This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…

The meaning of words can be influenced by their co-occurrences. Semantic prosody (SP) is attitudinal and evaluative meaning inferred from the habitual lexical environment of a word in a corpus. By introducing SP in an English teaching classroom, teachers can reveal more implicit knowledge about language usage and assist students in reaching…

Background: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) demonstrate deficits in vocabulary development and novel word learning processes, which have been proposed to stem from their speech perception deficits. Aims: This study had two aims. The first was to evaluate the efficacy of an intervention incorporating a computer-based phonetic…

CHALLENGE is generally perceived as a negative word synonymous with "dispute," "defy," "confrontation," and "contest." However, when resorting to dictionary definitions, CHALLENGE has unexpectedly been found to possess positive senses such as "stimulating" and "arousing competitive…