The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

This study investigated the effects of construction types on Korean-L1 English-L2 learners' verb-construction integration in online processing by presenting the ditransitive and prepositional dative constructions and manipulating the verb's association strength within these constructions. Results of a self-paced reading experiment showed that the…

Purpose: This study analysed text mining from full-text articles and abstracts by postgraduate students in selected Nigeria universities. Design/methodology/approach: The study adopted a survey research design using a questionnaire as the instrument for data collection from 357 postgraduate students drawn using Raosoft sample size calculator. Six…

Domain restriction is a pervasive if often neglected part of discourse comprehension. Speakers and authors implicitly limit the domain of discourse of quantifiers (e.g., "everyone") and noun phrases (e.g., "the girls"). Our previous research shows that an initial temporal or locative prepositional phrase (PP), which introduces…

Learning from text is a "constructive" activity in which sentence-level information is combined by the reader to build coherent mental models. With increasingly complex texts, forming a mental model becomes challenging due to a lack of background knowledge, and limits in working memory and attention. To address this, we are taught…

15-month-olds behave as if they comprehend filler-gap dependencies such as "wh"-questions and relative clauses. On one hypothesis, this success does not reflect adult-like representations but rather a "gap-driven" interpretation heuristic based on verb knowledge. Infants who know that "feed" is transitive may notice…

As the disseminator of information, news media play a vital role in the public speech community. Especially the mainstream English media in China, which not only carefully design the topic, content, and framework of news to broadcast information but also construct cultural identity and build China's image. Exemplified by a piece of news from…

The present study examined whether Chinese-English bilinguals showed morphological sensitivity toward prefixed words. In the experiment, English monolinguals showed masked priming effects in a Transparent condition ("disagree-AGREE") and an Opaque condition ("mischief-CHIEF"), but not in a Form condition…

For decades, educators have relied on readability metrics that tend to oversimplify dimensions of text difficulty. This study examines the potential of applying advanced artificial intelligence methods to the educational problem of assessing text difficulty. The combination of hierarchical machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) is…

Word vectors are widely used as input features in natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Researchers have found that word vectors often encode the biases of society, and steps have been taken towards debiasing the vectors themselves. However, little has been said about the fairness of the methods used to evaluate the quality of vectors.…

Recent approaches to the "that"-trace phenomenon in English include syntactic analyses based on the principle of Anti-locality and a sentence production analysis based on the Principle of End Weight. These analyses have many similarities, but they differ in their predictions for second language (L2) speakers. In an Anti-locality…

Research on first language (L1) attrition typically focuses on immigrant populations in their second language (L2) environment, yet we know comparably little about L1 attrition in the L1 setting. This study used two lexical tasks to test L1 attrition, a time-sensitive word decision task and a video retelling. Chinese teachers of English vs.…

The aim of this research is to investigate the educational potential of AI-powered chatbots in Social Studies learning-teaching processes. The study was conducted using embedded design, evaluated within the framework of mixed methods research. The study group consists of 78 6th-grade students studying in three different classes, along with one…

This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children's L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish…

This research investigated the impact of processing instruction (PI) on the acquisition of the English third-person singular present tense by Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners and whether this effect would extend to the acquisition of other language components. This study featured the pretest-immediate-posttest design and…