This study investigated understanding of language ambiguity as a source of individual differences in children’s reading comprehension skill, and the role of peer metalinguistic discussion in fostering comprehension improvement. Twenty-four 7to 9-year-old children worked in pairs to discuss and resolve ambiguities in joking riddles. Their reading comprehension increased significantly more than a...

In ‘‘Intuitions in Linguistics’’ (2006a) and Ignorance of Language (2006b) I took it to be Chomskian orthodoxy that a speaker’s metalinguistic intuitions are provided by her linguistic competence. I argued against this view in favor of the alternative that the intuitions are empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to linguistic phenomena. The concern about these linguistic intuitions...

Different theories of SLA offer conflicting views of the relationship between metalinguistic task performance and oral production. We examined this relationship with respect to the possessive determiners ‘his/her’in English. Learners’ oral production was elicited using a picture description task and described according to developmental stages;a parallelframework was developed to classifylearner...

This paper describes the outcomes of an investigation into the misconceptions and difficulties encountered when learning grammar. The study is based on evidence collected from a class of twelve-year-olds who were engaged upon a workscheme focusing on grammar,and two cohorts of PGCE English students undertaking an intensive grammar course. The analysis suggests that learning metalinguistic knowl...

Just as it is possible to refer to any entity, concrete or abstract, in extralinguistic reality, it is also possible to refer to any linguistic entity, be that a phoneme, a word, a sentence, or any other linguistic object. Metalinguistic reference can be achieved in two ways, by means of ‘autonymous’ and ‘heteronymous’ mention (cf. Recanati 2000: 137). Autonymous mention is a matter of quotatio...

We are interested in developing an automatic emphasis correction system, which converts any unemphasized word in an utterance into emphasized. Analyzing how prosody changes from unaccented to accented is crucial for the task. While previous works on prosody reconstruction only model the prosody contour itself instead of the increment, we propose a framework to study the prosody increment induce...

The phenomenon of mixed quotation exhibits clear signs of both the apparent transparency of compositional language use and the opacity of pure quotation. I argue that the interpretation of a mixed quotation involves the resolution of a metalinguistic presupposition. The leading idea behind my proposal is that a mixed-quoted expression, say, “has an anomalous feature”, means what x referred to w...

Contrary to the widely held presumption that quotations are quantificationally opaque, I argue that quantification into quotational contexts is in fact possible, although only in a very limited way. Specifically, I show that quantification over expressions, or metalinguistic quantification, into quotational contexts is attested in natural language. The main empirical support comes from Japanese...

Oral corrective feedback has attracted the attention of EFL teachers and researchers in recent decades. The current study aims to investigate learners’ preferences emotions about oral with a specific focus on gender grade level at secondary education Turkey. Quantitative research methods were used reveal findings. 664 learners participated two different state high schools Ankara, Mann-Whitney U...