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Language is a systematic means of communication that employs sound or conventional symbols. Using a foreign language can be problematic when attempting to communicate or translate written or spoken language from one's native language due to structural differences between languages. Among the most widely spoken languages in the world, English is understood by approximately half of the global population. However, it is neither an official nor a second language in our country. Nonetheless, due to its significance, it is often taught as a foreign language at schools, institutes, and universities. As previously mentioned, Pashto, our language, shares structural similarities and differences with English, which can challenge learners. To address these difficulties in learning English, this paper presents a contrastive analysis of English and Pashto adjectives, examining their similarities and differences. The study employs a descriptive and contrastive methodology.

The study examined the types of language errors made by learners in the English narrative essays. It also assessed the feedback techniques employed by teachers of English in the handling of language errors in the English narrative essays. A descriptive research design was employed to examine errors of English narrative essays of 181 form two learners obtained through stratified random sampling and simple random sampling techniques. The eight teachers of English selected through purposive and simple random sampling completed interview schedules. Qualitative data generated from the essays of the learners was analyzed using Error Analysis and Content Analysis. The findings reveal that a total of seven categories of language errors which include: word order, verb tense and form, subject -- verb agreement, spelling, plurality, word choice, and capital letter errors were made by the learners in their English narrative essays. The most preferred corrective technique was to involve the learners actively by encouraging them to read extensively and write severally on various narratives in the target language. The findings will provide reliable feedback to teachers of English because it will guide on the development of teaching methods and evaluative measures to narrative essays. The study will also be useful to curriculum developers in designing materials for teaching English language in secondary schools. It will also be of invaluable benefit to learners of English as it will guide on the way narrative essays need to be written.

To acquire language, learners have to map the language onto the environment, but languages vary as to how much information they include to constrain how a sentence relates to the world. We investigated the conditions under which information within the language and the environment is combined for learning. In a cross-situational artificial language learning study, participants listened to transitive sentences and viewed two scenes, and selected which scene was described by the sentence. There were three conditions, involving different language variants. All variants had free word order but varied as to whether or not they contained morphosyntactic information that defined the subject and object roles of nouns in the sentence. We found that participants were able to learn information about word order and vocabulary from each variant, demonstrating that learners are not reliant on information within a language only, but can combine constraints from language and environment to support acquisition.

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 single word. Given this, we expected Turkish speakers to be less sensitive to phrasal frequencies than English speakers. In Study 1, we conducted a corpus analysis of translation-equivalent adjective-noun collocations (e.g., front door) and found differences between the two languages in frequency counts. In Study 2, we conducted a reaction time experiment to determine the sensitivity of native speakers of English and Turkish to the frequency of adjectives, nouns, and whole collocations. Turkish speakers were less sensitive to whole-phrase frequencies, as predicted, indicating that collocations are processed less holistically in Turkish than English. Both groups demonstrated that processing collocations involves combining information about individual words and phrases. Taken together, we show that speakers are sensitive to frequency information at multiple grain sizes that are attuned to the typology of different languages.

Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we report a word-order selection task, with a Greek and a Spanish version. The two versions of the task were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Greek and Spanish. The results show that the first language (L1) Spanish learners of Greek approximated more closely native word orders than the L1 Greek learners of Spanish. For the Spanish learners of Greek, the advanced group performed at ceiling, while the intermediate group performed native-like only with unergatives in neutral and direct interrogative subject-focused contexts. On the other hand, for the Greek learners of Spanish, the intermediate group failed in all contexts, while the advanced group performed native-like with unaccusatives in neutral contexts. This asymmetry between L2 Greek and L2 Spanish reveals that the L1-L2 combination determines the learners' performance, and this is unexpected under the IH.

Drastic changes in education like depending on remote and online education during and after Corona Virus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) have been undergone globally. As a result, instructors and learners were convinced to pursue their objectives despite the complications of pandemic disease. To this end, this study focuses on the effect of extra-curricular collocation-based assignments on reading comprehension skill and the utilization of technology in the context of education. Thus, in this quasi-experimental study two homogeneous groups including sixty intermediate students from a state university in Turkey were selected. Reading comprehension instruction was given to both groups who participated in online education run by a Moodle Application.While the experimental group received additional collocation-focused education and assignments, the control group had traditional reading comprehension education without noticing the importance and conducive effect of collocations. To compare the means of the two groups pre and post-tests, and two independent T-tests were used. Ameaningful difference in the means of the groups on the post-test of reading comprehension performance was obvious in the results section. Last but not the least, assignment, as an academic extra-curricular activity, had a considerable impact on Turkish intermediate EFL learners' foreign language reading comprehension ability after the pandemic lockdown period.

This case study describes the use of a syntax intervention with two deaf children who did not acquire a complete first language (L1) from birth. It looks specifically at their ability to produce subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure in American Sign Language (ASL) after receiving intervention. This was an exploratory case study in which investigators utilized an intervention that contained visuals to help teach SVO word order to young deaf children. Baseline data were collected over three sessions before implementation of a targeted syntax intervention and two follow-up sessions over 3-4 weeks. Both participants demonstrated improvements in their ability to produce SVO structure in ASL in 6-10 sessions. Visual analysis revealed a positive therapeutic trend that was maintained in follow-up sessions. These data provide preliminary evidence that a targeted intervention may help young deaf children with an incomplete L1 learn to produce basic word order in ASL. Results from this case study can help inform the practice of professionals working with signing deaf children who did not acquire a complete L1 from birth (e.g., speech-language pathologists, deaf mentors/coaches, ASL specialists, etc.). Future research should investigate the use of this intervention with a larger sample of deaf children.

