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Although vocabulary size is thought to index children's language abilities, an increasing body of work suggests that regularities in children's vocabulary composition, particularly the proportion of shape-based nouns (e.g., cup), support language development. Here we examine initial vocabulary composition in children with hearing loss following cochlear implantation (n = 163) and age-matched children with normal hearing (n = 87). This comparison constitutes an experiment in nature for understanding how early vocabulary composition shapes subsequent language development in the context of the clinical provision of auditory experience. Children with higher initial proportions of shape-based nouns had larger vocabularies and scored higher on tests of receptive and expressive language abilities at 1, 2, and 3 years follow-up, than children whose vocabularies had lower proportions of shape-based nouns. These effects were strongest for cochlear implant users, especially 2-3 years postimplantation. The results suggest that knowing shape-based nouns facilitates language development and may ameliorate delayed language development trajectories.

This study explores whether English-dominant (ED) speakers and speakers of English as a foreign language (EFL) perceive the same degrees of formality in combinations of (in)formal greetings (Hi/Dear) and address forms (informal First Name/Ms. Last Name) with (in)formal nouns, verbs, and adjectives (Latinate/Germanic). It also explores which of these variants the two groups perceive as salient in communicating formality. Twenty-five ED undergraduates in Canada and 27 EFL undergraduates in Slovakia rated the formality of 20 sentence-length examples of business email correspondence and identified features that were the primary basis for their formality rating. Distributions of 11 of the formality ratings were statistically significantly different in the two groups (with most effect sizes ranging from small to medium), and trends in the reports of salient features suggested that the EFL speakers focused on the formality of address forms more frequently than did the ED speakers. The findings are discussed in relation to infelicitous interlingual transfer and strategies for developing pragmatic competence.

The present study examines the mechanisms of lexical case acquisition in Russian by two-to-five-year-old Russian monolingual (n = 54) and Russian-English bilingual children (n = 38). Participants performed a picture-based sentence completion task. Sentences were constructed to elicit production of real Russian words (n = 24) and nonce words (n = 24) in different non-nominative cases (e.g., 'The boy is holding a . . . beetle-ACC/meetle-ACC'). We wanted to know if there are qualitative and/or quantitative differences in case assignment on complements of prepositions between monolingual and bilingual children, whether they can generalize case assignment rules to novel input, and whether monolingual and bilingual children show different developmental trajectories in terms of case acquisition at different ages. The results indicate that bilingual children make more errors with case forms than their monolingual peers in all tested age groups and inflectional paradigms, in both real word and nonce word productions. However, despite robust quantitative differences, bilinguals and monolinguals show strikingly similar patterns of case acquisition in that they make similar types of errors and struggle with the same case forms. Furthermore, we did not find significant differences in the accuracy of produced case forms for real versus nonce words, suggesting that both monolingual and bilingual children learn to generalize morphological rules to novel input early in language development. Finally, chronological age was a significant predictor of case form accuracy but did not interact with other variables. This means that both monolingual and bilingual children improved their case performance gradually over time with similar learning gains for real and nonce words.

Comprehenders generate expectations about upcoming lexical items in language processing using various types of contextual information. However, a number of studies have shown that argument roles do not impact neural and behavioral prediction measures. Despite these robust findings, some prior studies have suggested that lexical prediction might be sensitive to argument roles in production tasks such as the cloze task or in comprehension tasks when additional time is available for prediction. This study demonstrates that both the task and additional time for prediction independently influence lexical prediction using argument roles, via evidence from closely matched electroencephalogram (EEG) and speeded cloze experiments. In order to investigate the timing effect, our EEG experiment used maximally simple Japanese stimuli such as "Bee-nom/acc sting," and it manipulated the time for prediction by changing the temporal interval between the context noun and the target verb without adding any further linguistic content. In order to investigate the task effect, we conducted a speeded cloze study that was matched with our EEG study both in terms of stimuli and the time available for prediction. We found that both the EEG study with additional time for prediction and the speeded cloze study with matched timing showed clear sensitivity to argument roles, while the EEG conditions with less time for prediction replicated the standard pattern of argument role insensitivity. Based on these findings, we propose that lexical prediction is initially insensitive to argument roles but a monitoring mechanism serially inhibits role-inappropriate candidates. This monitoring process operates quickly in production tasks, where it is important to quickly select a single candidate to produce, whereas it may operate more slowly in comprehension tasks, where multiple candidates can be maintained until a continuation is perceived. Computational simulations demonstrate that this mechanism can successfully explain the task and timing effects observed in our experiments.

This study examines whether children acquiring Tseltal (Mayan) demonstrate a noun bias -- an overrepresentation of nouns in their early vocabularies. Nouns, specifically concrete and animate nouns, are argued to universally predominate in children's early vocabularies because their referents are naturally available as bounded concepts to which linguistic labels can be mapped. This early advantage for noun learning has been documented using multiple methods and across a diverse collection of language populations. However, past evidence bearing on a noun bias in Tseltal learners has been mixed. Tseltal grammatical features and child--caregiver interactional patterns dampen the salience of nouns and heighten the salience of verbs, leading to the prediction of a diminished noun bias and perhaps even an early predominance of verbs. We here analyze the use of noun and verb stems in children's spontaneous speech from egocentric daylong recordings of 29 Tseltal learners between 0;9 and 4;4. We find weak to no evidence for a noun bias using two separate analytical approaches on the same data; one analysis yields a preliminary suggestion of a flipped outcome (i.e. a verb bias). We discuss the implications of these findings for broader theories of learning bias in early lexical development.

Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article-noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article-noun associations with either segmented input first or unsegmented input first, and tested their learning of the article-noun association and their ability to use articles to predict nouns. Our results showed that participants exposed to unsegmented input first were more likely to treat the article-noun unit as one word and were more accurate at learning the correct article-noun associations. However, participants in the unsegmented-first condition did not show increased gaze to the target compared to those in the segmented-first condition. We discuss how these findings inform our understanding of the challenges that adults face when learning a second language.

Studies of English academic writing have revealed a shift to a compressed style, with preferences for lexical and phrasal types of noun modifiers over clausal modifiers. However, condensed noun phrases may result in a loss of explicitness since they lack grammatical markers specifying the semantic relations between head nouns and modifiers. This study examines the types and characteristics of nominal modifiers in the academic prose of ELF, which has been found to be marked by explicitness and clarification to ensure efficiency of communication among non-native users. Data were from the introduction and method sections of 60 research manuscripts in language and linguistics submitted to a Scopus-indexed journal. The results show that ELF authors conform to the modern norm of academic prose, producing compressed noun phrases with lexical and phrasal modifiers, particularly adjectives, nouns, and prepositional phrases. However, these noun phrases are structurally explicit: many of them have only one or two modifiers, facilitating the comprehension process. Also, the most prevalent modifier is prepositional phrases, with prepositions explicitly signaling the semantic relationship between head nouns and modifiers. The results reflect the way experienced users shape ELF to achieve a balance between the contrasting goals of conciseness and explicitness, which are both vital in ELF academic prose.

Koh Lipe, Satun is a famous tourist destination along the Andaman Sea, Southern Thailand where linguistic landscape is structured mainly in English. Monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual signage in this island displays distinctiveness of linguistic elements and linguistic diversity manifested in a variety of English lexicons. Thus, this study aims to analyze lexical characteristics of English in 370 signs along three popular beaches of the island -- Pattaya Beach, Sunrise Beach, and Sunset Beach. It also discusses a reflection of the features on glocalization of English. Through the use of Linguistic Landscape, Multilingualism, and World Englishes approaches, an analysis of photographed data showed that textual formations of the signage highlight outstanding lexical and semantic dimensions of words. There appear to be English nouns, affixation, proper nouns in register of English, English compound nouns, hybrid compound nouns, acronyms, clipping, loanwords, loan translation, phrasal verbs, coinage, Tinglish words, and lexical repetition. Moreover, these lexical items present crucial linguistic formation in English that contacts other indigenous, Asian, and European languages, and they are formed to provide governmental information and to advertise local products and services of tourism for local and international tourists. Hence, these characteristics mirror glocalized English in a southern Thai context of tourism.

This article examines the use of prompt-based lexical collocations in opinion essays by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. Fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote 100 opinion essays on two topics as progress tests. The AntConc programme (Anthony, 2020) was employed to identify the frequencies of use of the prompt-based lexical collocations in the essays. Paraphrases of the target lexical collocations were further identified and calculated for their occurrences. The AntConc concordance lines that target the prompt-based collocations or paraphrases were analysed for errors, with the consultation of the Oxford Collocations Dictionary (OCD), the British National Corpus (BNC), and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results revealed that students repeated the source lexical collocations and replaced them with various word combinations, though recycling occurred to a greater extent. Erroneous use involved use of i) incorrect word combinations, mainly through wrong choice of verbs, adjectives, or nouns that do not collocate with adjacent words and ii) incorrect grammatical forms of the individual lexical words of the target collocations (i.e., omission of plural marker --s, misuse of parts of speech). Pedagogical implications are discussed to assist students in using lexical collocations appropriately in L2 writing.

The aim of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of mind mapping on Ethiopian secondary school students' English collocation learning. The study specifically tried to check the effectiveness of mind mapping on adjective-preposition and verb-noun combination collocations. A sample of 110 grade 12 students who were learning in two sections at Majete General Secondary School, North Shoa Zone, Ethiopia, participated in the study. One of the two sections was randomly assigned to an experimental group, while the other one was labeled as a control group. A pre-test and two post-tests were used as data-gathering instruments. The data were analyzed by using mean scores, paired samples, and independent sample t-tests. The results revealed that although the two sections had no significant difference in their pre-test results, in the immediate and delayed post-tests, the score of adjective-preposition & verb-noun collocations of the experimental group students was significantly higher than the score of the control group students who learnt those collocations without mind map. Based on this, it could be concluded that using mind map was an effective strategy to improve EFL high-school students' collocations learning. Accordingly, it is recommended that EFL teachers and students should use mind-map during their collocations lessons.

At a time when language trainers need to determine how best to integrate new digital tools that provide students with linguistic information, our aim in this article is to assess the potential value of information provided by two types of tools now widely used by students: machine translation via online translators and state-of-the-art generative AI platforms such as ChatGPT. In particular, the aim is to explore whether access to such information can help students develop their linguistic analysis skills to improve their understanding of the language prior to performing a translation task. Our case study deals with the analysis of complex English compounds--a known challenge for French learners of English as a second language--and involves two distinct cohorts: students in their third and final year of an undergraduate program in applied foreign languages, and students in their second and final year of a master's program in professional translation. We evaluated the participants' ability to identify head nouns--a necessary skill for comprehending complex noun phrases--under two conditions: (i) without access to any additional information and (ii) with access to machine translation outputs provided by a generic online translator. Subsequently, we explored the capabilities of advanced generative AI tools--in this instance ChatGPT--in correctly identifying head nouns. Our results show that students may benefit from the presence of machine translation outputs, albeit with varying degrees of success. However, our experimentation with ChatGPT suggests that generative AI tools may be more effective in helping students analyze and understand complex noun phrases in English, in particular since the launch of ChatGPT-4o.

