Miniature language learning has been widely used to study the causality of language universals. However, factors that have been shown to affect language acquisition in other paradigms are understudied in miniature language learning, which calls into question results that claim to uncover universal biases. In this dissertation, I ask how the…

The tendency for negation to appear early in the sentence, dubbed the "Neg-First principle" by Horn (1989:452), has been observed in the domains of typology, language contact, and language acquisition. Based on evidence from these fields, scholars have speculated about the source and universality of Neg-First biases affecting language…

This study used an eye-tracking method to examine whether Chinese translation equivalents activated by English prime words can continue to activate their Chinese homophones. With 30 English prime words, and 60 Chinese target words as materials, the experiment used a Tobii eye-tracking device to collect data from 30 university students while…

Since the Korean pronoun system does not specify gender indication, Korean speakers of English tend to have difficulties when they use English pronouns. This paper explores how absence of obligatory gender marking in Korean affects gender errors in the production of English. Gender pronoun errors made by Korean learners of English were analyzed…

The current study explores error fossilization in the academic writing of Saudi English as a Foreign Language (EFL) undergraduate learners. A manual textual analysis approach, employing corpus content analysis on writing across diverse genres including argumentative, expository, narrative, and descriptive essays was conducted to discover the…

This study investigates whether there is a relation between how motion is linguistically expressed and how it is conceptualised. To do this, native speakers of two languages that differ typologically in how they encode telic motion (English and Spanish) are compared in both a verbal and a non-verbal experiment. The preferred non-verbal methods to…

This research aims to address the syntactic problems that Saudi students confront when translating. The significance of the study is to detect syntactic issues among Saudi Arabian undergraduate students. The question is addressed in the study: what are the syntactic problems that Saudi students confront when translating? The researcher used a…

This theoretical study aims at raising awareness of the existence of lexical false friends (FFs) in English and Arabic as genetically unrelated languages. It also provides a general categorization for FFs from a semantic point of view. A sample of more than fifty FF pairs is examined by contrasting their form, pronunciation and meaning. The…

In phonetics research, language alternation--including code switching (speaker-initiated) and cued switching (researcher-prompted)--can be used as a tool to investigate various aspects of speech production and perception in bilingual or multilingual speakers (Bullock & Toribio, 2009a). Studies on the production of voice onset time (VOT) during…

This study investigated the erroneous use of the high-frequency verb TAKE by the Chinese college learners of English as a foreign language (EFL), aiming to identify the similarities and differences between Chinese EFL learners, aimed at finding out more effective ways for the teaching and researching of the high-frequency verbs. Corpus-based…

Spontaneous motion is one of the most basic event types, but different languages use varying patterns to express it. For example, English usually encodes path information in prepositional phrases or adverbial particles, while Korean maps path information onto verbs (Talmy, 1985). This study predicts that this typological difference would affect…

In today's world, educational contexts are getting increasingly multicultural. Although EFL (English as a Foreign Language) classes in Turkey were mostly composed of Turkish students a decade ago, today students from any part of the world are brought together within the frame of various student exchange programs. In Turkish EFL contexts, students…

Though generally under-utilised in spoken English, the passive voice plays a crucial role in formal, written English (Biber et al., 1999). An understanding of how the passive voice operates in English writing is therefore a vital skill for EFL learners in secondary and higher education so that they may be able to both understand and produce fluent…

This study investigates the syntactic errors in speaking among an Arab L2 post-graduate student in an academic speaking context. Specifically, the objectives are to describe the syntax error patterns committed by the student while engaging in speaking and to explore the contributing factors that may affect the errors. To address these objectives,…

The purpose of this study was to determine if first language interference does play a significant role in the use of articles in English by native speakers of Arabic as compared to other ESL learners. An error analysis was conducted on the use of English articles in essays taken from two groups of advanced ESL learners. The essays were composed by…