This study investigates the effect of conventional and nonconventional expressions on listener comprehensibility. A forty-item comprehensibility test, including conventional expressions, interlanguage attempts, sociopragmatic deviances and alternative grammar constructions produced by French L2 (second language) speakers (N=27) was created.…

In two visual world eye-tracking experiments, this dissertation examines the role of literacy on predictive processing during spoken language comprehension. Previous studies have shown that comprehenders can use morphosyntactic cues available in the input to generate predictions about upcoming information. Recent key findings also suggest that…

Listeners have been shown to judge second language (L2) users more negatively than L1 speakers on measures of language proficiency and even on personal qualities. However, less is known about what factors affect listener judgment which this study seeks to explore. In the study, one first language (L1) English speaker recorded her spontaneous…

The first stage of combinatorial speech is better described as variable than uniform. Talk of variants obscures two different aspects of language (knowledge and use) and two different aspects of language development -- acquisition of the grammar (competence) and deployment of the grammar in speaking and listening (performance). Null subjects and…

Scholars have argued for the inclusion of different spoken varieties of English in high-stakes listening tests to better represent the global use of English. However, doing so may introduce additional construct-irrelevant variance due to accent familiarity and the shared first language (L1) advantage, which could threaten test fairness. However,…

This study investigated the impact of information density on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) listening comprehension, testing the hypothesis that listeners prioritize message understanding in information-rich discourse over grammar-focused analysis in rhetorical discourse. A quasi-experimental design was employed with 26 EFL college students,…

The current replication study aims to examine the effects of learners' attention to lexical and grammatical forms on meaning comprehension while listening to a passage in Spanish. The registered protocol and materials in the aural mode from Morgan-Short et al.'s (2018) multisite replication study were used, with first language (L1) Chinese-second…

The study aimed to identify the primary obstacles encountered by junior high school students when learning English. Conducted as a cross-sectional survey, data were gathered from 102 9th-grade students in three public schools in Parongpong using a Likert questionnaire and analyzed through mean scores. Findings revealed that the key barriers…

In second language (L2) research, the lexical unit is often defined as a base word plus inflectional and derivational forms through Level 6 of Bauer and Nation's framework (WF6). WF6 use has been justified by the assumption that once a form is known, recognition of other WF6 members requires little extra effort. A more lenient view holds that an…

Multicomponent perspectives on second language reading proficiency offer a contemporary understanding of reading and its development (e.g., Yamashita, 2022). In this web-based experiment, we investigated the relationship among L2 reading proficiency measures--reading comprehension, listening comprehension, reading fluency--and component reading…

Purpose: We investigated the efficacy of "Story Champs" for improving oral language in third-grade Spanish-English bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Method: We implemented a concurrent multiple-baseline across-participants single-case design with four bilingual Spanish-English third-grade students with DLD.…

Cohesion is a very important part of learning English. The Cohesion Theory of Halliday and Hasan is of great importance for people to acquire the knowledge of cohesion. This study is aimed at applying this Cohesion Theory in CET-4 listening comprehension which is an important test for Chinese college students. This study uses the test papers of…

For many people, learning a second language as an adult is a challenging endeavor. Much interest in the study of adult second language learning has concerned the type of input that learners receive in their second language, with findings suggesting that second language learners are often exposed to a register of speech called 'foreigner talk' that…

We investigated the influence of globally ungrammatical local syntactic constraints on sentence comprehension, as well as the corresponding activation of global and local representations. In Experiment 1, participants viewed visual scenes with objects like a carousel and motorbike while hearing sentences with noun phrase (NP) or verb phrase (VP)…

This longitudinal study investigated development of second language (L2) reading comprehension ability and predictive contributions of five L2 reading components (word recognition speed, listening comprehension, vocabulary breadth, grammar knowledge and first language [L1] reading comprehension) using latent growth curve modelling. The…