In the past two decades, syntactic complexity measures (e.g. the length or number of words per clause/t-unit/sentences and number of clauses per t-unit/sentence, and types of clauses used) have been widely used to determine and benchmark language proficiency development in speaking and writing. (Norris and Ortega 2009; Lu 2011). However, the…

The concept of Theme is regarded as a functional linguistic element that exists in many languages. The main aim of this study is to explore the functions of Theme in Arabic, applying the Systemic Functional Linguistics framework adopted by Downing (1991). Methodologically, several related real examples have been selected from the written discourse…

Attitude verbs like "think" and "want" describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic…

Spelling is a significant parameter in establishing text quality. This study aims to describe the developmental path of spelling errors in expository texts, argumentative and descriptive--written by Hebrew speaking children from second through fifth grades. Bearing in mind different genre requirements, we aimed to determine whether genre type…

Learning to use word versus phrase level prosody to identify compounds from lists is thought to be a protracted process, only acquired by 11 years (Vogel & Raimy, 2002). However, a recent study has shown that 5-year-olds can use prosodic cues other than stress for these two structures in production, at least for early-acquired noun-noun…

The paper aims at discussing the difficulties that students from French speaking countries who are pursuing their education in a Ghanaian university face in identifying English determiners. This is a qualitative study that analysed the difficulties that level 100 Francophone students who have French as a Second Language(L2) and English as a…

Building on previous studies investigating the multidimensional nature of lexical use in task-based L2 performance, this study clarified the roles that the distinct lexical features play in predicting vocabulary proficiency in a corpus of L2 Oral Proficiency Interviews (OPI). A total of 85 OPI samples were rated by three separate raters based on a…

This qualitative study explored the perceptions of EFL students at a Chinese university regarding collocation learning. The participating students were provided with a collocation instruction and practice component over ten weeks within a regular one-semester EFL course. The participants were 15 Chinese first-year non-English major students. The…

Lexical bundles and moves are essential for vloggers to communicate clearly and purposefully within travel vlog discourse. It is crucial for L2 learners and practitioners aiming to enter the industry to master these bundles and understand the moves used in creating travel vlogs. This corpus-based study compiled a list of 239 four-word lexical…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

The main objective of the current study is to carry out a critical stylistic analysis of Al Jazeera's online news reports of the 2017 Gulf crisis. The study specifically examines the linguistic strategies employed by Al Jazeera newsmakers in order to effectively communicate their ideological perspectives. The research employs Jeffries's critical…

This study investigates the effects of native language experience and phonetic properties on the discrimination of labial-velar versus labial and velar contrasts, as well as voicing contrasts in labials, velars, and labial-velars. Research indicates that phonological perceptions are influenced by native language experience and the specific…

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…

Background: German is exceptional in its use of noun capitalisation. It has been suggested that sentence-internal capitalisation as in German may benefit processing by specifically marking a noun and thus a noun phrase (NP). However, other cues, such as a determiner, can also indicate an NP. The influence of capitalisation on processing may thus…

The thriving developer community has a significant impact on the widespread use of R software. To better understand this community, we conducted a study analyzing all R packages available on CRAN. We identified the most popular topics of R packages by text mining the package descriptions. Additionally, using network centrality measures, we…