In this brief report, we present a scoping review of 31 second language (L2) vocabulary research syntheses published in the Web of Science from January 1990 to May 2022. The purpose of this undertaking was to understand what L2 vocabulary research synthesizers have aggregated and the investigative foci they intended to address. It was observed…

Language can alter our mental conceptions of space, time, and categories. While there is compelling evidence that thought can be shaped by syntactic, morphological, and lexical features of a language, less is known about the impact of phonology on thought. This dissertation uses novel objects (alien cartoon figures) and pseudoword names in three…

In the L2 fluency literature there is considerable debate over how best to operationally define pauses and how different pause measures relate to L2 proficiency. This creates a challenge for researchers interested in L2 fluency, and particularly those who are working with groups that vary in L2 proficiency. This article addresses these issues by…

The vocabulary research of the 1980s and 1990s brought a breath of fresh air into the language classroom. Teachers in many remote EFL locations had long suspected that vocabulary was their learners' main challenge, but there was little research evidence to confirm this or say what to do about it. Then, suddenly, work by Nation, Laufer, Meara,…

The study investigates the relationship between lexical encoding and production in order to establish whether learners are able to produce a difficult contrast in words that they merged in their mental lexicon. Forty American English learners of Russian were tested on their production and lexical encoding of familiar and highly-frequent words with…

This dissertation presents three studies that examined issues related to the production and the perception of pitch in a tone language. The first study examined linguistic contexts that may modulate consonant-induced pitch perturbations (CF0) in a tone language. Previous studies have produced mixed findings regarding the role of linguistic…

Age of acquisition (AoA) refers to the age at which people learn a particular item and the AoA effect refers to the phenomenon that early-acquired items are processed more quickly and accurately than those acquired later. Over several decades, the AoA effect has been investigated using neuroscientific, behavioral, corpus and computational…

This article proposes basic (shared) and extended (nonshared) language cognition in native speakers as a function of two types of extralinguistic attributes: (a) degree of being multilingual and (b) variables related to amount and type of literacy experiences (e.g., level of education). This approach may throw new light on the question of whether…

Although regularity refers to the compatibility between pronunciation of character and sound of phonetic component, it has been suggested as being part of consistency, which is defined by neighborhood characteristics. Two experiments demonstrate how regularity effect is amplified or reduced by neighborhood characteristics and reveals the…

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of…

A number of longitudinal studies of L2 production have reported frequency effects wherein learners' produce more frequent words as a function of time. The current study investigated the spoken output of English L2 learners over a four-month period of time using both native and non-native English speaker frequency norms for both word types and word…

This exploratory study aimed to examine whether early exposure to Chinese as a heritage language (CHL) provides facilitation in word-knowledge development in collegiate CHL learners by comparing word-level subskills, including oral vocabulary knowledge, print vocabulary knowledge, morphological awareness, and lexical inferencing ability, between…

Educators are aware of the need to promote students' academic language to support text comprehension. Yet, besides teaching academic vocabulary, many educators continue to ask, What would this instruction entail? Guided by a new framework known as core academic language skills (CALS), the authors' research focuses on delineating core language…

This study uses conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the coupling of specific linguistic items with specific gestures in second language (L2) learning over time. In particular, we are interested in how gestures accompany learning of new vocabulary. CA-informed studies of gesture have previously shown the importance of embodiment in L2 use and…

People differ in the size of their social network, and thus in the properties of the linguistic input they receive. This article examines whether differences in social network size influence individuals' linguistic skills in their native language, focusing on global comprehension of evaluative language. Study 1 exploits the natural variation in…