Ambiguity is an inherent property of natural language. Its most prominent manifestations comprise syntactic ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, scope ambiguity and referential ambiguity. Considering the high frequency with which ambiguity occurs in unrestricted natural language, it is surprising how seldom ambiguity causes misunderstandings. Most linguistic ambiguities in inter-human communication ev...

We investigated using the LDC English/Chinese bilingual wordlists for English-Chinese cross language retrieval. It is shown that the Chinese-to-English wordlist can be considered as both a phrase and word dictionary, and is preferable to the English-to-Chinese version in terms of phrase translation and word translation selection. Additional techniques such as frequency-based term selection, tra...

Reading, in any language, is a complex process. Reading in a second language is even more complicated because of the cross-linguistic influences that come from the reader’s two (or more) languages. In particular, cross-linguistic influences have been shown to affect word recognition processes. Much research has shown that properties of a reader’s first language, especially the writing system, c...

Subproject 2 consisted of three sets of studies that focused on the transfer of language skills in Spanish-speaking English language learners (ELLs). The first two sets of studies followed students across multiple years, examining the cross-linguistic, intra-linguistic and developmental factors that influence second language literacy development. The third set of studies was an intervention des...

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-dro...

The use of subject pronouns by bilingual speakers using both a pro-drop and a non-pro-drop language (e.g. Spanish heritage speakers in the USA) is a well-studied topic in research on cross-linguistic influence in language contact situations. Previous studies looking at bilinguals with different proficiency levels have yielded conflicting results on whether there is transfer from the non-pro-dro...