This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

Subject relative clauses (RCs) have been shown to be acquired earlier, comprehended more accurately, and produced more easily than object RCs by children. While this subject preference is often claimed to be a universal tendency, it has largely been investigated piecemeal and with low-powered experiments. To address these issues, this…

This article investigates whether first-language (L1) Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (L2) can acquire the knowledge that the reflexive pronoun jibun 'self' within the head noun phrase of Japanese relative clauses cannot refer to the relative clause subject. Successful acquisition would suggest that learners are able to…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

The current study examined the degree to which collocation use (i.e., meaningful co-occurrences of multiple words) is related to first language (L1) raters' intuitive judgments of second language (L2) speech. Speech samples from a picture description task performed by 85 Japanese learners of English with varied L2 proficiency profiles were…

This study examined the linguistic dimensions of comprehensibility and perceived fluency in the context of L2 argumentative speech elicited from 40 Japanese-speaking learners of English. Their speaking performance was judged by 10 inexperienced native speakers of English for comprehensibility and perceived fluency, and was also objectively…

With the development of language corpora, linguists have been able to identify how often specific words, phrases, and expressions are used, and in which contexts. However, applications of corpora in the wider domain of language teaching have remained limited. This article presents an approach to utilizing corpora, combining principles from…

Definite discourse-new bridging reference (e.g., a school … "the teacher"; Clark, 1975) is a complex syntax-pragmatic component of referential movement, one that is subject to relatively opaque form-function contingency compared with forms used for discourse-old reference, and one that is especially prone to crosslinguistic influence.…

There is emerging evidence that collocation use plays a primary role in determining various dimensions of L2 oral proficiency assessment and development. The current study presents the results of three experiments which examined the relationship between the degree of association in collocation use (operationalized as t scores and mutual…

This study examines the relationship between the repetition of oral monologue tasks and immediate gains in L2 fluency. It considers the effect of aural-oral task repetition on speech rate, frequency of clause-final and midclause filled pauses, and overt self-repairs across different task types and proficiency levels and relates these findings to…

This study investigated the effects of word frequency, collocational frequency, L1 congruency, and L2 proficiency, on L2 collocational processing. Two groups of L1 Japanese speakers of English (intermediate and advanced) and one group of English native speakers (NSs) performed an online acceptability judgment task on four types of adjective-noun…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

The present study examined the use of prosody in semantic and syntactic disambiguation by means of comparison between Japanese and Chinese speakers' production of English sentences. In Chinese and Japanese, lexical prosody is more prominent than sentence prosody, and the sentential meaning contrast is usually realized through particles or a change…

Qualitative research focusing primarily on advanced-proficiency second language (L2) learners suggests that online corpora can function as useful reference tools for language learners, especially when addressing phraseological issues. However, the feasibility and effectiveness of online corpus consultation for learners at a basic level of L2…

This study examines second language (L2) acquisition of English generic noun phrases (NPs) by Spanish, Turkish and Japanese learners. The aim is to identify the role of the first language (L1) in the L2 acquisition of definite NP-level generics and indefinite sentence-level generics with singular, bare plural, and mass generic nouns. The four…