguity resolution of relative clause attachment when two possible NPs are available as in "Someone shot [NP1 the servant] of [NP2 the actress] [RC who was on the balcony]& x2ee;. The relevant literature has showed that RC attachment preferences-whether NP1 or NP2-vary across languages, which results in contradictory evidence if some universal processing principle is assumed. Turkish differs typologically from English and other European languages in the construction of RC using complex "genitive-possessor" construction. In order to make a valid cross-linguistic comparison it is therefore of particular importance to carefully control potential extraneous factors which might obstruct true attachment preferences-if they exist. The present study, which controls various confounding factors, reveals that both syntactic and non-syntactic factors should be taken into consideration when constructing the stimulus sentences for testing attachment ambiguity resolution. Specifically, we propose that the semantic relations (e.g. part-whole relations) between the noun phrases of the genitive-possessive construction and the semantic associations with the proximal as well as with the distal predicate play a key role in the attachment preferences of monolingual Turkish native speakers in this type of ambiguous sentences. When these extraneous factors were controlled, no preference was observed. TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey)Turkiye Bilimsel ve Teknolojik Arastirma Kurumu (TUBITAK) We wish to acknowledge TUBITAK (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) for the doctoral scholarship granted to the first author, and to thank two anonymous academics who reviewed and commented on the Turkish stimulus material.