We compared recognition memory for pictures of family interactions in Indonesian – in which sibling terms are based on relative age – and English – in which sibling terms are based on gender. In Experiment 1, participants saw a set of pictures of family interactions and gave a verbal description of each picture. They later received a recognition test that included variants that altered either s...

The bilingual child does not fuse the two languages to which she is exposed; rather, in each language, most of the milestones she reaches, and even most of the errors she makes, align neatly with those of a monolingual acquiring that language. Hence it is generally agreed that the bilingual child acquires two separate grammars (e.g., Meisel, 1989, Genesee et al., 1995). Yet this separation does...

This paper presents a cross-cultural comparison of U.S., Canadian-Anglophone, Canadian-Francophone, and Mexican managers’ attitudes toward upward influence strategies. Generally, it was found that all four groups have similar perspectives in terms of the relative acceptability of various influence strategies. However, examination of absolute ratings of influence behaviors suggests that Canadian...

This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...

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...

"Theory of mind" (ToM) has been described as the ability to attribute and understand other people's desires and intentions as distinct from one's own. There has been a debate about the extent to which language influences ToM development. Although very few studies directly examined linguistic influence on the neural basis of ToM, results from these studies indicate at least moderate influence of...

This research concerns how children learn the distinction between substance names and object names. Quine (1969) proposed that children learn the distinction through learning the syntactic distinctions inherent in count/mass grammar. However, Soja et al. (1991) found that English-speaking 2-year-olds, who did not seem to have acquired count/mass grammar, distinguished objects from substances in...

extended abstract 1. introduction the diversity of impersonal constructions and the different approaches used in studying them have caused different and sometimes contradictory positions about their classification and the explanation of grammatical and semantic roles of their components. this article reveals the necessity of studying them with a new approach which pursues a common basis coverin...