Recently there has been some debate about the appropriacy of different lexical units in pedagogy and research (e.g., Brown et al., 2020; Dang & Webb, 2016a; Kremmel, 2016; Laufer & Cobb, 2020; McLean, 2018; Nation, 2016; Nation & Webb, 2011; Vilkaite-Lozdiene & Schmitt, 2020). The lexical unit (word types, lemmas, flemmas, word…

Recent studies of appositives have turned up differences between sentence-medial appositives and sentence-final appositives, for instance, in their availability for discourse continuations. Three experiments investigated whether medial appositives are more difficult to comprehend than final appositives and if so why. Experiment 1 tested…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

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 "Common European Framework of Reference" (CEFR) is the most widespread reference tool for linking language tests, curricula, and national educational standards to levels of foreign language proficiency in Europe. In spite of this, little is known about how the CEFR levels (A1-C2) relate to empirical learner language(s). This article…

Whilst the links between learner corpus research (LCR) and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) have long been debated, McEnery et al. (2019. "Corpus Linguistics, Learner Corpora, and SLA: Employing Technology to Analyze Language Use." Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 39: 74-92. doi:10.1017/S0267190519000096) claim that learner corpus…

This article focuses on the acquisition of mood in early complement clauses of European Portuguese (EP). Two semantic features are involved in the EP mood system--epistemicity and veridicality. An elicited production task administered to 80 children aged 4 to 9 showed that, even though children use the subjunctive in [-- epistemic] contexts, the…

This study compares monolinguals and different kinds of bilinguals with respect to their knowledge of the type of lexical phenomenon known as collocation. Collocations are word combinations that speakers use recurrently, forming the basis of conventionalized lexical patterns that are shared by a linguistic community. Examples of collocations…

This study investigates relations between second language (L2) lexical input and output in terms of word information properties (i.e., lexical salience; Ellis, 2006a). The data for this study come from a longitudinal corpus of naturalistic spoken data between L2 learners and first language (L1) interlocutors collected over a year's time. The…

Second language (L2) learners of tone languages do not perceive and produce the different tones of the target language with equal ease. The most common explanation for these asymmetries is that acoustically salient tones are the easiest to learn. An alternative explanation is that tones are easiest to learn when they are highly frequent in the…

This article focuses on the proficiency level of texts in Computer Learner Corpora (CLCs). A claim is made that proficiency levels are often poorly defined in CLC design, and that the methods used for level assignment of corpus texts are not always adequate. Proficiency level can therefore, best be described as a fuzzy variable in CLCs,…

This study investigates how figurative language is processed by learners of a second language (L2). With an experiment testing L2 comprehension of figurative expressions in three categories, each combining shared and unshared first language (L1) and L2 lexical representations and conceptual representations in a different way, the study…

The English Language Institute (now the School of Linguistics and Applied Language Studies) at Victoria University of Wellington has a long history of corpus-based vocabulary research, especially after the arrival of the second director of the institute, H. V. George, and the appointment of Helen Barnard, whom George knew in India. George's…

Despite the current importance given to L2 vocabulary acquisition in the last two decades, considerable deficiencies are found in L2 students' vocabulary size. One of the aspects that may influence vocabulary learning is word frequency. However, scholars warn that frequency may lead to wrong conclusions if the way words are distributed is ignored.…

In order to identify the causes of inflectional variability in adult second-language (L2) acquisition, this study investigates lexical and syntactic aspects of gender processing in real-time L2 production and comprehension. Twenty advanced to near-native adult first language (L1) English speakers of L2 German and 20 native controls were tested in…