Word learning can build the high-quality word representations that support skilled reading and language comprehension. According to the partial knowledge hypothesis, words that are partially known, also known as "frontier words" (Durso & Shore, 1991), may be good targets for instruction precisely because they are already familiar.…

Skilled reading depends on recognizing words efficiently in isolation ("word-level processing"; "WL") and extracting meaning from text ("discourse-level processing"; "DL"); deficiencies in either result in poor reading. FMRI has revealed consistent overlapping networks in word and passage reading, as well as…

The importance of the topic of this study is determined by several factors: increased interest of linguists to the problem of interaction between language and culture; the need to study the onomastic units as body language. The purpose of this article is to identify the types of motivational nick names of famous American and English public…

Lexical ambiguities exist when two different meanings are ascribed to the same word. Such lexical ambiguities can be particularly problematic for learning material with technical words that have everyday meanings that are not the same as the technical meaning. This study reports on lexical ambiguities in six statistical words germane to statistics…

The present study aimed to investigate the frequency of the use of two semantic adjustment strategies; namely, expansion and reduction, in the two English translations of book one of "Masnavi." For this purpose, 300 lines of "Masnavi" by Rumi (2014) along its two corresponding English translations by Nicholson (2004) and…

Four picture-word interference experiments aimed to test the role of grammatical class in lexical production. In Experiment 1 target nouns and verbs were produced in presence of semantically unrelated distractors that could also be nouns and verbs. Participants were slower when the distractor was of the same grammatical category of the target. To…

Many words have more than one translation across languages. Such "translation-ambiguous" words are translated more slowly and less accurately than their unambiguous counterparts. We examine the extent to which word context and translation dominance influence the processing of translation-ambiguous words. We further examine how these factors…

Research to-date has not successfully demonstrated consistent neural distinctions for different types of ambiguity or explored the effect of grammatical class on semantic selection. We conducted a relatedness judgment task using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to further explore these topics. Participants judged…

The primary concern of this dissertation is determining the distinction between semantics and pragmatics and how context sensitivity should be accommodated within a semantic theory. I approach the question over how to distinguish semantics from pragmatics from a new angle by investigating what the objects of a semantic theory are, namely…

Words like "church" are polysemous, having two related senses (a building and an organization). Three experiments investigated how polysemous senses are represented and processed during sentence comprehension. On one view, readers retrieve an underspecified, core meaning, which is later specified more fully with contextual information. On another…

However influential the interdependence hypothesis has become in bilingual research, it still lacks full empirical support. This longitudinal study explores the parallels in the biliteracy development (L1 Spanish and L2 English) of 20 students in a European immersion programme (i.e. CLIL) over a two-year period. A bilingual learner corpus of…

This dissertation explores the professionalization of students enrolled in second language teacher education (SLTE) and their perceptions of the characteristics and obligations of a professional second language teacher (SLT). The sociocognitive approach forms the theoretical foundation, which sees humans as life-long learners and teachers, who…

This study on online L2 interactions compares lexical word search between an audioconferencing and a videoconferencing condition. Nine upper-intermediate learners of English describe a previously unseen photograph in either the videoconferencing or the audioconferencing condition. A semantic feature analysis is adopted to compare their…

The concept of semantic prosody has attracted great research interest in language teaching. Identifying learners' perception of semantic prosody and collocation may be beneficial to vocabulary teaching. This study analyzes two pairs of synonyms in English writings of Chinese students and English native speakers based on the ICNALE corpus. The…

Because a large number of Chinese characters are commonly used in both Japanese and Chinese, Chinese-speaking learners of Japanese as a second language (JSL) find it more challenging to learn Japanese functional expressions than to learn other Japanese vocabulary. To address this challenge, we have developed "Jastudy," a…