One of the challenges that students face during the transition from high school to university is mastering discipline-specific academic expectations and norms. From a language perspective, they may encounter new academic and disciplinary vocabulary, some of which will be metaphoric in nature. However, some students whose first language is not…

In recent years, despite the fact that many researchers have devoted much of their attention to second language attrition, not much focus has been given to first language attrition (FLA) specifically among Iranian immigrants. The present study attempts to describe FLA in the semantic domain of idiomatic expression and effect of length of residence…

This study examines how adult second language learners acquire the different meanings of the Spanish preposition "a". Cognitive linguistic models predict that spatial meanings are acquired first, as they are conceptually basic and are the source from which other meanings derive via natural cognitive mechanisms such as metaphor and…