This study analyzes four English synonyms -- clear, obvious, apparent, and evident -- concentrating on meanings, distribution across genre, collocations, and semantic preference and prosody. The data were drawn from learner's dictionaries and the Corpus of the Contemporary American English (COCA). It was discovered that the four synonyms share the…

A critical component of cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs) is a Q-matrix that stipulates associations between items of a test and their required attributes. The present study aims to develop and empirically validate a Q-matrix for the listening comprehension section of the International English Language Testing System (IELTS). To this end, a…

Learners frequently encounter challenges in accurately utilizing near-synonyms in the English language. This investigation explored the similarities and differences among four near-synonymous verbs: "attempt, endeavor, strive," and "try." The analysis encompassed their prevalence across diverse genres, formality levels,…

This dissertation investigates how English-speaking second language (L2) learners of Mandarin perceive, process and learn Mandarin lexical tones. While most languages use modulations in pitch (intonation) to convey meanings at the phrasal and sentential levels, a number of languages, including Mandarin, also use suprasegmental features such as…

The meaning of words can be influenced by their co-occurrences. Semantic prosody (SP) is attitudinal and evaluative meaning inferred from the habitual lexical environment of a word in a corpus. By introducing SP in an English teaching classroom, teachers can reveal more implicit knowledge about language usage and assist students in reaching…

To avoid potential miscommunication resulting from structural ambiguity, speakers and listeners often rely on differences in prosodic realization. For instance, the sentence "Jennifer blackmailed the boss of the clerk [who was dishonest"][subscript RC'] is realized with different prosody depending on the attachment of the relative clause…

Terminology represents a significant factor in healthcare communication between specialists and patients. The present paper deals with the lexicosemantic characteristics of multi-word lexical units "multiple sclerosis," "amyotrophic lateral sclerosis," "Parkinson's disease," "Alzheimer's disease,"…

The concept of semantic prosody has attracted great research interest in language teaching. Identifying learners' perception of semantic prosody and collocation may be beneficial to vocabulary teaching. This study analyzes two pairs of synonyms in English writings of Chinese students and English native speakers based on the ICNALE corpus. The…

This quasi-experimental research explores the difference between the pausing patterns of native English and nonnative Turkish speakers of English concerning their pause durations preceding and following English adverbial clause conjunctions. The findings reveal statistically significant differences between native and nonnative participants for two…

The effects of repeated oral reading and timed reading on L2 oral reading fluency were examined among Japanese university students (N = 50) over 12 weeks. Three quasi-experimental groups were used in the study. Group 1 practiced two types of reading: Repeated oral reading with chunking practice and timed reading. Group 2 did timed reading only.…

The present study examined the use of prosody in semantic and syntactic disambiguation by means of comparison between Japanese and Chinese speakers' production of English sentences. In Chinese and Japanese, lexical prosody is more prominent than sentence prosody, and the sentential meaning contrast is usually realized through particles or a change…

The current study addresses an aspect of second language (L2) phonological acquisition that has received little attention to date--namely, the acquisition of allophonic variation as a word boundary cue. The role of subphonemic variation in the segmentation of speech by native speakers has been indisputably demonstrated; however, the acquisition of…

CHALLENGE is generally perceived as a negative word synonymous with "dispute," "defy," "confrontation," and "contest." However, when resorting to dictionary definitions, CHALLENGE has unexpectedly been found to possess positive senses such as "stimulating" and "arousing competitive…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

With the ever increasing number of studies on formulaic language, we are beginning to learn more about the processing of formulaic language (e.g. Ellis et al. 2008; Siyanova et al. 2011), its use in speech (e.g. Aijmer 1996; Wood 2012) and writing (e.g. Hyland 2008a, 2008b) and its application in natural language processing (e.g. Tschichold 2000).…