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) which represent varieties of English usage across different cultures (American and British). This study analyzed the top 20 noun collocates with Mutual Information (MI) scores value of at least three. The corpus data from COCA and BNC explored some shared characteristics and contrastive features. The findings discovered that the two adjectives have the same core meaning and degree of formality since their highest frequency in academic texts whereas frequencies are the lowest in informal genres i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. In certain conditions, these synonyms are different in terms of noun collocation due to the fact that these synonyms co-occur with particular noun collocates. Interestingly, the findings also confirm two adjectives are near synonyms as they share only two similar theme of semantic preference. In consequence, the two synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. Moreover, it was found that the corpora provide some useful details that are deficient in the dictionary.

This study aimed to analyze common syntactic errors found in the argumentative essays of third-year English major students at the Faculty of Foreign Languages, Van Lang University, Vietnam. Quantitative and qualitative methods were used to obtain data in this study. The quantitative approach involved counting and calculating the frequency, percentage, and ranking of syntactic errors, while the qualitative method was adopted to explain these errors. The instrument for collecting data was argumentative essays written by 37 third-year English majors enrolling in Writing-5 at Van Lang University. Microsoft Word was used to collect and analyze syntactic errors and sentence structures, while Microsoft Excel was employed to calculate the frequency and rank of these errors and structures. The results found that the five most frequent errors in their essays were at the noun phrase and sentence levels. These errors included run-on sentences, preposition errors, article errors, sentence fragments, and pronoun errors. Through error analysis, it was indicated that the majority of errors made by students were due to the negative transfer from their first language and the literal translation. Based on the findings, language teachers and syllabus designers could use these results as guidance to design appropriate teaching methods and materials.

The main objective of the current study is to carry out a critical stylistic analysis of Al Jazeera's online news reports of the 2017 Gulf crisis. The study specifically examines the linguistic strategies employed by Al Jazeera newsmakers in order to effectively communicate their ideological perspectives. The research employs Jeffries's critical stylistic framework (2010) and corpus methodologies to examine a corpus obtained from Al Jazeera English, which covers the first month of the crisis. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies has been employed to analyze the ideological implications embedded within the narrative of the platform, focusing specifically on the strategies of naming, describing, equating, and contrasting. The study discloses that Al Jazeera has used specific nouns and phrases to portray the measures against Qatar as deliberate, violent, unjustifiable, and retaliatory, blaming the Saudi leadership. Complex noun phrases and evaluative adjectives have been utilized to intensify this description, while nominalization conceals agency and creates skepticism. The narrative has subtly portrayed Qatar as a passive victim of negative actions, using equating strategies to criticize the Saudi leadership's policies and the blockade. Contrasting strategies have presented contradictory actions, questioned their credibility and legitimacy, and encouraged cohesion among Gulf nations.

The intricate and tricky case of semantic analysis, especially of the enigmatic realm of nouns, the red thread of linguistics and literary exploration. This academic research explores the rich sphere of Russian literature in-depth to determine connections between function and the embodiment of theme through proper names. This research is aiming at studying the role of proper nouns in the literary masterpieces by focusing on the ideas of character development, thematic cohesiveness, and the narrative flow. This papers deals with profound significance of proper nouns as linguistics pointers that take you beyond their literal meaning to different levels of connotative value. It takes most of its ideas from the late linguistics and literary critique. This research gets down to serious business by cherry-picking and analysing a set of Russian masterpieces. An intensive method of semantic analysis was used by the study to properly identify and categorize all the structural features of proper nouns. Also, it conducts an examination of the usage of language by these instrumentalities so as to discover their common features and themes which lead to the invention of the main narrative. The results of this study add to our comprehension of proper noun semantics in Russian literature and provide us with a stepping-stone to broader discussions on the linguistic theory and literary studies. This cognitive effort exceeds the linguistic borders, as it takes into consideration the cultural and historical value of the proper nouns being presented. The report shows why it is necessary to reconsider the theoretical design to account for the distinctive linguistic and particular cultural features of the Russian literary heritage. This research is a step toward unravelling noun semantics' mystery and adds to the already existing linguistic aesthetics and cultural semiotics debates.

Through consultations with the online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study focuses on distinguishing between the two synonymous verbs "restrict" and "constrain," both part of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, in terms of formality and collocations. The COCA-informed findings revealed that both near-synonyms are most prevalent in academic genres, sharing an equally high level of formality, and exhibit six overlapping groups of noun collocates. Interestingly, the target synonyms, along with their left- and right-sided noun collocates, form context-specific clusters. The verb "restrict" is associated with terms related to governance and rights (i.e., "laws and regulations restrict liberties") while "constrain" with governance and commerce (i.e., "rules constrain spending"). The two are also characterized by unique patterns of collocating with nouns that have opposite morphological meanings: "restrict" pairs with noun collocates containing morphemes representing inbound activities (e.g., "acc"- in "access," as in "restrict access"), while "constrain" with those indicating outbound directions (e.g., "ex"- in "expansion," as in "constrain expansion").

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and nonEnglish programs, emphasizing natural occurrences in academic settings. Participants were directed to record audio and video during collaborative activities with peers and lecturers inside and outside the classroom. Through Conversation Analysis, findings revealed a significant divergence in the phonological and lexicogrammatical features of ELF participants compared to speakers of standard British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). Specifically, nonstandard lexicogrammatical features concerning verb, noun, article, word choice, tense, and preposition emerged predominantly. Furthermore, common phonological deviations included omission of final consonant sounds, mispronunciation of the schwa sound, confusion in pronouncing the article 'the,' mispronunciation of words ending with '-ine,' and substitution of /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/ with /[open-mid back rounded vowel]/. The data suggests widespread use of non-standard English norms, indicating linguistic adaptation beyond traditional boundaries in various environments. Significantly, this study contributes by highlighting how ELF participants reshape language for effective communication, prioritizing intelligibility over nativelike proficiency, with insights extending beyond the Thai context, valuable for educators, linguists, and intercultural communication practitioners.