It remains an open question whether second language (L2) learners can process linguistic properties at the syntax-discourse interface. This study examines this issue in the context of the L2 processing of Korean dative sentences under different information structure requirements. Given that discourse constraints associated with information structure tend to manifest more strongly in noncanonical than in canonical structures, we tested whether L2 learners of Korean show sensitivity to such constraints during online processing. In a story-continuation task, both native and nonnative speaker groups showed a strong preference for producing canonical dative patterns, indicating their comparable knowledge of the canonical status of Korean dative sentences. In a self-paced reading task, both groups spent longer reading times when the word order of dative sentences did not follow given-new information structure, but only for the noncanonical and not the canonical structure. These results suggest that L2 processing of dative structures at the syntax-discourse interface relies on the same parsing architecture that guides native-speaker processing.

It has been proposed that an implicit learning deficit explains the difficulties with grammar commonly observed in children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD). The present study further investigates this link in two ways. Firstly, we investigate whether kindergartners with DLD have more difficulties with preposition understanding and production as compared to their typically developing peers because they have not (yet) learned to weigh implicit structural information (word order) over more explicit semantic information (noun animacy; Study 1). Secondly, we investigate whether kindergartners with DLD learn to comprehend and produce locative prepositions from an implicit learning context (Study 2). In Study 1 we observed that Dutch kindergartners with DLD (n = 32) made more errors in preposition comprehension (picture-matching task) and preposition production (semi-spontaneous production task) as compared to their typically developing peers (n = 30). We have no evidence that these differences can be explained by a difference in cue weighing or implicit learning ability (serial reaction time task). In Study 2 we observed that the storytelling context led to an increase in preposition production in children with DLD, but we found no evidence that it also led to a better understanding and more semantically accurate productions of the prepositions. We conclude that Dutch kindergartners with DLD have difficulties with locative prepositions but cannot conclude that differences in cue-weighing or implicit learning play a role herein.

To learn new words, particularly verbs, child learners have been shown to benefit from the linguistic contexts in which the words appear. However, cross-linguistic differences affect how this process unfolds. One previous study found that children's abilities to learn a new verb differed across Korean and English as a function of the sentence in which the verb occurred. The authors hypothesized that the properties of word order and argument drop, which vary systematically in these two languages, were driving the differences. In the current study, we pursued this finding to ask if the difference persists later in development, or if children acquiring different languages come to appear more similar as their linguistic knowledge and learning capacities increase. Preschool-aged monolingual English learners (N = 80) and monolingual Korean learners (N = 64) were presented with novel verbs in contexts that varied in word order and argument drop and accompanying visual stimuli. We assessed their learning by measuring accuracy in a forced-choice pointing task, and we measured eye gaze during the learning phase as an indicator of the processes by which they mapped the novel verbs to meaning. Unlike previous studies which identified differences between English and Korean learning 2-year-olds in a similar task, our results revealed similarities between the two language groups with these older preschoolers. We interpret our results as evidence that over the course of early childhood, children become adept at learning from a large variety of contexts, such that differences between learners of different languages are attenuated.

The study compares three synonymous nouns, "disadvantage," "downside," and "drawback," in terms of their frequency, distribution patterns, and collocations, using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings show that the frequency of "disadvantage" is the highest, followed by that of "downside" and "drawback," respectively. Regarding their distribution across eight registers in COCA, "disadvantage" prevails in academic texts, whereas "downside" and "drawback" seem to be less formal as they are most often found in magazines. An analysis of semantic preferences of the verb collocates of the three synonyms revealed two common themes: CONSIDER and DEAL WITH. As for their adjective collocates, the three synonyms frequently co-occur with adjectives under the theme EXTENT. "Disadvantage" is more often preceded by adjectives subscribed to the theme ASPECT than drawback is, and while "downside" regularly combines with some adjectives representing counter-expectations, "drawback" tends to be accompanied by more adjective collocates organized into the theme PROMINENCE than the other two synonyms. It is advisable that English language teachers utilize these valuable insights to develop lessons and materials.

Students majoring in translation at the College of Languages and Translation take a stylistics course (3 hours per week) in the 5th semester of the translation program. The course aims to introduce students to the stylistic features of different genres in English such as journalese, advertisements, commercial, scientific, and legal texts. The present study aims to investigate ESL translation students' ability to comprehend and identify the stylistic features of legal documents, to find out the stylistic features that are easy to identify, and those that are difficult to identify. Sixty EFL junior students enrolled in a Stylistics course took a test which consisted of an English legal (notarial) text and asked them to identify its lexical and syntactic features. Analysis of the subjects' responses showed that the features that they could identify were: Use of legal verbs (69%); prefixing and suffixing of prepositions (63%;) prepositional/adverbial phrases (57%); long complex sentences (52%); coordination of synonyms (doublets) (52%); statements (22%); no adjectives (10%); few pronouns (8%); use of technical vocabulary and emphatic auxiliaries (7% each); use of passive structures, relative clauses and scarce use of pronoun reference (5% each); use adverbs and putting adverbs in an unusual position (3% each); rare pronoun reference, descriptive adjectives, few adjectives, long words, sentence with unusual order, and long nominal clauses (1.6% each). These percentages reflect the difficulty level of the different lexical and syntactic features of the legal text and features with which the students have comprehension difficulties. The lower the percentage, the more difficult the feature is. Difficulties in processing the notarial text may be attributed to lack of linguistic competence and unfamiliarity with the notarial text structure. Recommendations for instructional techniques that would help enhance the students' ability to identify and comprehend the lexical and syntactic structures of legal texts are given.

