Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow…

The digital transformation in educational assessment has led to the proliferation of large-scale data, offering unprecedented opportunities to enhance language learning, and testing through machine learning (ML) techniques. Drawing on the extensive data generated by online English language assessments, this dissertation investigates the efficacy…

This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions, and difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic numeral-based formulaic expressions containing zero, two, three, twenty, sixty, hundred, thousand…etc., and another corpus of specialized…

This research study aims to explore students' perceptions and reflections on the effectiveness of project-based learning (PBL) in a Thai-English translation course in the EFL context. The participants of this study included forty-nine students who were enrolled in the Thai-English translation course. The participants were asked to produce a…

Translators employ an array of tools to streamline the translation process, ensuring precision and coherence. The necessity of these tools is particularly pronounced when tackling authentic materials, such as texts from the United Nations (UN). Among these tools, corpora stand out as a pivotal resource. In light of this, this study undertook a…

Material development is important for training beginner student interpreters, as it guides the direction of interpreting learning. One key principle is difficulty progression, which requires a good knowledge of the indicators of difficulty. Since text structure outweighs words and sentences in the information processing of consecutive…

This study aims to: (i) describe the different meanings and contexts in which Arabic "dar" and "bayt" and English "house" and "home" expressions are used; (ii) compare "dar," "bayt," "house" and "home" expressions and give examples of expressions that are identical in…

Purpose: The article strives for the enhancement of the efficiency of translation competence assessment in philologists' university training with the help of the triangulation method. It is deemed in the concurrent involvement of different assessment agents (teacher, peer and self) into integrated and collaborative translation performance…

The present study is designed to investigate whether children's difficulties with subject-to-subject raising (StSR) are due to intervention effects. We examine English-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "seem" and Spanish-speaking children's comprehension of StSR with "parecer" 'seem,' a configuration never before…

This study examined the influence of formulaic language on second language (L2) listeners' lower-level processing, in terms of their ability to accurately identify the words in texts. On the one hand, there were reasons for expecting the presence of the formulas to advantage the learners, because the learners would process these formulaic words…

We report three studies (one corpus, two experimental) that investigated the acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in Finnish-speaking children. Study 1 found that Finnish children's naturalistic exposure to RCs predominantly consists of non-subject relatives (i.e. oblique, object) which typically have inanimate head nouns. Study 2 tested…

It is a common finding across languages that young children have problems in understanding patient-initial sentences. We used Tagalog, a verb-initial language with a reliable voice-marking system and highly frequent patient voice constructions, to test the predictions of several accounts that have been proposed to explain this difficulty: the…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

In most languages, most of the syntactic dependency relations found in any given sentence are projective: the word-word dependencies in the sentence do not cross each other. Some syntactic dependency relations, however, are non-projective: some of their word-word dependencies cross each other. Non-projective dependencies are both rarer and more…