The Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) started a new approach to viewing metaphors in languages. Traditionally, metaphor is considered as one of the rhetorical devices. Conceptual metaphor, however, is an approach for us to understand abstract notions in terms of relatively concrete concepts. The HEART metaphor in Chinese…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

The study aims to investigate phrasal complexity measures that can predict EFL students' academic writing proficiency. Academic English written test responses were derived from written responses from the Khon Kaen University Academic English Language Test (KKU-AELT). Five hundred and thirty written responses were separated into groups based on…

This article investigates how children acquire word order generalizations from ambiguous and infrequent input. We focus on verb placement in Norwegian relative and complement clauses. In two elicitation experiments we explore where children (age 3-7) place verbs in three embedded clauses types: one requiring a purely syntactic generalization and…

Research employing psycholinguistic techniques to assess the on-line processing of collocation by native and non-native speakers has flourished in the past few years. This line of research aims (among other things) at exploring actual performance in real time as opposed to the traditional paper-and-pencil testing techniques that have been…

Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested…

This mixed-methods study investigated the effectiveness of multimedia instruction for phrasal-verb education with community-college English as a second-language learners (ESL) in Northern California. Previous researchers have found that ESL learners have difficulties and barriers in learning phrasal verbs, and other researchers have found that how…

The aim of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of mind mapping on Ethiopian secondary school students' English collocation learning. The study specifically tried to check the effectiveness of mind mapping on adjective-preposition and verb-noun combination collocations. A sample of 110 grade 12 students who were learning in two sections…

AI-generated paraphrasing tools, especially QuillBot and Paraphrasing Tool, play a crucial role in preventing plagiarism in academic writing. However, their effectiveness and proficiency have been questioned, particularly regarding the adequacy of their strategies. This qualitative study analyzed the paraphrasing strategies and proficiency levels…

This study investigated the effects of a reading assistant software on the fluency and accuracy of speech production among EFL university students, employing a one-group pretest-posttest design. The participants included 50 Thai undergraduate English majors in their first and second years. Data were analyzed using paired samples t-tests to measure…

It is widely perceived that vocabulary learning is essential in second and foreign language acquisition. Vocabulary learning beliefs (VLB) and vocabulary learning strategies (VLS) are factors that affect both second language acquisition (SLA) and first language acquisition (FLA). This study investigated the vocabulary learning beliefs and…

In second language learning research, L1-L2 congruency refers to the similarity in form and meaning of the way a word or phrase is said between two languages. If there is low L1-L2 congruency, the learning burden of a word or phrase can be higher, and thus, such items should be focused on more in teaching to help learners avoid errors. For…

Literature on early language acquisition has observed that age of onset of acquisition (AoA) is relevant for certain grammatical phenomena. Simultaneous bilinguals receive regular and extensive exposure to two languages from birth (Müller, 2009), whereas sequential child learners get in extensive contact to L[subscript B] once the L[subscript A]…

Most words spoken to infants are produced in larger units, such as clauses, phrases, and sentences. As such, language learners must recognize words amidst the words that surround them. However, the phonetic forms of words change based on surrounding context. Here, we investigate the effects of a common source of phonetic change--phonological…

This longitudinal study explored the roles of item- and learner-related variables in L2 learners' development of productive collocation knowledge (L1 = Dutch; L2 = German; NLearners= 50). Learners' form recall knowledge of 35 target collocations was measured three times over a 3-year period. The item-related variables investigated were L1-L2…