Grammar competition has been proposed as a model for second language (L2) acquisition. Variational Learning provides a framework within which to investigate the idea of grammar competition as the model requires a marriage of quantitative properties of the input with Universal Grammar. A diachronic variational model of grammar competition is extended to second language acquisition (L2A) to explore verb-second word order optionality in L2 English. Patterns of L1-German--L2-English word order acquisition are reviewed in light of a study of classroom discourse as input to first language (L1) German speakers. A variational model of word order patterns in the input identifies differences in patterns of word order optionality, which may contribute to the trajectory of acquisition identified for L2 English.

Over the last two decades, the question of to which linguistic cues learners pay attention when they decode a new language has been subject to controversy in the field of third language (L3) acquisition. In this article, we present an artificial language learning experiment that investigated how lexical and syntactic similarities between an artificial L3 and preexisting grammars impact crosslinguistic influence at the very beginning of the acquisition process. We exposed four groups of 30 Norwegian-English bilinguals each to one of four L3s and gave them training in that L3. The participants gave forced-choice acceptability judgments on pairs of nonsubject-initial declarative clauses that differed in word order, one grammatical in English, the other grammatical in Norwegian. The participants had not been exposed to nonsubject-initial declaratives during the exposure and training phases to avoid confounds with learning. The results showed that both lexical and syntactic similarities affect crosslinguistic influence. We discuss this result considering contemporary accounts of L3 acquisition.

This study was conducted to identify Iranian EFL teachers' perceptions regarding the most serious written errors made by young adult EFL learners, along with the most effective types of written corrective feedback to deal with them. Data were collected from 253 Iranian EFL teachers through a questionnaire made by the researchers and were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results showed that the most serious errors perceived by the teachers were verb form and verb tense, and word order driven by psychological verbs. The most effective feedback types to treat these errors were (a) direct, non-negotiated feedback and (b) indirect, negotiated. The findings contribute to the research concerning the most frequently noticed errors by EFL teachers along with the most frequently employed corrective feedback strategies to address them.

This study, using a quantitative approach, examined Spanish and South African pre-service teachers' responses to translating word problems based on direct proportionality into equations. The participants were 79 South African and 211 Spanish prospective primary school teachers who were in their second year of a Bachelor of Education degree. The study's general objective was to compare the students' proficiency in expressing direct proportionality word problems as equations, with a particular focus on the extent of the reversal error among the students' responses. Furthermore, the study sought to test the explanatory power of word order matching and the static comparison as causes of the reversal error in the two contexts. The study found that South African students had a higher proportion of correct responses across all the items. While nearly all the errors made by Spanish students were reversals, the South African group barely committed reversal errors. However, a subgroup of the South African students made errors consisting of equations that do not make sense in the situation, suggesting that they had poor foundational knowledge of the multiplicative comparison relation and did not understand the functioning of the algebraic language. The study also found that the word order matching strategy has some explanatory power for the reversal error in both contexts. However, the static comparison strategy offers explanatory power only in the Spanish context, suggesting that there may be a difference in curriculum and instructional approaches in the middle and secondary years of schooling, which is when equations are taught.

Within the framework of the systematic functional grammar (SFG), Matthiessen (2004) has provided an analysis of the word/element order according to which word/element order in a clause is decided by experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. In this study which has been conducted aiming at the description and analysis of the word/element order in a simple Persian clause, we have sought to describe and analyze the sequence of the main elements in a Persian active simple declarative clause within Matthiessen (2004)'s metafunctional model. In fact, through evidence from Persian language, i.e. samples derived from Persian texts and also other Persian researchers' works, we have sought to demonstrate how the three experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions are involved in determining the order of the main elements in an active simple declarative clause in Persian. The results of this study show that the "basic" order of the main elements in a Persian simple clause and specifically single-Complement clause is in line with both experiential and interpersonal metafunctions and any type of the movement of the aforementioned elements in an active simple declarative clause in Persian language is explained with the help of the mechanisms of textual metafunction.

The current study attempted to investigate English collocations used in written translation among fourth-year English majors at a university. The participants included forty-one fourth-year English-majored students and three translation teachers who are teaching English-Vietnamese translation courses in the university. To gather data, the researchers used two instruments: a test of English collocations including five types of collocations: an adjective going with a noun, a verb going with a noun, a noun going with a verb, a noun going with a noun and a verb going with an adverb. After data analysis, it revealed that just slightly over half of the student participants were able to find the correct collocations in written translation. Furthermore, a noun going with a verb and a noun going with a noun are the two main lexical errors made by most of the students. The interview was also used to seek translation teachers' perspectives on students' ability to translate texts in general and strategies of translation in particular. They perceived that most of their students were not aware of collocations in written translation and still had difficulties in both grammatical and lexical collocations. Finally, some recommendations on improving English collocations in written translation were also made based on these findings.

