Chinese directional complement (DC) constructions, as a subtype of Chinese multiword sequences, are challenging to acquire for second language (L2) learners. However, little is known about L2 Chinese learners' acquisition of figurative DCs and their comprehension of literal and figurative DCs. This study investigated whether the acquisition of…

This study assessed the effect of adjectives and noun premodifiers on L2 noun phrase comprehension and error types among English Language Learners. We also examined the correlation between L2 noun phrase comprehension and L2 reading comprehension, as well as the contribution of L2 noun phrase comprehension to L2 reading comprehension. One hundred…

This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions, and difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions containing zero, two, three, twenty, sixty, hundred, thousand…etc., and another corpus of specialized…

This research analyzed adequacy of referential expressions in the narratives of bilingual and monolingual children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) and typical language development (TLD), aiming to shed light on the relative contribution of morpho-syntactic, discourse-pragmatic, and semantic constraints. Narratives were collected from 51…

Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have the potential to reduce the workload for the second language (L2) teachers and test developers. We propose two AI distractor-generating methods for creating Chinese vocabulary items: semantic similarity and visual similarity. Semantic similarity refers to antonyms and synonyms, while visual similarity…

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…

Collocations are one of the areas that create problems for EFL learners. Iranian EFL learners like other EFL learners encounter serious problems in producing collocations. The current study is an attempt to examine the Iranian EFL learners' ability to produce English collocations. It also attempts to identify the strategies that they usually adopt…

Following an emergentist approach, the authors examined the comprehension of four different types of restrictive relative clauses (direct object/oblique vs. subject/indirect object) with animate/inanimate referents by Iranian EFL learners. To this end, an Oxford placement test and two sets of comprehension tests within a week's interval were…

This study examined the influence of formulaic language on second language (L2) listeners' lower-level processing, in terms of their ability to accurately identify the words in texts. On the one hand, there were reasons for expecting the presence of the formulas to advantage the learners, because the learners would process these formulaic words…

Purpose: The goal of this study was to examine online and off-line sentence processing using Korean language relative clause sentences between children with specific language impairment (SLI) and children with typical development (TD). Method: Twenty-four children with TD and 19 children with SLI participated in this study. Children completed…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

Numerous studies have demonstrated that native Mandarin speakers have pervasive difficulties processing L2 English agreement morphology. However, less is known about the lexical and morphological cues that may modulate Mandarin speakers' sensitivity to English number agreement. To investigate this, we examined subject-verb agreement processing in…

This study aims to clearly diagnose EFL "students' writing strengths and weaknesses." I adapted a diagnostic framework which comprises multiple writing components associated with three main dimensions of second language writing. The essays of 304 English learners who enrolled in an English language program were double-rated by 13…

Legal translation of contract agreements is a challenge to translators as it involves combining the literary translation with the technical terminological precision. In translating legal contract agreements, a legal translator must utilize the lexical or syntactic precision and, more importantly, the pragmatic awareness of the context. This will…

This study investigates whether congruency (+/- literal translation equivalent), collocate-node relationship (adjective-noun, verb-noun, phrasal-verb-noun collocations), and word length influence the learning burden of EFL learners' learning collocations at the initial stage of form-meaning mapping. Eighteen collocations were selected on the basis…