Researchers in second language (L2) and education domain use different statistical methods to assess their constructs of interest. Many L2 constructs emerge from elements/parts, i.e., the elements "define" and "form" the construct and not the other way around. These constructs are referred to as emergent variables (also called…

Learners frequently encounter challenges in accurately utilizing near-synonyms in the English language. This investigation explored the similarities and differences among four near-synonymous verbs: "attempt, endeavor, strive," and "try." The analysis encompassed their prevalence across diverse genres, formality levels,…

In Turkish, Relative Clause (RC) attachment ambiguity arises when two noun phrases (NPs) in a genitive construction follow the (RC). The present paper studies Turkish RC attachment preferences of Turkish native speakers in two experiments through off-line comprehension tasks. While in the first experiment the main verb immediately follows the NP…

Through two elicited production experiments we investigated how preschool Italian-speaking children access the left periphery of the clause with respect to topics in Clitic Left Dislocation (ClLD) structures. Since the discourse conditions of the experiments are felicitous for the production of passives as well, we also investigated children's…

Generating accurate word-level transcripts of recorded speech for language documentation is difficult and time-consuming, even for skilled speakers of the target language. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has the potential to streamline transcription efforts for endangered language documentation, but the practical utility of ASR for this purpose…

Native speakers strongly disprefer novel formulations when a conventional alternative expresses the same intended message, presumably because the more conventional form competes with the novel form. In five studies, second language (L2) speakers were less influenced by competing alternatives than native speakers. L2 speakers accepted novel…

Much research has been done in the realization of apology and request speech act but very few have explored this in the context of Arabic language. We perform a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process in this paper to gather and analyze studies to identify the diverse apology and request strategies preferred by Arabic learners of English and…

Beginning with the classic work of Shepard, Hovland, & Jenkins (1961), Type II visual patterns (e.g., exemplars are large white squares OR small black triangles) have held a special place in investigations of human learning. Recent research on Type II "linguistic" patterns has shown that they are relatively frequent across languages…

This study is one of the pioneers in investigating and analyzing the orthographical conventions/norms of the outer circle Asian Englishes using one of the largest databases of English corpus, the Global Web-based English (GloWbE). This study extends the analysis of the current orthographical norms of the new varieties to their colonial parents.…

Syntactic bootstrapping facilitates children's initial learning of verb meanings based on syntactic information. A challenging case is the argument-drop languages, where the number of argument NPs is not a reliable cue for distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs. Despite this fact, the availability of syntactic bootstrapping in…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

"Although" is a frequently used subordinating conjunction in English. However, non-nativeness is often observed in Chinese EFL learners' "although" output during pedagogical practice. This paper aims at exploring the characteristics of Chinese EFL learners' "although" employment in Chinese EFL learners' writing. The…