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were higher- or lower-frequency labels for a referent ("horse" vs. "pony"). Toddlers showed no significant differences in comprehension of nouns in typical and atypical sentence frames. However, they were less accurate in recognizing lower-frequency nouns, particularly among toddlers with smaller vocabularies. We conclude that toddlers can recognize nouns in diverse sentence contexts, but their representations develop gradually.

According to rational adaptation approaches of language processing, readers adjust their expectations of upcoming information depending on the distributional properties of the preceding language input. However, adaptation to sentence structures has not been systematically attested, especially not in second-language (L2) processing. To further our understanding of adaptive processes, we recorded electroencephalogram (EEG) from L1-Mandarin-L2-English speakers while they read English sentences containing a coordination ambiguity. This ambiguity was always resolved toward a less-preferred clausal coordination in the first half of the study, and towards a noun-phrase coordination in the second half. Group-level results suggest that L2 readers adapted but at a slow rate and a coarse level. Individuals differed in that some changed their processing strategies, and some did not. These findings suggest that adaptation is not a direct function of fine-grained input distributions, and are problematic for the idea that adaptation is important for language learning.

It remains unclear whether late second language learners (L2ers) can acquire sufficient knowledge about unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning to build anticipations during real-time processing. To tackle this question, we conducted a visual world paradigm experiment to investigate high-proficiency late first-language Dutch second-language Mandarin Chinese learners' online processing of syntactic cues to count vs. mass interpretations in Chinese which are unique-to-L2 and never explicitly taught. The results showed that late Dutch-Mandarin learners were sensitive to a mass-biased syntactic cue in real-time processing, and exhibited some native-like anticipatory behaviour. These findings indicate that late L2ers can acquire unique-to-L2 constructions through implicit learning, and can automatically use this knowledge to make predictions.

The objective of this study was to examine the development of derivational morphological structures in the productive language of Kuwaiti Arabic (KA)-speaking children. Participants were 512 typically developing Kuwaiti children aged 3;0 years to 7;11 years (243 boys and 269 girls). Five age groups at 1-year intervals were tested; each group was divided into four sub-groups at 3-month intervals. The children were examined using a tool designed to assess structures specific to the KA dialect, and they were assessed by trained research assistants at their nurseries and public schools. There were clear developmental trajectories in the derivational morphological structures studied in KA-speaking children across the five age groups. Results showed that KA-speaking children have not reached mastery level in most of the structures examined in this study. Among the two types of derivations examined, nominal derivations emerged later than verb derivations. Error analysis showed that most errors were morphological, affecting mainly the root. The results of this study enhance our knowledge of early language development in Arabic by showing that nominal derivations develop later than verb derivations. The results are discussed in light of previous cross-linguistic studies, which also found a similar trajectory in terms of morphological development. Further, Arabic morphological theory, as well as implications for practice and the need for further research, is discussed.

While previous research has provided insights into vocabulary learning through extensive reading, the differential effects of word frequency and word class on active form and passive meaning word recognition remain less understood. By evaluating learners' post-test performance in active form recognition and passive meaning recognition, this study offers a comprehensive view of how these factors influence incidental vocabulary acquisition. The findings reveal a complex picture: while verbs showed a more significant improvement in active form recognition with increased exposure, underscoring the importance of repeated encounters, nouns were more effectively acquired in passive meaning recognition, suggesting differing cognitive processes involved in learning nouns versus verbs. Additionally, the study highlights that word frequency had a varied impact on learning outcomes, with multiple exposures facilitating a deeper understanding of verb forms, whereas noun learning showed less sensitivity to frequency. These results challenge the assumption that pleasure reading uniformly enhances all facets of word knowledge and suggest a complex interplay between word frequency, word class, and type of vocabulary recognition. The implications of these findings underscore the need for tailored strategies in L2 vocabulary instruction, advocating for a diversified approach to reading materials selection and emphasizing the importance of exposure diversity for effective vocabulary acquisition.

To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to identify other words' referents. Here, we assess how accurately and efficiently 4-year-old children use sentential context to identify referents of known and novel nouns in unfamiliar-accented speech, as compared to familiar-accented speech. In a looking-while-listening task, children showed considerable success in processing unfamiliar-accented speech. Children robustly mapped known nouns produced in an unfamiliar accent to their target referents rather than novel competitors, and they used informative surrounding verbs (e.g., "You can eat the dax") to identify the referents of both known and novel nouns--although there was a processing cost for unfamiliar-accented speech in some cases. This demonstrates that 4-year-olds successfully and rapidly process unfamiliar-accented speech by recruiting the same strategies available to them in familiar-accented speech, revealing impressive flexibility in word recognition and word learning across diverse linguistic environments.

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused primarily on university level learners, with young L2 learners being almost entirely disregarded. The present study sought to address these gaps with 148 high school students who were randomly assigned one of three fill-in-the-gap exercises: (1) word-format, where participants selected the appropriate verb from a list provided; (2) letter-format, where the first-letter of the missing verb was provided as a clue; and (3) phrase-format, where participants chose an appropriate intact phrase from a list. Participants did the exercise once, twice or three times. The study investigated the effects of exercise format and repetition on the learning of 20 verb-noun collocations, one and eight weeks following the treatment. Results from generalized linear mixed-effects modeling showed that both exercise and repetition had significant impact on the learnability of the target MWEs, but the format had a smaller effect size than repetition. Rasch analysis was also used to examine the potential difference in the difficulty of MWEs, and how this difficulty may interact with the exercise format. The findings largely support previous research, but also underline the importance of repetition and suggest that exercise format does not uniformly interact with the learnability of MWEs.

