In second language (L2) vocabulary studies there is continuing interest in tests of depth of vocabulary knowledge, measuring various aspects of word knowledge other than just the form--meaning link that is the focus of breadth (or size) tests. This study aimed to explore new formats that could be used as diagnostic tools for assessing depth of…

Recent studies suggest that developing L2 receptive knowledge of single words is associated with increased receptive knowledge of collocations. However, no study to date has directly examined the interrelationship between productive word knowledge and productive collocation knowledge. To address this gap, the present study administered a…

Recent literature in the field of L2 vocabulary assessment has advocated for the development of written receptive vocabulary tests such as Vocabulary Levels Tests (VLTs) that use: (a) meaning-recall item formats, (b) a minimum of 40 item counts per 1,000-frequency band to improve level estimates, and (c) lemmas (not word-families) as the lexical…

This paper attempts to investigate the repetition of Relative Clauses (RCs) in Mandarin children with Developmental Language Disorder (DLD) (aged 4; 5 to 6; 0) and their typically developing (TD) peers. The results of a sentence repetition task indicate that Mandarin children with DLD perform significantly worse than both groups of TD children,…

Phrasal verbs (PVs) are very common in English, indicating their usefulness in everyday settings. However, it was reported that language learners generally have great difficulties in understanding and using this linguistic form. This study investigated Malaysian learners' receptive and productive knowledge of PVs, and some possible factors which…

This study examines whether semantic relatedness facilitates or impedes the acquisition of English collocations by conducting two experiments respectively on Chinese undergraduates. Each experiment was composed of a reading session, a productive test, and a receptive test. Experiment 1 began with the reading session of 28 paired-up words and their…

Studies examining productive syntax have used varying elicitation methods and have tended to focus on either young children or adolescents/adults, so we lack an account of syntactic development throughout middle childhood. We describe here the results of an analysis of clause complexity in narratives produced by 354 speakers aged from four years…

The present study aimed at investigating the effects of scaffolding strategies using input and output-oriented tasks on Iranian EFL learners' receptive and productive knowledge of lexical collocations. For this purpose, 540 adult intermediate-level EFL learners--both male and female--were selected and divided into six experimental groups; three…

This study investigated the learnability of multiple word knowledge aspects and the relationship between the word knowledge aspects. A total of 261 Thai high school students were measured on receptive and productive word knowledge aspects: word parts, the form-meaning link, and collocations. The current findings indicated that word parts are…

Learning collocations poses difficulties for foreign language learners despite their importance for fluency in the target language. Collocation learning and teaching should therefore be an integral part of foreign language instruction. With a focus on the receptive knowledge of collocations, this 5-week-long pretest/posttest quasi-experimental…

Vocabulary plays an important role in reading comprehension in both the L1 and the L2 (Murphy, 2018). In measuring vocabulary knowledge, however, researchers typically focus on mono-lexical units where vocabulary assessments tend not to take into account multi-word expressions which include phrasal verbs, collocations, and idioms. Omitting these…

Scholars debate whether musical and linguistic abilities are associated or independent. In the present study, we examined whether musical rhythm skills predict receptive grammar proficiency in childhood. In Experiment 1, 7- to 17-year-old children (N = 68) were tested on their grammar and rhythm abilities. In the grammar-comprehension task,…

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…

The purpose of this study was to find out, whether three methods of presenting input, were effective in relation to language aptitude. Persian-speaking learners of English were provided with 20 grammatical collocations (verb-preposition collocations) embedded in authentic passages, lexically/grammatically elaborated passages, and…

The purposes of this study were to investigate the levels of receptive and productive knowledge of English collocations of Thai EFL university students and identify the types of grammatical and lexical collocations reported as most and least known by the students. The participants were 286 third-year regular students affiliated with four academic…