Since corpus linguistics gained popularity as a methodology in the latter half of the 20th century, second language acquisition research has seen the emergence of work investigating formulaic language, such as idioms, lexical bundles, and collocations. A collocation is a string of words that co-occur more routinely than probability would predict,…

Experimental research on the interface between second language vocabulary knowledge, including collocations, and translation competence is scarce. The present study investigates the role played by three determinants of collocation knowledge (knowledge level -- recall versus recognition, congruency, and constituent word types) in the accuracy of…

The development of corpus linguistics has laid theoretical foundation and provided technical support for breaking the bottleneck in traditional vocabulary instruction in China. Corpora allow access to authentic data and show frequency patterns of words and grammar construction. Such patterns can be used to improve language materials or to directly…

This study investigates whether congruency (+/- literal translation equivalent), collocate-node relationship (adjective-noun, verb-noun, phrasal-verb-noun collocations), and word length influence the learning burden of EFL learners' learning collocations at the initial stage of form-meaning mapping. Eighteen collocations were selected on the basis…

Speakers of gender-agreement languages use gender-marked elements of the noun phrase in spoken-word recognition: A congruent marking on a determiner or adjective facilitates the recognition of a subsequent noun, while an incongruent marking inhibits its recognition. However, while monolinguals and early language learners evidence this…

Two eye-tracking experiments in the Visual World paradigm compared how monolingual Russian (Experiment 1) and heritage Russian-English bilingual (Experiment 2) listeners process contrastiveness online in Russian. Materials were color adjective-noun phrases embedded into the split-constituent construction Krasnuju polozite zvezdovku..."Red put…

Two experiments investigate whether native speakers of French can use a noun's phonological ending to retrieve its gender and that of a gender-marked element. In Experiment 1, participants performed a gender decision task on the noun's gender-marked determiner for auditorily presented nouns. Noun endings with high predictive values were selected.…

This paper exposes how function words and their prosodic features play a part in learning and teaching to read in the early years. It sketches the place that function words have in the grammar of English and describes their phonological features, especially their weak stress and its role in the prosodic quality of sentences. It considers the ways…