This study intended to explore the different types of phraseological units in IELTS academic writing task 2 and probe into the IELTS candidates' perceptions of phraseological competence. To this end, a corpus entailing 100 essays (26,423 words) written for IELTS writing task 2 was scrutinized, through which phraseological units were extracted and…

"Wh"-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English "what") and an indefinite (like English "a/some") interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and…

We propose that negative clauses are generally interpreted as if the affirmative portion of the clause is under discussion, a likely topic. This predicts a preference for affirmative (topical) antecedents over negative antecedents of a following missing verb phrase (VP). Three experiments tested the predictions of this hypothesis in sentences…

English speaking accuracy is one of the most important aspects of Business English. While most studies are conducted to improve English speaking accuracy, they neglect phrasal semantics. This present study involves 30 participants from Phu Em Company. The study employs a mixed-methods design in which the quantitative approach helps quantify the…

Background: Vocabulary learning in a second language (L2) encompasses crucial aspects, including single words and collocations. Research indicates that L2 learners can incidentally learn single words from captioned videos, but less is known about the incidental learning outcomes of collocations, let alone the differences in learning gains for…

This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self-paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second…

Various studies have consistently shown that collocations are processed faster than matched control phrases, both in L1 and in L2. Most of these studies focused on adjacent collocations (e.g. provide information). However, research in corpus linguistics normally uses a span to identify collocations (e.g. plus or minus four words), and these…

This paper focuses on the capacity of the case markers in the Mongolian language, as a relative element, to generate any finite noun phrase or relative clause based on their syntactic function or relationship. In Mongolian, there are two different approaches to generate noun phrases: parataxis and hypotaxis. According to my early observation, if…

The aim of this study is to shed light on the learnability regarding usages of three English articles ("a," "the" and zero) among Chinese EFL learners. To this end, three tasks were administered in a pool of 107 participants to examine the extent to which learners can accurately use articles across different semantic contexts…

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief…

Writing an English research article for novice English as an additional language (EAL) writers is a challenging task that requires experience and training at both the sentence and meaning levels. One strategy that EAL writers employ when writing a research article is the use of formulaic sequences (FSs). However, available FS corpora are general…

Little is known about how nonnative speakers process novel language patterns in the input they encounter. The present study examines whether nonnatives develop a sensitivity to novel binomials and their ordering preference from context. Thirty-nine nonnative speakers of English (L1 Arabic) read three short stories seeded with existing binomials…

This study compared syntactic complexity between undergraduate students' research papers and published research papers. A 2 (Groups: experts, students) × 4 (Sections: introduction, methods, results, discussions) mixed factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted on each of the following variables: T-unit length, clause density, the…

This study explored how visual input enhancement impacts caption-reading behaviors, the acquisition of English collocations, and the recall of onscreen captions. The participants comprised 53 Korean undergraduate students at a high-intermediate level of English proficiency. They were assigned to either a baseline or an enhancement group. The…

This study investigated L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause (N + RC)" based on Structural Priming (SP)(Bock,1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA)(Cleland, 2003). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English "N +…