The development of theory of mind (ToM) in infancy has been mainly documented through studies conducted on a single age group with a single task. Very few studies have examined ToM abilities other than false belief, and very few studies have used a within-subjects design. During 2 testing sessions, infants aged 14 and 18 months old were…

This study explores the time-course of word processing by grammatical class (verbs vs. nouns) and meaning (action vs. non-action) by means of an ERP experiment. The morphology of Spanish words allows for a noun (e.g., "bail"-e [a dance]) or a verb (e.g., "bail"-ar [to dance]) to be formed by simply changing the suffix attached…

This paper assesses the reliability and validity of cognitive and socioemotional skills measures and investigates the correlation between schooling, skills acquisition, and labor earnings. The primary data from Pakistan incorporates two innovations related to measurement and sampling. On measurement, the paper develops and implements a battery of…

This study sought to determine the difference in text-based negotiated interaction between non-native speakers of English (NNS-NNS) and between non-native and natives (NNS-NS) in terms of the frequency of negotiated instances, successfully resolved instances, and interactional strategy use when the dyads collaborated on Facebook. It involved 10…

Creativity may be enhanced by contextual factors that contribute to a divergence from conventional and habitual modes of thought. Two studies tested the prediction that a foreign language (that is frequently associated with moving away from the routine experiences) will contribute to originality of solutions, compared to one's native language.…

In contrast to previous studies on Spontaneous Focusing on Quantitative Relations (SFOR), the present study investigated not only the "extent" to which children focus on (multiplicative) quantitative relations, but also the "nature" of children's quantitative focus (i.e., the types of quantitative relations that children focus…

This dissertation explores why grammatical structures are better learned implicitly or explicitly by investigating differential object marking (DOM) in Spanish. To address the effectiveness of implicit versus explicit instruction in the classroom, the researcher focused on two of the main features that constrain DOM in Spanish: animacy and…

English-Medium Instruction (EMI) practices in the People's Republic of China (PRC) are still emerging and in need of further empirical investigation, in comparison to European countries. Existing research in the Asian context is mainly based on students' and teachers' perceptions and policy-related concerns. There is a remarkable lack of studies…

The acquisition of verbal morphology presents challenges for many second language (L2) learners, in part because they do not readily process those forms during sentence comprehension. Instead, L2 learners rely on lexical-semantic cues (e.g., temporal adverbs and explicit subjects). This study investigated the role of task-essential training in…

The aim of this study is to investigate the pragmatic language behavior of Turkish learners of English in formal complaint situations through the comparison of their speech act performances to those of native speakers. The data was collected from a total of 276 participants, 132 Native Speakers (NSs) and 144 Turkish Learners (TLs) of English.…

Machine translation is currently undergoing a paradigm shift from statistical to neural network models. Neural machine translation (NMT) is difficult to conceptualise for translation students, especially without context. This article describes a short in-class evaluation exercise to compare statistical and neural MT, including details of student…

This study investigated the effects of word frequency, collocational frequency, L1 congruency, and L2 proficiency, on L2 collocational processing. Two groups of L1 Japanese speakers of English (intermediate and advanced) and one group of English native speakers (NSs) performed an online acceptability judgment task on four types of adjective-noun…

Children frequently select learning sources based on epistemic cues, or cues pertaining to informants' knowledge. Previous research has shown that preschoolers preferentially learn from informants who have been accurate in the past, appear confident, or have had visual access to relevant information. The present series of studies aimed to…

This article reports on a 16-week study that examined the effect of mobile-based authentic audiovisual materials (AAM) on the vocabulary acquisition of Japanese university English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students. A quasi-experimental pretest-posttest design study was employed to compare the differences in vocabulary learning between a control…

Recently, the field of instructed pragmatics has seen a shift of paradigm from the prevailing cognitive approaches to socially-oriented ones, revolving around the notions like collaborative dialogue and sociocultural theory. Drawing on the notion of collaborative dialogue, this study investigates the extent to which teacher's scaffolding and…