This article hypothesizes that one of the reasons for Chinese EFL learners' rigid use of nominalization and insufficient use of hedging in academic writing can be attributed to the unclear understanding of the relationship between these two expressions. The aim of the research is to first prove and then explain the possible co-occurrence of…

Purpose: The aim of this study was to gain more insight into the linguistic characterization of dyslexia by investigating vocabulary acquisition. In a previous study, vocabulary at 17 months of age appeared to be related to familial risk (FR) of dyslexia. The aim of this study was to investigate how the differences in lexical composition further…

Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li,…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

The study assesses the extent to which Spanish students of English as a foreign language (EFL) at a B1+ level (CEFR) are able to communicate in English (target language) joy, sadness, fear, and anger emotions. It focuses on perception, by investigating learners' ability to recognise these emotions in a reading task, and production, by examining…

It is a robust finding that ambiguous words are recognized faster than unambiguous words. More recent studies (e.g., Rodd et al. in "J Mem Lang" 46:245-266, 2002) now indicate that this "ambiguity advantage" may in reality be a "polysemy advantage": caused by related senses (polysemy) rather than unrelated meanings…

Two eye-tracking experiments tested (a) whether L2 learners benefit from the consistency of input modality (auditory instead of written processing instruction [PI] training) and (b) whether they benefit from training using the same voice as the test voice. Results confirmed a robust effect of PI training on picture-selection accuracy, yet the…

This article investigates 90 Shanghainese participants' cross-generational use and knowledge of 140 English loanwords in Shanghainese which are deemed as an important part of Shanghai Regional Culture (SRC). The quantitative results reveal that the older participants use and know much more of English loanwords than the younger ones, and that many…

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article…

Collocations are word combinations essential for achieving fluency in a given language. Considerable emphasis should therefore be placed on teaching collocations as a part of vocabulary instruction in language teaching. However, there is no current consensus on how best to teach collocations, and few studies have addressed the issue. This…

Purpose: Grammatical morphology is often a locus of difficulty for both children with language impairment (LI) and bilingual children. In contrast to previous research that mainly focused on verbal tense and agreement markings, the present study investigated whether plural and past participle formation can disentangle the effects of LI and…

Purpose: The first aim of this study was to investigate if Swedish-speaking school-age children with language impairment (LI) show specific morphosyntactic vulnerabilities in error detection. The second aim was to investigate the effects of lexical frequency on error detection, an overlooked aspect of previous error detection studies. Method:…

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

Compound surnames in Japanese show complex phonological patterns, which pose challenges to current theories of phonology. This dissertation proposes an account of the segmental and prosodic issues in Japanese surnames and discusses their theoretical implications. Like regular compound words, compound surnames may undergo a sound alternation known…

When young children interpret novel nouns, they tend to be very much affected by the perceptual features of the referent objects, especially shape. This article investigates whether children might inhibit a prepotent tendency to base novel nouns on the shape of referent objects in order to base them on conceptual features (i.e. taxonomic object…