The use of music to sensitize, inform, and entertain for purposes of social organizing and public pedagogy is receiving increasing attention from scholars. This approach is usually selected because it allows a targeted message to reach large populations using varying mediums of transmission, such as social media, radio, television, and word of…

In this exploratory study, we considered the method of combining event-related potentials (ERPs) and source attributions as a means for examining the explicit or implicit nature of second language (L2) knowledge and processing. We recorded electroencephalograms while L2 Spanish participants judged phrase structure and subject-verb agreement…

This study investigated three synonymous verbs, "teach," "educate," and "instruct," in terms of their collocational patterns and distribution across genres. Data were drawn from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (2021) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings from this…

A critical component of cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) is a Q-matrix that stipulates associations between items of a test and their required attributes. The present study aims to develop and empirically validate a Q-matrix for the listening comprehension section of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). To this end, a…

The present study investigates L1 and L2 English speakers' knowledge of the "wh"-clausal construction along the parameters of (a) conventionality, distinguishing between high-frequency conventional and low-frequency unconventional formulations ("I asked him why they agreed/why did they agree"), and (b) proposition type,…

The congruency effect--that is, faster and more accurate processing of congruent multiword units, has been demonstrated in multiple studies. It is still unclear, however, what its underlying mechanism is, and how congruency may interact with other factors. Using an acceptability judgement task, this study examined the congruency effect in…

Lexical bundles (LBs) are frequent groups of words that appear repeatedly in different academic texts. A plethora of research has explored their distribution and usage in general, particularly in academic texts. However, to our knowledge, the extent of research investigating LBs in the discussion sections of Medical Research Articles (MRAs) is…

We examined how a group of Chinese undergraduate students understood paraphrasing and source use conventions for research paper writing in English. Prior scholarship has generated valuable insights about novice second language (L2) writers' unconventional source use practices, but little is known about how these writers interpret and understand…

Form-Focused Instruction (FFI) has been extensively studied, yet past experimental results are often inconsistent or even contradictory. Overly simplistic examinations of grammatical complexity and learner characteristics (e.g., L2 English proficiency) may have fueled the confusion, limiting understanding of how different FFI techniques can be…

The slip-over phenomenon is a very interesting feature in rapid writing Chinese characters, a unique psychological phenomenon in Chinese language. Most of the slip-over characters appear in set phrases. It is just like a walking man, when he is in a hurry he would sometimes run one or two steps. Since most Chinese characters contain radicals,…

A number of studies have found evidence for the so-called "ambiguity advantage," that is, faster processing of ambiguous sentences compared with unambiguous counterparts. While a number of proposals regarding the mechanism underlying this phenomenon have been made, the empirical evidence so far is far from unequivocal. It is compatible…

Usage-based approaches to additional-language acquisition have identified numerous determinants of language learning, two of which were the focus of our study: frequency and cue contingency. Specifically, we examined how an immersion experience may impact sensitivity to these two determinants as reflected in the production of 4,808 pairs of nouns…

Language migration and Russian teaching practice highlights the need to consider both cultural and linguistic factors in teaching Russian preposition structure to Chinese students. The present study examined the impact of language migration on Chinese students' ability to acquire Russian preposition structure, and whether the acquisition 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…

Relative clauses (RCs) are complex syntactic structures because they consist of multiple clauses and involve syntactic movement. RCs are known as a reliable clinical marker of syntactic impairment across many different languages and populations. Children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) struggle with the comprehension and production of RCs,…