Understanding that people's ideas may be false is a challenging step in Theory of Mind (ToM) development, which is accomplished around the age of 4-5 years old by typically developing (TD) children. False-belief attribution remains difficult beyond this age for certain clinical populations, such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), where delays in…

Formulaic language, such as lexical phrases as hot as hell or pass the buck, in English is common in daily usage. Although formulaic language is common, the lexical phrases are often excluded from word lists. Second language learners of English need to use formulaic language to enhance their proficiency level. Beyond incorporating lexical phrases…

Purpose: The primary purpose of this study was to examine the development of past tense counterfactual (PTCF) sentences ("If the dog had stayed in the house, he would not have bitten the police officer") in young adolescents and young adults, addressing both production and comprehension. The goal was to determine if growth occurs during…

Knowledge of collocations is essential for English academic writing. However, there are few academic collocation referencing tools available and there is a pressing need to develop more. In this paper, we will introduce the ACOP (Academic Collocations and Phrases Search Engine), a newly developed corpus-based tool to search large academic corpora.…

Task-based language teaching (TBLT) is well known for providing authentic opportunities for second and foreign language (L2) skill development. However, for many learners the use of traditional grammar within TBLT lacks the functional support necessary to create accurate and fluent L2 output. The current study replaced traditional grammar…

This cross-sectional study compares the written language of Thai EFL students in their first two years of university study. First- and second-year students (N = 170) wrote opinion paragraphs by hand in response to six prompts. Using automated textual analysis tools, clausal (subordination), phrasal (coordinated phrases and complex nominals), and…

This study investigated the effects of teaching vocabulary through the lexical instructional approach in EFL intermediate level students. Ninety-five (95) students participated in a non-equivalent pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental design study. The participants were given vocabulary competence pre-test in order to check their homogeneity in…

Purpose: An impoverished production of routinized expressions, namely, formulaic language, has been reported for monolingual speakers with Parkinson's disease (PD). Little is known regarding how formulaic expressions might be manifested in individuals with neurological damage who speak more than one language. This study investigated the processing…

Recent research in SLA indicates that collocations are an indispensable aspect of language learning. Its importance in learners' writing ability is, therefore, undeniable. Thus, the present study attempted to explore the effect of explicit teaching of collocations on learners' awareness and use of them in their writing. It differed from previous…

The study aims to investigate differences and similarities of two synonymous nouns, chance and opportunity. The sources of data were from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and online dictionaries. The study applied both quantitative and qualitative methodology. Throughout the five text types of COCA (i.e. spoken, fiction, popular…

The current study examined the occurrence and benefits of linguistic alignment in two modalities, face-to-face (FTF) and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), focusing on stranded prepositions in relative clauses. It further examined how learner characteristics (i.e., working memory, language proficiency, previous knowledge of the…

We report on an eye-tracking study that investigated four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). Children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to RC structures identifying a unique referent (e.g. "Can you pick up the horse that pushed the pig?"). Two RC types,…

This exploratory study examines the role of foreign and second language contexts in the acquisition of conventional expressions. A group of 21 ESL learners was compared to 25 EFL learners randomly selected from a larger pool. Both groups completed an aural multiple-choice discourse completion task (MC-DCT), which was developed from a previously…

The present study aimed to examine the effect of proficiency on the pragmatic comprehension of speech acts, implicatures, and routines, as well as the way learners of different proficiency levels employ strategies when comprehending a pragmatic task. Thirty-three high-proficiency and forty-one low-proficiency Chinese learners of English completed…

Collocation is an often-neglected language form that foreign language teachers and students should focus on to achieve competence in a target language. In this research, the researchers studied purposely to facilitate both second language teachers and students to produce correct and appropriate collocations. The purposes of this research were 1)…