Conversational partners align the meanings of their words over the course of interaction to coordinate and communicate. One process of alignment is lexical entrainment, whereby partners mirror and abbreviate their word usage to converge on shared terms for referents relevant to the conversation. However, lexical entrainment may result in…

What is the nature of conceptual representations? Models of semantic memory often describe concepts as a distributed feature space. However, it remains unknown which subset of this feature space constitutes the invariant representation of a concept. In this dissertation, I investigate the nature of modality-independent representations and their…

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between lexical coverage and TV viewing comprehension. Previous studies have indicated that 95% to 98% of lexical coverage may be needed for reading comprehension (Hu & Nation, 2000). To understand informal listening passages, lower coverage figures (95%-90%) may suffice. However, no study has…

Early vocabulary development benefits from diverse lexical exposures within children's language environment. However, the influence of lexical diversity on children as they enter middle childhood and are exposed to multimodal language inputs remains unclear. This study evaluates global and local aspects of lexical diversity in three…

In standard models of language production or comprehension, the elements which are retrieved from memory and combined into a syntactic structure are "lemmas" or "lexical items". Such models implicitly take a "lexicalist" approach, which assumes that lexical items store meaning, syntax, and form together, that…

Partly as a result of China's reform and opening-up and the broader trend of globalisation, Guangzhou in Southern China has risen to global prominence as a commercial and business hub. Strategically positioned as a centre of 'low-end globalisation', Guangzhou has attracted investors, traders and businessmen from Africa, the Middle East and South…

Previous research on grid questions has mostly focused on their comparability with the item-by-item method and the use of shading to help respondents navigate through a grid. This study extends prior work by examining whether lexical similarity among grid items affects how respondents answer the questions in an experiment where we manipulated…

In the past couple of decades, machine translation (MT), whether phrase-based statistical or neural MT, has made considerable progress and has become increasingly common in specialised translation workflows. More studies on MT in legal contexts have been conducted in the past several years, and MT has been and continues to be used in international…

Purpose: This study aims to examine the associations of phonological, lexical, and grammatical skills within and between languages in Mandarin-English bilingual preschoolers. Method: Sixty-three Singaporean Mandarin-English bilingual children aged 3-5 years were assessed for articulation, receptive vocabulary, and receptive grammar using…

Purpose: There are many aspects of words that can influence our lexical processing, and the words we are exposed to influence our opportunities for language and reading development. The purpose of this study is to establish a more comprehensive understanding of the lexical challenges and opportunities students face. Method: We explore the latent…

To identify effective methods for boosting incidental vocabulary learning, this study examines the impacts of two tools--bimodal presentation (BP) and lexical elaboration (LE)--on vocabulary acquisition through repeated encounters with target words during meaning-focused reading. In a quiet and comfortable place conducive to full concentration on…

Cognitive systems face a tension between stability and plasticity. The maintenance of long-term representations that reflect the global regularities of the environment is often at odds with pressure to flexibly adjust to short-term input regularities that may deviate from the norm. This tension is abundantly clear in speech communication when…

This article compared three-word move-specific lexical bundles (MLBs) in dissertation abstracts authored by linguistics doctoral students from China and the United States. Two separate corpora were constructed for analysis: (1) The China Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (CLC), consisting of 700 abstracts totaling 613,713 words generated by…

The integration of semantic information of compound words with context is a crucial aspect of reading comprehension. In two eye-tracking experiments, we used two-character and four-character Chinese lexicalized and novel compound words to investigate how Chinese readers integrate semantic information of compound words with contexts in the present…

The advent of global citizenship agendas marks a transformation in citizenship education policy and practice internationally. However, research has revealed a highly diverse collection of visions and models for global citizenship. This article seeks to make two main contributions to the study of global citizenship in education. Empirically, it…