Collocational priming is a priming effect induced by collocationally related words; it has been taken to explain the cognitive reality of collocation. Collocational priming has largely been observed in first language (L1) speakers, whereas work on the representation of collocation in a second language (L2) is still limited. In the present study,…

This study investigates how linguistic and nonlinguistic information interacts in second language (L2) sentence processing. Previous studies argued that L2 behaviors might stem from how L2 speakers rely more on one type of information over another. However, direct attempts have not been made to test the (dis)agreement of different information…

The use of subordination enables language users to achieve syntactic efficiency by allowing them to connect ideas in temporal/logical relation. Although the importance of subordination has been recognized in previous research on second language (L2) writing, it has been typically assessed with global indices that measure overall ratio of…

Frequency and proficiency have been found to play an important role in second language (L2) phrasal processing. However, existing research has largely focused on English and other European languages, with other commonly used languages, such as Chinese, being largely disregarded. To fill this gap, we carried out two experiments to investigate how…

This study examined how linguistic complexity features contribute to second language (L2) processing effort by analyzing the Dutch English-L2 learners' eye movements from GECO and MECO, two eye-tracking corpora. Processing effort was operationalized as reading rate, mean fixation duration, regression rate, skipping rate, and mean saccade…

An important issue in second-language acquisition concerns the role of explicit information (EI) and how it is affected by individual differences. The present study explored this question through a partial replication and extension of Fernández (2008: Experiment 2), which investigated the effects of EI in processing instruction (PI) for the…

First (L1) and second (L2) language speakers process information differently. The current study explores whether L1 and L2 English language speakers process the emotional connotations of high and low-frequency words using the emotional Stroop task. With this task, we measure the reaction time required to name the color of words with positive,…

Proper nouns constitute a lexical class with special properties and are thus treated differently from other words by second language acquisition researchers. An assumption exists that even low-proficiency learners will find them unproblematic, yet research suggests this assumption might be misplaced. The present study involved two self-paced…

This study investigates whether cross-linguistic differences affect how adult second language (L2) learners use different types of verb subcategorization information for prediction in real-time sentence comprehension. Using visual world eye-tracking, we tested if first language (L1) German and L1 Turkish intermediate-to-advanced learners of L2…

This study investigated the effects of semantic transparency of Chinese suon Chinese as a second language (CSL) learners' incidental learning of word meanings in sentence-level reading and passage-level reading. The accuracy of the learners' lexical inferencing was compared among various types of words (transparent, semi-transparent, and opaque…

The present study uses event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine nonlocal agreement processing between native (L1) English speakers and Chinese-English second language (L2) learners, whose L1 lacks number agreement. We manipulated number marking with determiners ("the" vs. "that"/"these") to see how…

The study examined the role of Chinese-Japanese cognate awareness in Japanese vocabulary acquisition among college Chinese learners of Japanese. Thirty-seven college-level students participated in this study and they completed a bilingual cognate awareness test which covered both crosslinguistic similarities and differences. In addition,…

Second language (L2) grammar learning is difficult. Two frameworks--the psycholinguistic lexical bottleneck hypothesis and the neurocognitive declarative/procedural model--predict that faster L2 lexical processing should facilitate L2 incidental grammar learning. We tested these predictions in a pretest-posttest syntactic adaptation study of…

This research project is set in a Pakistani undergraduate translation studies class. Pakistan is an ex-British colony where English is taught in a linguistic neo-imperial context. Teachers often endeavor to lessen the palpable struggle of students by introducing activities that put less emphasis on grammatical correctness and more on fostering…

A new kind of reading platform supported by ChatGPT has quickly become a popular research assistant among students due to its instant natural language interaction and question-answering capabilities. This study explored the effects of ChatGPT-based reading platform on student's foreign language paper reading. A total of 64 undergraduate students…