People prefer words with inward directed consonantal patterns (e.g., MENIKA) compared to outward patterns (KENIMA), because inward (outward) articulation movements resemble positive (negative) mouth actions such as swallowing (spitting). This effect might rely on covert articulation simulations, or subvocalizations, since it occurs also under…

This study investigates the second language (L2) acquisition of the English count/mass distinction by speakers of Korean and Mandarin Chinese, with a focus on the semantics of atomicity. It is hypothesized that L1-Korean and L1-Mandarin L2-English learners are influenced by atomicity in the use of the count/mass morphosyntax in English. This…

Terminal changes in fundamental frequency provide the most salient acoustic cues to declarative questions, but adults sometimes identify such questions from pre-terminal cues. In the present study, adults and 7- to 10-year-old children judged a single speaker's adult- and child-directed utterances as questions or statements in a gating task with…

This paper examines possible psycholinguistic mechanisms governing stem vowel changes of irregular verbs in intermediate English learners of German as a foreign language (GFL). In Experiment 1, nonce-infinitives embedded in an authentic fictional text had to be inflected for German preterite, thus testing possible analogy-driven pattern…

Two eye-tracking experiments examined the effects of sentence structure on the processing of complement coercion, in which an event-selecting verb combines with a complement that represents an entity (e.g., "began the memo"). Previous work has demonstrated that these expressions impose a processing cost, which has been attributed to the…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

Mastery of idiomatic expressions by foreign language learners is often equated with the fluency of native speakers of that language. However, learning these idiomatic expressions is one of the significant problems experienced by learners. The present quasi-experimental study conducted over four weeks in the ELT department of a Turkish university…

Recent research has shown that beat gestures (hand gestures that co-occur with speech in spontaneous discourse) are temporally integrated with prosodic prominence and that they help word memorization and discourse comprehension. However, little is known about the potential beneficial effects of beat gestures in second language (L2) pronunciation…

Storytelling plays a vital role to impart a nation's tradition, cultural beliefs and history to future generation. It is frequently used for the purpose of sharing or exchanging information as it enables the messages to be conveyed to the audience easily. Storytelling acts as a tool of human social interaction and is commonly used in education for…

Formulaic sequences are found to be processed faster than their matched novel phrases in previous studies. Given the variety of formulaic types, few studies have compared processing on different types of formulaic sequences. The present study explored the processing among idioms, speech formulae and written formulae. It has been found that in…

This replication study investigates how the level of context in vocabulary assessment affects the scores on tests of American idioms. Using Uçkun's methodology of 3 tests with 3 levels of context, 85 participants varying in level from high-beginner to advanced took an online test consisting of 30 questions, 10 questions for each level of context.…

This survey investigates to what degree the Chinese learners know about the discrepancies between Chinese and English thought patterns and their possible effects on English writing. Eighty-one students from North China Electric Power University participate in the survey. Qualitative and quantities approaches, involving the adoption of both…

Culture-loaded words and expressions are loaded with specific national cultural information and indicate deep national culture. They are the direct and indirect reflection of national culture in the structure of words and expressions. The improper use of culture-loaded words often leads to misunderstanding in cross-cultural communication. However,…

Data-driven learning (DDL) has become an innovative approach developed from corpus linguistics. It plays a significant role in the progression of foreign language pedagogy, since it offers learners plentiful authentic corpora examples that make them analyze language rules with the help of online corpora and concordancers. The present study…

While it is a well-known fact that speakers of article-less mother tongues, such as Polish, experience problems with articles in English, this study seeks to investigate the problem from a different perspective. Namely, it poses the question of whether the correct use of the article system of the L2 is indeed a purely grammatical task (as it is…