This study investigated EFL learners' comprehension of scalar properties of three types of emotion verbs, namely, fear type, liking and disliking emotion verbs and compare their performance with instructors and native speakers of English. The participants were 38 nonnative pre-service teachers from ELT department at a state university in Turkey, 11 ELT instructors at different universities and 10 native speakers from the USA and the UK. A scale construction task was administered, and data were collected via in person and e-mail according to participants' judgements on scalar emotion verbs in terms of their relative order on a linear scale. The quantitative data were analysed using SPSS. The results revealed that in terms of constructing consistent scales with previously determined scales in literatutre, pre-service teachers performed poorly for fear-type and disliking emotion verbs, they were partly successful in constructing consistent scales for liking verbs. It was also found that similarly instructors performed poorly in constructing scales for fear-type and disliking verbs, but they were better than pre-service teachers. They were also successful in constructing scales for liking verbs. Native speakers were successful in fear-type and liking verbs; however, like non-native participants, they performed poorly in constructing consistent scales for disliking verbs. This means that there are cross-cultural differences among participants' judgement of emotion verbs on a linear scale in terms of their intensity. This study provides valuable information for the studies on lexical resources (e.g., VerbNet, WordNet etc.) Previous studies (e.g. Fellbaum & Mathieu,2014; Sheinman, & Tokunaga, 2009) show a way to represent the scalar properties of emotion verbs in WordNet, and other possible extensions to additional verb families can cause a more subtle semantic analysis of emotion verbs in lexical databases with potential benefits for automatic inferencing, language pedagogy and translation. This study contributes to semantic analysis of emotion verbs in lexical databases. It also provides some implications for students, language teachers, and policy makers in terms of vocabulary learning and teaching.

The present study investigates the role of three structural factors ("word order," "case-marking," and "verbal morphology") in the comprehension of the Korean suffixal passive by Korean-speaking children. To measure the relative impact of each factor on the comprehension of the passive, we devise a novel method where these factors are obscured systematically by employing acoustic masking -- chewing and coughing. Results from three picture selection tasks show that (1) the Agent-First preference is not ubiquitously employed by young children, but is dependent on other grammatical cues; (2) despite mediocre accuracy rates on passive sentences, we nonetheless find evidence that children have some knowledge about the passive construction; and (3) scrambling of passive sentences does not aid in comprehension. These findings suggest that, in order to understand the acquisition of the passive, all these structural factors need to be considered.

Purpose: To assess strengths and weaknesses of the reading level (RL) match approach and its potential to generate insights regarding the cognitive foundations of reading ability and disability. Method: We applied RL-match design to a sample of 2nd-6th graders reading a consistent orthography, Russian, using an "extreme phenotype" approach. Readers with suspected specific reading disability (sSRD, n = 538) and highperforming readers (HPR; n = 806) were matched via propensity Scores, using IQ and each of the alternatives: accuracy of word decoding, pseudoword decoding, word unitization, or paragraph reading fluency. In each case, two groups were compared on the remaining literacy tasks as well as phonological processing, orthographic processing, and rapid serial naming. Results: When matched on word or pseudoword decoding (288 and 313 pairs, respectively), readers with sSRD and HPR differed on all remaining indicators. When matched on word unitization (173 pairs), the differences disappeared or had substantially diminished effect sizes. When matched on paragraph reading fluency (57 pairs), no significant differences remained. Thus, none of the componential skills appeared antecedent to the observed difficulties assessed via the number of correctly orally read words per minute. However, certain inherent limitations of RL-match design preclude us from considering this to be a definitive outcome.

Purpose: This study conducted a transcription-based and spectral moments' analysis of alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives in monolingual and bilingual Frenchs-peaking children, aged 2;6--6;10 (years;months). We measured the percent accuracy of fricatives and investigated whether young children could distinguish alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives on the basis of spectral moments. In addition, we examined which child- (i.e., age, gender, bilingualism, and alveopalatal fricative inventory size) and word/sound-related (i.e., place-of-articulation [PoA], voicing, vowel quality, and word position) factors influenced spectral moments and fricative duration. Method: Children (N = 89) participated in a picture-naming task in which they produced words containing alveolar /s, z/ and alveopalatal /?, ?/ fricatives in word-initial, -medial, and -final positions. The words were transcribed and analyzed acoustically, and the first and third spectral moments (i.e., centroid and skewness) and the duration of fricatives were calculated. The data were subject to mixed-effects linear regression. Results: Percent accuracy results indicated effects of age on alveopalatal fricatives and effects of word position on voiced fricatives. Statistical models indicated that age, gender, and alveopalatal fricative inventory size influenced spectral moments. Age and inventory size interacted significantly with PoA. Children as young as age 2;6 distinguished alveopalatal and alveolar fricatives on the basis of centroid but not skewness values. The distinction between the two sets of fricatives increased with age. Bilingual children who spoke languages with greater numbers of alveopalatal fricatives distinguished alveopalatal and alveolar fricatives less well than monolinguals and bilinguals who spoke languages with fewer numbers of alveopalatal fricatives. Girls had higher centroid and lower skewness values than boys. Models also revealed a significant influence of word/sound-related factors (voicing, vowel quality, and word position) on spectral moments and fricative duration. Conclusions: Findings indicated that multiple factors influence the spectral moments and duration measures of children's alveolar and alveopalatal fricatives. In particular, we found that spectral moments were sensitive to gender and bilingualism effects.