Purpose: The present study evaluated the applicability of the sentence-focused framework to Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the relative contribution of receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes to later grammatical complexity. Method: Participants were 51 Mandarin-speaking children who received cochlear implantation before 30 months of age. At 12 months after CI activation, parents were asked to endorse words that their child could understand only or understand and say using the infant version of the Early Vocabulary Inventory. At 24 months after CI activation, parents were asked to endorse the grammatical structures that their children were able to say using the Grammatical Complexity subtest in the Mandarin Communicative Development Inventory--Taiwan. Children's receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes and grammatical complexity scores were computed from these parent checklists. Results: Correlational analyses showed that children's receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes at 12 months after CI activation were all highly correlated with their grammatical complexity scores at 24 months after CI activation ([rho]s = 0.52-0.63, ps < 0.001). Regression analyses further revealed that verb lexicon sizes at 12 months after CI activation outweighed noun lexicon sizes in accounting for grammatical complexity at 24 months after CI activation. Conclusions: Our findings supported the prediction of the sentence-focused framework. Emphasizing the role of verbs in early intervention has the potential to enhance grammatical outcomes in Mandarin-speaking children with CIs.

Purpose: There is limited research on the writing of young Spanish-English bilinguals and their writing in both languages. In the current study, we addressed whether written syntax features differed by language (English and Spanish) and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program (dual or English immersion). We also examined whether Spanish and English syntax features were related cross-linguistically and related to writing quality within languages and whether these relations to writing quality were moderated by grade level, English learner status, and instructional program. Method: We examined written syntax features of Spanish and English essays by simultaneous and emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 in either Spanish-English dual immersion or English immersion instruction in the United States (N = 278). Essays were scored for quality and evaluated for mean length of T-units, number of verbs, number of noun agreement words, and number of subject agreement words accurately conjugated. Results: Written syntax features significantly differed by language and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program. Grades 2 and 3 wrote longer utterances, more verbs, and greater noun agreement accuracy than Grade 1. Syntax features were related to writing quality within languages, but Spanish relations were weaker for English learners than non-English learners and for dual immersion students than English immersion students. Conclusion: Our findings suggest written syntax features may be useful for evaluation of English-Spanish simultaneous and emergent bilinguals' writing.

The article revisits the canonical (Dem>Num>A>N) and non-canonical (A>Dem>Num>N & Dem>A>Num>N) prenominal patterns in Mandarin Chinese, from the perspective of the Labeling Algorithm. It shows that the syntactic distribution of adjectives are different, depending on the attributive-predicative sources and the presence or absence of the subordinator -de. The attributive adjective (with or without -de) and the de-less predicative adjective are analyzed as direct modification of the noun phrase, and it derives as a specifier of the noun, then falling into an agreement Agr projection. The non-canonical pattern undergoes AgrP-movement to the nominal left-periphery, which involves focus moving. However, the predicative adjective with -de is associated with a predicate of a reduced relative clause, and it undergoes successive focus-driven movement in the non-canonical pattern. The supporting evidence is illustrated in superlative and exclamatory adjectives as well as the CP-DP splitting hypothesis. The labeling-based explanation provides a specific picture to see the internal structure of adjectives, to look at how to package the informational constituents in the prenominal pattern, and to demonstrate the systematic parallelism between nominal and clausal domains in Mandarin Chinese.

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.g., "The hospital [that was] requested by the doctor…"). If comprehenders have a bias to interpret metonyms in subject position as agents (Fishbein & Harris, 2014), they should initially access the figurative (institutional) sense of the metonym. This interpretation is rendered incorrect at the disambiguating by-phrase, which should lead to reanalysis (i.e., garden-path effects). In Experiment 1, larger garden-path effects were observed for metonyms compared to inanimate control nouns that did not have a figurative sense. In Experiment 2, garden-path effects were equivalent for metonyms and animate sentence subjects. In addition, there was some evidence that readers exhibited initial difficulty at the verb (e.g., "requested") when it immediately followed the metonym compared to the inanimate control nouns in Experiment 1. Overall, the results suggest that the subject-as-agent heuristic is a powerful cue during sentence processing, which can prompt the comprehender to access a figurative interpretation of a metonym.

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and (2) background factors associated with input. To assess the role of CLI and input we compared two groups of adult heritage speakers of Russian (n = 66) with two typologically distinct societal languages (SLs), Hebrew and American English. Their production was evaluated for three morphosyntactic phenomena: adjective-noun agreement, accusative case morphology, and numerical phrases. Using self-rating and baseline vocabulary tasks as proficiency measures, we conducted controlled experiments to assess mastery of the target phenomena. Our results show that, while CLI is the main mechanism behind HL grammar maintenance, increased input and proficiency can modulate performance in the absence of grammatical similarities between the HL and SL. An analysis of non-target responses revealed systematic patterns, including reliance on default, or unmarked, forms in both groups, in line with previous research. These findings contribute to the literature on the mechanisms of HL grammar formation and maintenance.

