Neuroimaging research is providing new types of information and insight about the cortical activity underlying discourse processing. Knowing the intensity and location of the brain activity during discourse comprehension adds significantly to the information provided by behavioral measures alone. The combination of neuroimaging data and behaviorally based discourse theories indicate that discou...

Received wisdom in Primary science classroom teaching advocates the use of open questions for elicitation. The sociocultural perspective on discourse, however, leads one to question the usual classification of questioning by its grammatical formality and leads instead to an analysis of the discourse in the socio-cultural context which includes the background of the children. In this paper we de...

Using a discourse analytic qualitative approach, we investigated the naturally-occurring discourse that arose as part of two kinds of regular course activities, synchronous and asynchronous computer-mediated discussions. The messages contributed by members of a graduate course were analyzed for the kind of discourse functions and the kind of politeness strategies they displayed. Results indicat...

Research on argumentation has increased our understanding of knowledge construction, group learning, and scaffolding structures in CSCL although analyses of argumentation pose many difficulties. This could be due to the many theoretical positions that can be taken when approaching discourse data. In this paper, we use three popular analytic methods (interactional, content-specific, and linguist...

Recently a number of quasi-experimental studies have investigated the potential of a crossmodality transfer of second language competency between real-time, conversational exchange via text and speech (Abrams, 2003; Beauvious, 1998; Kost, 2004; Payne & Whitney, 2002). Payne and Whitney employed Levelt's (1989) model of language production and concepts from working memory as a rationale for a hy...

this study is an attempt to adapt a post-structural approach for the analysis of ‘trans-relational’ episodes prevalent in the study of workplace discourse analysis. to do this, the talk between three employees working at the same office was recorded and analyzed based on a discourse analytic framework. the results of data analysis revealed that five type of relational episodes are frequent in t...

This study examined narrative discourse in 23 children, ages 6 to 8 years, who sustained a severe closed head injury (CHI) at least 1 year prior to assessment. Narratives were analyzed at multiple levels using language and information structure measures. Results revealed significant discourse impairments in the CHI group on all measures of information structure, whereas differences in the lingu...

The ability to accurately judge the similarity between sentences is important for dialog system development in various areas such as utterance verification, context reasoning, utterance clustering. However, standard text similarity measures fail when directly applied to dialog sentences which are usually very short and have many ungrammatical omissions and inversions. This paper presents a meth...