Suriname represents an interesting case of unidirectional multilingual convergence in a linguistic area. The multilingual ecology of Suriname is hierarchical. The Germanic language Dutch exerts structural and lexical influence 'downwards', but other languages do not do so 'upwards' to the same degree. This study analyses the development of word order in the Indo-Aryan language Sarnami and the Afro-Caribbean English-lexifier Creole Sranan, the two largest languages of Suriname besides Dutch. The results show that Sarnami and Sranan have undergone a typological realignment in word order. Sranan has completed a shift from postpositional locative nouns to prepositions through language contact and structural borrowing from Dutch. Sarnami is acquiring SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) as a basic word order next to SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) through structural borrowing from Dutch and Sranan. Conversely, standardisation pressures prevent innovative linguistic practices and structural borrowing from the other languages of Suriname from consolidating themselves in Surinamese Dutch in a similar way. The change that spoken Dutch has undergone in Suriname through influence from Sranan and Sarnami is therefore more modest than the changes Sranan and Sarnami have incurred through Surinamese Dutch influence. This study compares changes in these three languages for the first time and highlights the role of both social and typological factors in driving or impeding areal convergence in multilingual ecologies.

We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb--Object--Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information available at the outset, which should facilitate anticipation of the post-verbal arguments. Tseltal speakers listened to verb-initial sentences with either an object-predictive verb (e.g., "eat") or a general verb (e.g., "look for") (e.g., "Ya slo'/sle ta stukel on te kereme," "Is eating/is looking (for) by himself the avocado the boy/" "The boy is eating/is looking (for) an avocado by himself") while seeing a visual display showing one potential referent (e.g., avocado) and three distractors (e.g., bag, toy car, coffee grinder). We manipulated verb type (predictive vs. general) and recorded participants' eye movements while they listened and inspected the visual scene. Participants' fixations to the target referent were analyzed using multilevel logistic regression models. Shortly after hearing the predictive verb, participants fixated the target object before it was mentioned. In contrast, when the verb was general, fixations to the target only started to increase once the object was heard. Our results suggest that Tseltal hearers pre-activate semantic features of the grammatical object prior to its linguistic expression. This provides evidence from a verb-initial language for online incremental semantic interpretation and anticipatory processing during language comprehension. These processes are comparable to the ones identified in subject-initial languages, which is consistent with the notion that different languages follow similar universal processing principles.

Memory limitations and probabilistic expectations are two key factors that have been posited to play a role in the incremental processing of natural language. Relative clauses (RCs) have long served as a key proving ground for such theories of language processing. Across three self-paced reading experiments, we test the online comprehension of Hungarian subject- and object-extracted RCs (SRCs and ORCs, respectively). We capitalize on the syntactic properties of Hungarian that allow for a variety of word orders within RCs, which helps us to delineate the processing costs associated with memory demand and violated expectations. Results showed a processing cost at the RC verb for structures that have longer verb-argument distances, despite those structures being more frequent in the corpus. These findings thus support theories that attribute processing difficulty to memory limitations, rather than theories that attribute difficulty to less expected structures.

Typing slows at the middle of the word. The exact nature of the slowdown is still disputed. Research on attentional and motoric effects in typing suggests that the slowdown is purely a function of chunking of letters in creating the motor output; this approach posits no further influence of linguistic information during output. Research from a psycholinguistic perspective does posit lexical and sublexical effects during output and explains the midword slowing as a function of slowdowns at the boundaries of sublexical units. Across four experiments, using three different typing tasks, we investigated the typing of compound ("schoolteacher") and pseudocompound ("carpet") words. Typing at the midword region is sensitive to the morphological structure of the word and to linguistic properties of the word and its (pseudo)constituents (e.g., linguistic information about "school" and "teacher" affects "schoolteacher," and "car" and "pet" affects "carpet"). These findings suggest that typing compounds involves a hierarchical plan consisting of two separate motor plans for each constituent executed sequentially such that the output of letters is sensitive to the number of letters within that plan, the position of the sequence in the hierarchy (e.g., first vs. second constituent), and the morphemic structure of the to-be-typed word. Surprisingly, given that pseudocompound lexical representations should not include the pseudoconstituents and given that our tasks in the first three experiments demand full access to the lexical representation before typing, pseudocompound typing is also sensitive to the pseudoconstituent characteristics, suggesting that, during typing, the system attempts to build a compound-like structure.

Purpose: The purpose of this investigation was to examine the impact of instruction order on the speech production response when adopting higher effort speaking styles, specifically loud and clear speech. Method: Speech intensity, lip aperture range, and speech rate data were collected from 24 talkers who repeated the utterance "Buy Bobby a puppy" using habitual, clear, and loud speech. Participants were assigned in quasi-random fashion to one of two groups: a Clear-Loud Group (11 participants; order: habitual-clear-loud) or a Loud-Clear Group (13 participants; order: habitual-loud-clear). Results: Talkers in the Clear-Loud Group exhibited higher speech intensity during the loud style compared with those who performed the Loud-Clear Group. Furthermore, talkers in the Clear-Loud Group retained the increases lip aperture range and reductions in speech rate associated with the clear style when producing the loud style. Conversely, talkers in the Loud-Clear Group exhibited significant increases in lip aperture range between the habitual and loud styles and between the loud and clear styles. Additionally, the Loud-Clear Group exhibited a reduction in speech rate only during the clear style, as no differences in speech rate were observed between the habitual and loud styles. Conclusions: These findings may suggest that producing a higher effort style leads to carry-over effects in subsequent styles. Future research should investigate factors that moderate the degree of order effects for both research and clinical purposes. For instance, if generalizable, the compounding carry-over effects may prove advantageous for certain clinical populations.