Purpose: Production of complex syntax is a hallmark of later language development; however, most of the research examining age-related changes has focused on adolescents or analyzed narrative language samples. Research documenting age-related changes in the production of complex syntax in elementary school-aged children in conversational language samples is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine age-related changes in the production of coordinate and subordinate clauses in children between 5 and 10 years of age obtained from 50-utterance conversational language samples. Method: The analytic sample included 196 children with typical language development, who ranged in age from 5;0 to 10;11 (years;months; girls = 103; boys = 96; three cases were excluded). Fifty-utterance conversational language samples were examined for use of coordinate and subordinate clauses. Results: Results of regression analyses indicated that the production of coordinate and subordinate clauses could be predicted from age. The proportion of utterances that included subordinate clauses increased 0.20% for every month increase in age (p < 0.001). Coordinate clauses also continued to grow, although at a slower rate (0.10% increase for every month increase in age, p < 0.001). Finally, the proportion of simple utterances (i.e., utterances without coordinate or subordinate clauses) decreased with age (0.40% decrease for every month increase in age, p < 0.001). Conclusions: This study indicated that as children's age increased, they used fewer, simple, one-clause sentences and more utterances that included subordinate clauses, with or without coordinate clauses. These results were obtained from 50-utterance language samples, further supporting use of language sampling to develop intervention goals and monitor progress in therapy.

Most of the previous studies focused on lexical and syntactic features in adapted texts while little attention has been paid to the structural complexity from the perspective of the amount of information. In this study, we intend to examine the differences in structural complexity in adapted texts from the perspective of the amount of information at the lexical and grammatical levels. We also aim to identify the lexical and grammatical features that contribute most to such differences. The data used in this study were reading texts from Newsela, that is, reading materials for English learners under the educational system of K-12 in the United States. This study yields several findings of interest. First, the adapted texts differ in the structural complexity at both lexical and grammatical levels in terms of their amount of information. Second, the differences display a decreasing trend. That is, the differences become smaller when the level of the text increases. Third, function words and part-of-speech trigrams with a preposition(s) and/or a noun(s) contribute most to the differences. The findings provide significant implications for the adaptation of language materials such as reading texts and test materials.

Knowledge of collocations facilitates second language (L2) learning by enhancing accuracy and fluency. However, acquiring L2 collocations is often challenging for learners. One factor contributing to this difficulty is incongruency between first and second languages (e.g., "draw distinctions" in English corresponds to do "distinctions" in Japanese). One possible solution is to facilitate semantic restructuring, where learners develop their understanding of L2 words' semantic possibilities. For the restructuring of semantic knowledge to occur, repeated exposure to multiple collocations containing the same node word may be necessary (e.g., "draw attention," "draw a conclusion"). However, how to facilitate semantic restructuring through repeated exposure is still unknown. Particularly, to what extent temporal distribution (i.e., spacing) of multiple collocations affects learning is an important issue to be examined. Based on recent research on collocation learning, the present article argues that a combination of massing and spacing can promote L2 collocation learning from the viewpoint of semantic restructuring. It also discusses some practical implications for effective L2 collocation learning.

This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self-paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second conjunct was read faster when it had the same structure as the first. This effect occurred for the structurally marked adjective phrases (e.g., "a simple to grasp problem") but only showed a numerical trend for the less marked relative clauses (e.g., "a problem that was simple to grasp"). Experiment 2 compared unmarked adjective phrases and relative clauses (e.g., "a simple problem" vs. "a problem that was simple") and found significant priming for both. Together, the two experiments showed that L2 comprehension priming could occur without repetition of the lexical head. Moreover, this priming was susceptible to inverse frequency effects, with the less frequent structure exhibiting greater priming.

In spite of the proliferation of research studies on vocabulary knowledge, investigating the relationship between self-regulation, vocabulary size, and collocational knowledge among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners has received scant attention. The current study aimed to investigate whether vocabulary and collocation size can explain EFL learners' self-regulated vocabulary learning. A population of 271 EFL learners from three state universities located in Iran participated in taking lexical measures (VST, Lex30, and a collocation test) and filling a questionnaire (SRCvoc). To check the relationship between self-regulated vocabulary learning, vocabulary and collocation size, standard multiple regression was conducted with SPSS. The results of standard multiple regression analysis showed that EFL learners' vocabulary and collocation size could explain a significant portion of the variance in the score of their self-regulation in vocabulary learning. The findings also indicated that verb-noun collocation size and productive vocabulary size were significant predictors of EFL learners' self-regulated capacity in vocabulary learning. Finally, implications and suggestions for future research are offered.

For English language learners, mastering the use of near-synonyms can be challenging. Despite the semantic similarities of English synonyms, they are not interchangeable in all contexts. The objectives of this corpus-based study are to examine differences between the near-synonymous adjectives "blank," "empty" and "vacant" based on the degree of formality from their distribution across genres and to analyze the noun collocates in relation to semantic preference drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings indicate that these synonyms are uncommon in formal English, i.e., academic texts and they tend to have quite different occurrences and distributions across genres (i.e., "blank" and "empty" most frequently occur in fiction whereas "vacant" mostly occurs in newspaper) despite a similar degree of formality. For the noun collocates and semantic preference, these three adjectives have a weak near-synonymous status as they share only one noun collocate and one similar theme of semantic preference. Thus, despite their similarity in meanings, these synonyms co-occur with specific noun collocates in a particular context.

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British National Corpus (BNC) of 100 million words as our corpus. Using the "Sketch Engine" Tool, we examined their frequency, subject and object noun collocations, adverb collocations, and syntactic behavioural profiles. The results demonstrate that both words collocate with subject and object nouns. However, on their top ten subject collocation lists, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns related to finance and economy, whereas "rise" collocates with three different kinds of abstract nouns related to finance/economy, the human entity, and the natural environment, and one concrete noun related to natural environment. In addition, they only have two collocates in common on their top subject noun collocates list. In terms of object noun collocations, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns connected to finance/economy and the natural environment, but "rise" collocates with abstract and concrete nouns on their top list. They also only have three adverb collocations in common on the top list. "Rise" has 17 distinct syntactic patterns, whereas "increase" has 15 different syntactic patterns. In teaching near-synonyms, we propose using corpus-based reference resources.

