This study investigates the use of formulaic sequences (FS) in academic writings of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language across different levels of studies at a public university in China. Frequency-based formulas were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at five time points between Year 1 and Year 3. The…

The study explored the role of verbal fluency in determining reading and comprehension skills in Bengali among 10-year old typically developing Bengali children. Robust correlations were found between semantic fluency and word reading (0.63) as well as semantic fluency and comprehension (0.70). Good correlation was found between letter fluency and…

One of the intellectual threads to which Suellen Shay contributed was describing the curriculum structure of professional and vocational education. This work was part of the Bernsteinian call for a return to knowledge in the curriculum. But education for vocations and professions, termed 'regions', remains a vexing problem. Turning to LCT…

The construct autobiographical memory (AM) refers to the mnemonic skill that enables individuals to form personal memories about their lives and re-experience them. Its ontogeny can be understood from the dialectic construction of maturational processes and the cultural-historical context. This research sought to further the knowledge regarding…

This volume sheds empirical light on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) by providing five sets of analyses of two longitudinal, interactional datasets, involving two dyads exchanging emails over one academic semester. The collective study on CDST is the first of its kind, in that it delves into multiple subsystems of learner language,…

Students are expected to comprehend and produce increasingly complex texts in upper elementary school, and academic language and literacy skills are considered critical to meeting these expectations. Notions of academic language are also controversial and require careful deliberation when applied to traditionally minoritized populations, including…

This article presents a self-paced reading study comparing the online processing of interclausal discourse relations in native speakers of English and German. The study aims to contribute to two overarching questions: First, it puts to the test the so-called causality-by-default hypothesis, which states that causality is a default assumption,…

The goal of this dissertation is to explore Hindi verbal complex predicates at the syntax/semantics interface using the lexicalist framework of HPSG. The enduring theoretical interest in complex predicates is undoubtedly due to the fact that in some aspects they pattern with prototypical words, whereas in other aspects they pattern with…

In recent decades, a growing number of children have been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition characterized by social interaction deficits and language impairment. Yet the precise nature of the disorder's impact on language development is not well understood, in part because of the language variability among children across…

This dissertation examines the extent to which lexical aspect and grounding influence the acquisition of tense and aspect by ninety-four instructed adult learners of Italian in two academic settings in North America. The semantic notions of tense and aspect have been extensively investigated in the domain of second language acquisition. After more…

The aim of this study was to investigate the role of central coherence skills and theory of mind competences in ambiguity detection in adolescents with Asperger syndrome (AS). We sought to pinpoint the level at which AS individuals experience difficulty detecting semantic ambiguity and identify the factors that account for their problems. We…

A basic challenge for research into the neurobiology of language is understanding how the brain combines words to make complex representations. Linguistic theory divides this task into several computations including syntactic structure building and semantic composition. The close relationship between these computations, however, poses a strong…

One important task of any semantic theory of plurals is to account for the collective/distributive ambiguity. The goal of this dissertation is to achieve greater understanding of plurality and the collectivity/distributivity distinction from a cross-linguistic perspective by examining the phenomenon of distributivity in Mandarin Chinese. I show…

Humans have knowledge about the properties of their native language at various levels of representation; sound, structure, and meaning computation constitute the core components of any linguistic theory. Although the brain sciences have engaged with representational theories of sound and syntactic structure, the study of the neural bases of…

Procedural semantics models have diminished the distinction between data structures and procedures in computer simulations of human intelligence. This development has theoretical consequences for models of cognition. One type of procedural semantics model, called schema theory, is presented, and a variety of cognitive processes are explained in…