The present study was conducted to analyse the use of word order in job interviews. The data was collected from participants in an organisation in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Ten candidates of different races between the ages of 23 and 25 participated in the study. Radford's syntactic theory of word order was employed to qualitatively analyse the data. It was found that positive sentences were predominantly used by the selected (n = 10; 47.4%) compared to the not selected (n = 10; 44.0%) and keep in view (KIV) (n = 23; 39.0%) job candidates. The findings further revealed that the types of word order used in utterances by the selected candidates were different compared to those who were not chosen for interviews. Selected candidates used more negative sentences, subordinate clauses, and time expression in sentences, whereas those who were not selected utilised adverbs of manner in negative sentences, subordinate clauses, and time expression in sentences, while the not selected candidates only used the position of adverbs. On the other hand, the KIV candidates used positive sentences, subordinate clauses and word order in questions in their utterances. The study can provide important contributions to knowledge on the use of English when developing employment course modules emphasising word order as an essential element in portraying good English language proficiency in job interviews.

Research on agrammatism has revealed that the nature of linguistic impairment is systematic and interpretable. Non-canonical sentences are more impaired than those of canonical sentences. Previous studies on Japanese (Hiroshi et al. 2004; Chujo 1983; Tamaoka et al. 2003; Nakayama 1995) report that aphasic patients take longer Response Time (RT) and make more mistakes in producing non-canonical sentences compared to that of canonical sentences. The present research investigates the production impairments of canonical and non-canonical sentences cross-linguistically focusing on Bangla, Japanese, German and English aphasic patients. While Bangla, Japanese, German have relatively flexible word order, and hence allow freer phrasal movement, English exemplifies less freedom in word order patterns, and does not allow as much movement as the former three. We hypothesized that Bangla agrammatic patients would have more impairments in producing non-canonical sentences than those of canonical counterparts, while the production of canonical sentences is not completely devoid of impairments too. Primary data were collected from Bangla agrammatic patients, and secondary data from Japanese, German and English were exploited for cross-linguistic comparison. The findings show that Bangla agrammatic speakers have severe impairments in producing passive sentences, although the production of active ones are not completely devoid of impairments. The cross-linguistic comparison of the findings implies that the production of Bangla agrammatism tend to be similar to other agrammatic production and the production of non-canonical sentences are more difficult than those of canonical sentences cross-linguistically.

The theory of iconicity is widely applied in different fields such as poetry, novel, advertising and English-Chinese comparison but scarcely is it utilized to the combination of English teaching and iconicity theory in cognitive linguistics. This paper discusses how iconicity theory can be used in English teaching by literature research method. Once teachers become familiar with iconicity theory and apply it to their teaching activity, English teaching and learning would be encouraged for they are a rewarding journey, promised with a host of knowledge.

Based on third language acquisition theories (Flynn, Foley, & Vinnitskaya, 2004; Marx & Hufeisen, 2004; Rothman, 2010, 2015) and cross-linguistic influence (Sharwood Smith & Kellerman, 1986), this study explored the written production errors of L3 English acquisition of word order in the affirmative and interrogative structures by L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin learners. The participants were thirty "Yi ethnic minority" students of L3 English at the beginner level from a middle school in Yunnan Province, China. The instrument was an elicited production task. The findings exhibited that errors in L1 Yi word order were more frequently produced than those of L2 Mandarin word order, and the errors produced in the interrogative structures were higher than in the affirmative structures. It demonstrated that cross-linguistic influence from L1 Yi and L2 Mandarin was more evident since a higher proportion of error rates from these two languages were examined, and L1 Yi tended to have a higher negative impact than L2 Mandarin.

This study investigated the frequent grammatical errors, found in the writings of Arab students' taking English writing courses in AL-Hussein Bin Talal University Learners' errors were considered positively as the best sources to identify students' limitations in English writing. Therefore the present study intended to investigate the grammatical errors of Arab students' writings in English in AL-Hussein Bin Talal University and to see if there are any differences in the grammatical errors according to year of study. To conduct this study data was collected from the writing sessions of writing classes that were taught during the fall semester of 2019. The data was collected, analyzed and categorized from students, all majoring in English Language and Literature and ranging from freshman to seniors. A Grammar test Questionnaire designed by the researchers was distributed to the students in these writing sessions. The results showed that the most frequent grammatical error was with the verb tense on a mean of (3.75), followed by errors in the article on a mean of (3.62), wrong word order on a mean of (3.57), noun ending on a mean of (3.40) and least was sentence structure on a mean of (3.39). The results also showed that the seniors on the grammar test on all its parts did better than the freshmen, juniors and sophomores that are the least problems were found among the seniors.

This study examined whether syntactic awareness was related to reading comprehension difficulties in either first language (L1) Chinese or second language (L2) English, or both, among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children. Parallel L1 and L2 metalinguistic and reading measures, including syntactic word-order, morphological awareness, phonological awareness, vocabulary, word reading, reading comprehension, and cognitive measures of nonverbal intelligence and working memory, were administered to 224 fourth-graders. Five groups of comprehenders were identified using a regression approach: (1) 12 poor in Chinese-only (PC); (2) 18 poor in English-only (PE); (3) six poor in both Chinese and English (PB); (4) 14 average in both Chinese and English (AB); and (5) seven good in both (GB). The results of multivariate analyses of covariance showed that: (1) the PB group performed worse than the AB and GB groups in both L1 Chinese and L2 English syntactic awareness; (2) the PC and PE groups performed worse than the AB and GB groups in Chinese syntactic awareness; (3) the PE group had lower performance than the PC, AB, and GB groups in English syntactic awareness; and (4) no significant group difference was found in L2 morphological awareness or vocabulary across both languages. By suggesting that weakness in syntactic awareness can serve as a universal indicator for identifying poor comprehenders in either or both L1 Chinese and L2 English among Hong Kong Chinese-English bilingual children, these findings demonstrate the fundamental role of syntactic awareness in bilingual reading comprehension.

