Scholars have documented substantial classes of iconic vocabulary in many non-Indo-European languages. In comparison, Indo-European languages like English are assumed to be arbitrary outside of a small number of onomatopoeic words. In three experiments, we asked English speakers to rate the iconicity of words from the MacArthurBates Communicative Developmental Inventory. We found English—contra...

Stuttering patterns may differ when comparing two languages. In bilinguals, specific patterns of stuttering in each one of the languages may potentially be found. This study reports on the case of a 27-year-old Spanish/English simultaneous bilingual whose dominant language is English. Speech and language testing was performed in both languages (language repetition, language understanding, vocab...

Since Heubner's (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by L2 learners from article-less and article languages. The present study investigated how Persian L2 learners of English produce and interpret English definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions. It was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same central sema...

Transitive nominals, that is nouns or adjectives that syntactically govern object arguments, are a problematic phenomenon under many influential categorizations of word classes. I show that in some languages, syntactic context can restrict the transitivity of transitive nominal categories; specifically, there is a clear association between predication and nominal transitivity, such that nominal...

A model for an Internet web crawler with a very limited vocabulary can be devised to learn most words in the English language. The system will have the ability to read a sentence where only constituents of the sentence are known. In order to achieve this, the system will provide a methodology to resolve ambiguities within the unknown constituent words and parts of speech. The system will includ...

Gender-based research on the language use in blogs has its roots in the long-standing notion that men and women speak and write differently. This paper reports an empirical study on the use of English in a blog context involving Malaysian blog authors. Specifically, the study aimed to identify gender-specific English use among Malaysian blog authors and determine the differences in the language...