This study investigated the aspectual marking of an event of a fictional story in Japanese and English-language narratives. Considerable differences were found in verbalization between them. The differences are attributed to the linguistic options provided by each language. Japaneseand English-speaking children develop their linguistic proficiency by making use of the expressive options offered...

This study critically examines the widely held belief that the Chinese language provides no consistent linguistic forms for expressing counterfactual ideas (Bloom, 1981). In Study 1, native speakers of Chinese identified counterfactual sentences from a large corpus of Chinese texts. A number of syntactic and/or lexical forms are found to be highly predictive of counterfactuality. Aspect modific...

The use of linguistic context in positively thought-disordered (TD) schizophrenics was investigated through examination of their performance on an on-line word-monitoring task. Controls and non-TD schizophrenics took longer to recognize words preceded by linguistic anomalies compared with words in normal sentences. Compared with both other groups, TD schizophrenics showed significantly smaller ...

Following several decades of research on native language (L1) processing, psycholinguists have more recently begun to investigate how non-native language (L2) speakers comprehend and process language in real time. Regarding the traditional assumption that L2 learners have 'difficulty with grammar', this new research has revealed some unexpected similarities and differences between L1 and L2 pro...

We consider the application of Game Theory in the modeling of different strategies of politeness. In particular, we examine how differences in the linguistic form of requests and proposals map onto the structure of the game being played by interlocutors. We show how considerations of social wants [1, 2] and coordination and cooperation motivate these differences. First, we adapt the notion of o...

It has been reported that listeners can benefit from a release in masking when the masker speech is spoken in a language that differs from the target speech compared to when the target and masker speech are spoken in the same language [Freyman, R. L. et al. (1999). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 106, 3578-3588; Van Engen, K., and Bradlow, A. (2007), J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 121, 519-526]. It is unclear whether...

Texts are routinely simplified to make them more comprehensible for second language learners. However, the effects of simplification upon the linguistic features of texts remain largely unexplored. Here we examine the effects of one type of text simplification: intuitive text simplification. We use the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to examine linguistic differences between proficiency levels ...

Previous studies have demonstrated that comprehension of conceptual metaphors elicits embodied representations. This finding is non-trivial, but begets the question whether alternative explanations are to be dismissed. The current paper shows how a statistical linguistic approach of word co-occurrences can also reliably predict metaphor comprehension. In two experiments participants saw word pa...

Linguistic research has identified abstract properties that seem to be shared by all languages-such properties may be considered defining characteristics. In recent decades, the recognition that human language is found not only in the spoken modality but also in the form of sign languages has led to a reconsideration of some of these potential linguistic universals. In large part, the linguisti...