Healthcare facilities are often complex and overwhelming for visitors, and wayfinding in healthcare facilities can be challenging. As there is an increasing number of global citizens who travel to seek medical care in another country, it is critical to make wayfinding easy for visitors who are not familiar with the language in a foreign country. Among many wayfinding aids, symbols are helpful f...

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren in grades 1-6 (aged 6;0-12;0) were administered r...

Traditionally, literacy, and speech production have been investigated separately. Studies of development demonstrate that children are able to meet the challenge of language learning across modalities, and that adults may experience difficulties in one or both modalities. Yet, it is rare to find a conceptual connection between these two processes. I argue that speaking and reading actually shar...

Computer-mediated communication is driving fundamental changes in the nature of written language. We investigate these changes by statistical analysis of a dataset comprising 107 million Twitter messages (authored by 2.7 million unique user accounts). Using a latent vector autoregressive model to aggregate across thousands of words, we identify high-level patterns in diffusion of linguistic cha...

Some scholars have hypothesized that writing style, the special language of writing, is acquired, or subconsciously absorbed, through reading (Krashen, 1984, 2004; Smith, 1988, 2004). The language of writing, it is argued, is too complex to be consciously learned, and there are compelling case histories of those who developed high levels of competence in the written language through reading alo...

OBJECTIVE To assess the quality of clinical care at first clinic attendance in children with suspected epilepsy from a defined geographical population. METHOD All hospital- and community-based consultant paediatricians in Nottingham City region, UK, were asked to collaborate with a retrospective clinical audit identifying children seen between January 2001 and March 2002. The British Paediatr...

Nominalization is a very universal phenomenon in English written language as well as other languages. It has compact relations with written texts that it becomes one of important components in the formal style writing such as technical writing or legal writing. However, this does not mean that we should use as many nominalizations as possible in formal written texts. Overuse of nominalization i...

This paper argues that glossing is an essential stage in the borrowing of writing systems. I use the term “glossing” in a somewhat extended sense to refer to a process where a text in one language is prepared (annotated, marked) to be read in another. I argue that this process of “vernacular reading” – reading a text written in the script, orthography, lexicon and grammar of a more prestigious ...