The language features of the second language (L2) English academic texts written by Indonesian graduate students enrolled in Hungarian higher education are employed in the present study. The study focuses on the level of abstraction and informational density in student assignments in particular. Seven high-stakes essays were collected from seven Indonesian graduate students registered in the faculty of Social Sciences at three different Hungarian universities. Coh-Metrix, a corpus-based computational tool, was used in this study to examine indices of content words and abstraction. As for the comparison between higher and lower proficiency level students, parametric statistics were used to conduct a quantitative analysis of the selected linguistic features, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and concreteness and abstraction. The results show that C1 English proficiency level students outnumber B2 students in terms of informational density. Their texts are more abstract than those of B2 students.

The present study sets out to measure Turkish EFL learners' receptive affix knowledge and productive derivative vocabulary knowledge. More specifically, the extent to which Turkish EFL learners recognize written form of affixes, know the meaning of affixes and determine the part of speech of the derivatives produced by means of affixes and how good such learners are at producing derivatives have been investigated. Sasao and Webb's (2017) Word Part Levels Test (WPLT) to diagnose learners' receptive affix knowledge and the Contextualized Derivative Recall Test developed by Iwaizumi and Webb (2021) to measure EFL learners' productive derivative vocabulary knowledge have been used. The findings regarding EFL learners' receptive affix knowledge reveal that EFL learners have problems with affixes with the difficulty levels of medium and hard. The further results devoted to EFL learners' productive derivative knowledge indicate that they manage to produce almost seventy-one percent of the total number of the derivatives tested. Further analysis of correct derivatives produced in terms of their grammatical class shows that nouns and verbs are the least challenging derivatives to produce for EFL learners. Last, the highest number of correctly derived forms are among the derivatives at 3K-5K word frequency bands.

This study explored the role of written languaging (WL) in response to automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) in L2 accuracy improvement in English classrooms at a university in China. A total of 254 freshmen enrolled in intermediate composition classes participated, and they wrote 4 essays and received AWCF. A half of them engaged in WL after receiving correction, while the other half did not. To measure whether WL could contribute to L2 accuracy improvement, error correction tests were conducted three times. AWCF targeted all types of errors, but the study focused on investigating six language features (nouns, conjunctions, subject-verb agreement, sentence constituents, articles, and prepositions) known as the most frequent errors intermediate students make. The results proved that WL had a positive effect on accuracy improvement overall. However, when individual language features were considered separately, the effects were not the same. The inherent complexity of the features along with L1 influence appeared to affect the effects of WL for accuracy improvement.

The purpose of this study is to examine the vocabulary included in listening texts in the textbooks used in teaching Turkish to foreigners according to their types. The study was limited to New Istanbul Turkish For International Students Course Book-A1 level. Accordingly, a total of eighteen listening texts in six units were analyzed. The document analysis method was used in the study. For this purpose, the words in the listening texts were analyzed as nouns, verbs, and phrases according to the distinction in the word list in the source of the study. In the analysis of the texts, the word types in the listening texts were compared with the word list shared with the reader at the end of each unit, and this ratio was reflected in the word types of tables with numerical values. Accordingly, a total of 592 words were included in eighteen listening texts. Of these, 429 are nouns, 129 are verbs and 34 are phrases. While a total of 957-word types are included in the word lists given in the book, 754 of them are nouns, 179 of them are verbs and 24 of them are phrases. When the word types within the listening texts in the book were analyzed, it was found that 149 out of 592-word types were used again. Another comparison is related to common uses. The word types in the listening texts were compared with the word lists in the textbook and 137 common word types were found. When at the distribution of word type preferences in the listening texts from the first unit to the last unit, it is observed that nouns, verbs, and phrases are partially distributed in a balanced way.

This research investigates disciplinary variations using syntactic features in Pakistani academic writing (AW). The corpus of this research is developed from 160 dissertations across four disciplinary divisions and analyzed through AntConc. Results reveal heterogeneous and homogenous use of the said features. Heterogeneity is seen in relation to the frequency of different types of clausal, intermediate, and phrasal features. Regarding the homogeneity, results reveal that the highest and lowest used features were similar across the four disciplinary divisions. That is, clausal coordinating conjunctions and WH complement clauses (highest and lowest used clausal features), nouns and prepositional phrases (highest and lowest used phrasal features), and adverbs and noun+to-clauses (highest and lowest used intermediate features) are observed to remain the same across the four disciplinary divisions. These results conclude that Pakistani AW does not reflect disciplinary variation. The practice is contrary to the expert convention. Therefore, Pakistani academic writers are suggested to appropriately use the syntactic features as per the expert conventions in their disciplines.

This study investigated L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause (N + RC)" based on Structural Priming (SP)(Bock,1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA)(Cleland, 2003). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English "N + RC," when the priming and the target structures shared different head nouns, they would produce more "N + RC" than when they were primed by the English "Adj + Noun (Adj + N)," and the priming effect was significant. Also, based on SP and LRA, when the priming and the target structures shared the same head noun, the increasing priming effect would be enhanced. The participants were 90 first year non-English major Chinese students attending Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, and 10 native English speakers. A picture description task was used to elicit data. The results confirmed the hypotheses. The study also found that there were different SP and LRA effects for L1 speakers and L2 speakers in that, while L2 speakers were significantly affected, L1 speakers were not. A long-term priming effect was found indirectly after the priming "Simple Sentence." The study contributed to Second Language Acquisition in that SP and LRA would facilitate L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause," although this structure is nonexistent in the learners' L1. The study also gave pedagogical implications in that the application of SP and LRA would facilitate the acquisition of the L2 structures.