We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow greater structural complexity, i.e., larger head-dependent distance, than head-final structures in both language comprehension and production; (ii) within the capacity limit of working memory, syntactic distance is a positive predictor of reading time for a word with a preceding head, whereas a negative predictor of reading time for a word with a following head; and (iii) at the sentence level, syntactic distance is a significant predictor of sentence reading time. These results suggest that (i) different word orders may enjoy different processing mechanisms in terms of cognitive difficulty and processes, which can be explained by an incremental language parser; and (ii) in addition to distance, word order should also be considered as a factor affecting language processing, which is an important extension to distance-based language processing models. Taken as a whole, our study paves the way for corpus-based integration of quantitative linguistic and psycholinguistic methods into understanding language processing and its underlying cognitive mechanisms.

Traditionally, it has been claimed that the non-canonical word order of passives makes them inherently more difficult to comprehend than their canonical active counterparts both in the first (L1) and second language (L2). However, growing evidence suggests that non-canonical word orders are not inherently more difficult to process than canonical counterparts when presented with discourse contexts that license their information structure constraints. In an eye-tracking experiment, we investigated the effect of information structure on the online processing of active and passive constructions and whether this effect differed in monolinguals and L1-Spanish-L2-English speakers. In line with previous corpus studies, our results indicated that there was an interaction between word order and information structure according to which passive sentences were much more costly to process with new--given information structure patterns. Crucially, we failed to find evidence that the effect of information structure on word order constraints in comprehension differed between monolingual and L2 speakers.

The present study compared Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals within three age groups to examine whether bilinguals have an advantage in syntactic processing. Participants were tested on morphosyntactic awareness, word-order awareness, artificial syntax learning, and general cognitive abilities. Bilinguals within the three age groups performed better than their monolingual peers in acquiring a novel syntax and in processing morphosyntax specific to English. The bilingual adults also outperformed their monolingual peers in processing language-specific word order. Overall, the findings give credence to the structural sensitivity theory in accounting for bilingual syntactic processing. A bilingual advantage in language processing appears not confined to knowledge of and strategies specific to the additional language but constitutes a more abstract representation of underlying linguistic structure. Bilingual effects are also qualified by cross-language differences in linguistic features, age, and the amount of bilingual experience.

Health messages are central to the field of public health in influencing behavioral change, and previous research does not offer a univocal answer on the most effective ordering of health outcomes and (un)healthy behaviors within health communication. An archival study revealed that online mass-media communicators tend to mention behaviors first. This strategy was questioned in two experimental studies (N[subscript tot]=158) examining the impact of word order on behavioral intention. Specifically, by manipulating the mentioning order of health outcomes (i.e., "effect-first vs. effect-later") within a health message, results revealed a subtle role of word-order. English and Italian middle-aged men were more willing to change unhealthy habits after being exposed to a health-related message following the "effect-first" order rather than the "effect-later" order. Besides extending the comprehension of the role of word-order in socio-cognitive processes, our findings provide health communicators feedback about subtle linguistic strategies while dealing with health messages construction.

Language, as a tool for people's daily communication, has no gender bias itself. With the development of society, the language has changed correspondingly. Language serve as the mirror of society, inevitably reflecting people's minds or ideology as well as the culture and social conditions of a society. While in English, as the mother tongue of many western countries, amounts of gender discrimination expressions are embodied. To some extent, the gender bias toward females serves as the embodiment that females are considerably insignificant and share a low social status. In this paper, the author will analyse the phenomenon of gender discrimination in English language, and find the reason behind it to make people realize the importance of eliminating this phenomenon. If people keep using sexism language unconsciously, it will become the hindrance of the social harmony

This research aims to explore the ability of English majors to identify the four basic types of sentences. English language has four types of sentences, each kind of sentence for different kinds of messages. Sentences are combinations of words that express complete thoughts. Sentences are basic building blocks of writing and communication; therefore, breaking our ideas into sentences is essential for clear communication. In traditional grammar, the four basic types of sentence structures are the simple sentence, the compound sentence, the complex sentence, and the compound-complex sentence, whose identification by the non-native student teachers may be problematic. It's crucial that English majors recognize word order and sentence types in English to improve their academic writing skills, and hence the identification of four types of sentences by English majors is a must. In this research 35 English majors with low intermediate background were given a pretest of 20 questions in terms of a multiple-choice test to measure their initial success at the beginning. After 6 hours of intense sentence structure recognition studies, they were given the same pretest, after al elapse of 15 days, as the posttest to determine their final success on the discrimination of simple, compound, complex sentences, and compound-complex sentences from each other. After the collection of data from pre-test and post-tests, the data were analyzed by SPSS 21. It was discovered that while pre-test's was 23%, the mean score of the post-test came up to be 56%, the percentage of ascent being % 23.

