This paper represents a summary and discussion of the three studies presented at the morning session of the Fall 2022 JALT Vocabulary SIG. The papers, which were written by Ali Al-Hoorie, Masaki Eguchi, Derek Canning, Stuart McLean, Christopher Nicklin, and Joseph Vitta, represent a range of topics and study designs that are common in recent…

Early Expressive language exposure is associated with child language acquisition and advantageous long-term developmental outcomes. The measurement of expressive language in a child's immediate environment is critical to the early identification of children who are at risk of low expressive language exposure, such as children with language delays…

The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the…

This article puts forward several proposals for replicating two well-known "First Exposure" studies dealing with the earliest stages of adult second language acquisition. Both of them enquire into the word-level knowledge that complete beginners are able to extract from minimal input when exposed to a new language for the first time.…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

Language is on display all around us, all the time, and the study of this linguistic landscape is one of the fastest-growing areas of research in applied linguistics. This book provides an overview of how the field of Linguistic Landscape Studies has emerged and developed over the past 20 years, combined with an in-depth exploration of the…

Family language policy (FLP) is increasingly recognised as a distinct domain of language policy concerned with the family as an arena of language policy formulation and implementation. While FLP is a relatively new research area, its conceptualisation of family and language practice requires re-examination due to social changes and technological…

Research Methodology (RM) is the backbone of any TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) MA programme. Although a burgeoning body of research has investigated students' attitude towards research and RM course in various disciplines, students' attitudes towards research and research methods courses in TEFL research has remained a relatively…

Based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, this paper takes New York Times and China Daily from January 23rd to April 8th, 2020 as corpus sources, randomly selects 39 COVID-19 reports, and makes a contrastive study of hedges among them, aiming at exploring the similarities and…

Accurate description of language use is central to English for academic purposes (EAP) practice. Thanks to the development of corpus tools, it has been possible to undertake systematic studies of language in academic contexts. This line of research aims to provide detailed and accurate characterization of academic communication and to ultimately…

This book applies a psycholinguistic perspective to instructed second language acquisition, seeking to bridge the gap between second language acquisition research and language teaching practices. It challenges the traditional divide between conscious and unconscious processes, or explicit and implicit learning, and re-envisions this as a continuum…

Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning…

The analysis of spoken language has been integral to a breadth of research in social science and beyond. However, for analyses to occur with efficiency, language must be in the form of computer-readable text. Historically, the speech-to-text process has occurred manually using human transcriptionists. Automated speech recognition (ASR) is…

This paper discusses levels of access in language archives and their implications for assessment. In the absence of well-established criteria, part of the evaluation of language archives is often based on accessibility; roughly, the more "unrestricted" or "open access" content, the better the archive. In this paper, I argue…

Despite the prevalence of quantitative approaches in applied linguistics (AL) and second language acquisition (SLA) research (Gass, 2009), evidence indicates a need for improvement in analyzing and reporting SLA data (e.g., Larson-Hall & Plonsky, 2015). However, to improve quantitative research, researchers must possess the statistical…