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational knowledge learned into their writing. Forty students who were inexperienced in DDL in one intact class at a private university in southern Thailand participated in this study. The participants learned through scaffolded paper-based DDL and autonomous computer-based DDL for a total of 10 weeks in an English for Communication course, which aims to develop their communicative abilities. Pre- and post-writing tests, a stimulated recall interview, and a semi-structured interview were employed as the data collection instruments. The writing test results indicate that the participants' collocational knowledge significantly improved in all patterns (p = 0.00), with a large overall effect size (d = 1.26). The interview results uncover that most participants could accurately: 1) classify the types of the target collocational patterns; 2) identify the hidden usage of the content words with varying prepositions; and 3) elucidate some key considerations when using collocations for their written communication. The results also suggest that the participants have acquired several collocations other than those targeted in DDL. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for DDL implementation and limitations in conducting DDL lessons.

The Kafoa language is one of the indigenous languages in Indonesia so that needs to preserve it to be in existed category and reveal it as language assets in Indonesia and local culture identity. Revealing the Kafoa Language vitality can be conducted through many perspectives, one of them is through the use of basic cultural vocabulary mastery by native speakers. Therefore, this study aimed to reveal the Kafoa language vitality through the basic cultural vocabulary mastery by the native speakers in Bawah Sub-Village, Probur Utara Village, Southwest Alor District, Alor Regency, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. The study was a qualitative applying case study method. Data were the answer of 40 native speakers of the Kafoa language as respondents. In collecting data, questionnaire and interview guidance is used as instruments which involves the 451 basic cultural vocabularies in nine domains of body parts; pronouns, greetings, and references; kinship; village and community life; house and its parts; equipment and tools; foods and beverages; plants and trees; and animals. The data were then analysed through Miles and Huberman steps of data analysis. The study result showed that 190 (42%) vocabularies are still mastered by the native speakers of Kafoa language, while 261(58%) vocabularies are not longer mastered. It indicates that the tendency to master the basic cultural vocabulary by native speakers of the Kafoa language tends to decrease so that its vitality is getting low. To maintain the vitality or life power of the Kafoa language, a policy from the Government is needed and teaching it in the schools is considered.

A standard treatment of proper names in second language (L2) vocabulary analyses is to categorize them as known items. This treatment is often supported by the assumption that the form of the proper name (i.e., the initial capital letter) and the context will indicate to the L2 reader that the item is a proper name. The aim of this work-in- progress report is to propose a methodological approach for investigating the claim that form facilitates proper name recognition for L2 readers, in particular for those whose first language (L1) employs a different orthography and writing system than English. While previous research has looked at the orthographic processing of proper names for L1 users, a gap exists in the literature for L2 readers. The assumption that L2 readers are skilled at identifying proper names from the initial capital warrants investigation as there are implications for the processing load in both pedagogical and testing situations. A proposed method to investigate the initial capital letter as a cue for L2 English proper name recognition is a name decision task, a variation on a lexical decision task, using English proper names and common nouns that are familiar to Japanese participants. Reaction times and error percentages to proper names with case type as a factor (i.e., initial capital letter or all lowercase) will be submitted to a linear mixed effects analysis.

Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development, but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention as each individual dimension, especially in terms of productive knowledge. This study analyses lexis from mid-frequency lemmas in the K3--K9 frequency bands from the learner corpus PELIC (The University of Pittsburgh English Language Institute Corpus). Critically for learners, mastery of lexis in this frequency range is essential for achieving the English proficiency required for university study. From these mid-frequency items, a dataset of 7,554 tokens were collected from word families with multiple derivations and manually annotated. The findings showed high rates of collocational and derivational accuracy for the forms learners opted to use. However, compared to expert speaker texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), learners overused the verb forms and underused the noun forms of these lexical items. These patterns provide evidence of the interplay between breadth and depth in learners' productive vocabulary usage, suggesting that increased lexical depth will naturally lead to greater lexical breadth and vice versa. Pedagogical implications reaffirm the importance of developing learners' explicit morphological awareness and collocational accuracy. Suggestions for mid-frequency lexical items to prioritize in language learning are also provided, with a view to helping learners achieve academic readiness.

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun-based location-cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location-cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement-verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic-embodied integrated language processing; location-cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli.

This case study describes the use of a syntax intervention with two deaf children who did not acquire a complete first language (L1) from birth. It looks specifically at their ability to produce subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure in American Sign Language (ASL) after receiving intervention. This was an exploratory case study in which investigators utilized an intervention that contained visuals to help teach SVO word order to young deaf children. Baseline data were collected over three sessions before implementation of a targeted syntax intervention and two follow-up sessions over 3-4 weeks. Both participants demonstrated improvements in their ability to produce SVO structure in ASL in 6-10 sessions. Visual analysis revealed a positive therapeutic trend that was maintained in follow-up sessions. These data provide preliminary evidence that a targeted intervention may help young deaf children with an incomplete L1 learn to produce basic word order in ASL. Results from this case study can help inform the practice of professionals working with signing deaf children who did not acquire a complete L1 from birth (e.g., speech-language pathologists, deaf mentors/coaches, ASL specialists, etc.). Future research should investigate the use of this intervention with a larger sample of deaf children.