Second language (L2) vocabulary depth, or how well learners know an L2 word (e.g., Meara, 1996), is a dimension of vocabulary knowledge that assists in L2 comprehension and production (e.g. Li & Kirby, 2014; Qian, 2002). The current study investigated the effects of two types of English L2 learning environments--formal English classrooms in Thailand and English exposure in an English-speaking country--on adult Thai speakers' (N=29) English vocabulary depth. Participants completed the Word Associates Test (Read, 1998), which measured the depth of their receptive vocabulary knowledge, and an elicitation task which required them to supply English collocations in a given context. Regression results based on both measures suggested that participants' previous length of English education in Thailand did not significantly predict their English vocabulary depth, but their length of stay in the US, which followed their English education in Thailand, significantly predicted the depth. The findings were in line with the theoretical proposals (e.g., Ellis, 2013) and previous empirical results (e.g., Parkinson, 2015) suggesting the superiority of an L2 immersion environment over an environment where an L2 is a foreign language in promoting the depth dimension of L2 word knowledge. Based on the results, pedagogical implications are discussed.

This study addresses the question of how the main factors related to input--including the environment in which children are exposed to both languages, the relative timing of the onset of the exposure to them and the amount of input--affect bilingual language acquisition at primary-school age. We examined the data of 42 German Polish bilinguals who had acquired German from birth and German monolinguals, comparing on the one hand simultaneous bilingual children speaking German as a majority language with simultaneous bilinguals who speak German as a heritage language and, on the other hand, comparing heritage speakers of German who are simultaneous bilinguals with those who are sequential bilinguals. We studied their word order patterns in German, specifically the position of verb and negation, by dint of several tasks including acceptability judgment, forced choice, sentence repetition, and narrative tasks. The results revealed the effect of all three factors on word order patterns used by bilinguals between the ages of 7 and 13. The performance of simultaneous bilingual heritage speakers varies across the tasks. We conclude that they have problems inhibiting their stronger language in tasks that place higher demands on processor, leading to a non-target-like performance in their weaker language in producing narratives.

The main purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of Machine Translation Post-Editing (MTPE) training for FL students. Our hypothesis was that with specific MTPE training, students will able to detect and correct machine translation mistakes in their FL. Training materials were developed to detect six typical mistakes from Machine Translation (MT) raw output: Accuracy, Word Order, Official Name, Preposition, Omission, and Formal Style. The training materials include three levels of difficulty: Initial - ability to spot a mistake, Intermediate - ability to classify the type of mistake, and Advanced - ability to correct the mistake. A pretest-posttest design with a control group and a trained experimental group was chosen to test the effectiveness of the training programme. In the post-test, the experimental group could identify and correct more mistakes successfully. and in less time than the control group, especially for omission, official name and preposition. Accuracy, formal style, and word order errors were more difficult to correct. Results suggest that specific MTPE training is not only useful to identify and correct MT mistakes but also a way to incorporate a critical view on machine translation in FL classes.

This article presents a series of three experiments investigating the processing of nested epistemic expressions, utterances containing two epistemic modals in one clause, such as "he 'certainly may' have forgotten." While some linguists claim that in a nested epistemic expression one modal is semantically embedded within the scope of the other modal based on the word order, it is possible that in daily conversation the scope of nested modals may not be thoroughly processed, leading to a "good-enough" interpretation that is not sensitive to the word order of the two modals. This study used probability judgment tests to investigate people's interpretation of nested epistemic expressions, and the effect of word order was not observed. This result fails to support the scope account of the nested epistemic expressions and suggests a holistic processing mechanism in line with the good-enough processing framework.

We test the comprehension of transitive sentences in very young learners of Mandarin Chinese using a combination of the weird word order paradigm with the use of pseudo-verbs and the preferential looking paradigm, replicating the experiment of Franck et al. (2013) on French. Seventeen typically-developing Mandarin infants (mean age: 17.4 months) participated and the same experiment was conducted with eighteen adults. The results show that hearing well-formed NP-V-NP sentences triggered infants to fixate more on a transitive scene than on a reflexive scene. In contrast, when they heard deviant NP-NP-V sequences, no such preference pattern was found, a performance pattern that is adult-like. This is at variance with some of the results from Candan et al. (2012), who only found evidence for canonical word order comprehension at almost age 3 when considering fixation time. Furthermore, within the age range tested, performance showed no effect of age or vocabulary size.

Representing the base-10 structure of numbers is a challenging cognitive ability, unique to humans, but it is yet unknown how precisely this is done. Here, we examined whether and how literate adults represent a number's full syntactic structure. In 5 experiments, participants repeated number-word sequences and we systematically varied the order of words within each sequence. Repetition on grammatical sequences (e.g., two hundred ninety-seven) was better than on non-grammatical ones (hundred seven two ninety). We conclude that the participants represented the number's full syntactic structure and used it to merge number words into chunks in short-term memory. Accuracy monotonously improved for sequences with increasingly longer grammatical segments, up to a limit of [approximately] 4 words per segment, irrespectively of the number of digits, and worsened thereafter. Namely, short chunks improved memorization, whereas oversized chunks disrupted memorization. This chunk size limit suggests that the chunks are not based on predefined structures, whose size limit is not expected to be so low, but are created ad hoc by a generative process, such as the hierarchical syntactic representation hypothesized in Michael McCloskey's number-processing model. Chunking occurred even when it disrupted performance, as in the oversized chunks, and even when external cues for chunking were controlled for or were removed. We conclude that the above generative process operates automatically rather than voluntarily. To date, this is the most detailed account of the core representation of the syntactic structure of numbers--a critical aspect of numerical literacy and of the ability to read and write numbers.