The study aimed to explore the evidence of first language (L1) mediation in second language (L2) word associations and the L2 learner-related factors affecting the extent of L1 mediation with the following approaches. First, different from previous research, word association tests (WATs) embraced both receptive and productive word associations in…

Current L2 utterance fluency literature tends to operationalize disfluency as isolated, individual features. However, disfluency features often co-occur at one location or across multiple locations in one utterance. This study explores the co-occurrence of L2 disfluency features in a speech corpus from 71 L1 and L2 speakers of English across…

The issue of English being the lingua franca in transnational higher education remains a debate, especially regarding fairness in doctoral examinations. The current study builds upon a recent publication that proposes examining doctoral students of an Anglophone doctoral program offered on an offshore campus in China to be held in the Chinese…

This study aims to provide a comprehensive profile of collocational competence, a key component of one's overall linguistic competence. For the maximum of ecological validity, we elicited naturalistic oral/written production data from 84 Chinese intermediate EFL learners and performed a 2×2 fashion of analysis on their performance in each of the…

In order to better understand the role of syntactic similarity in a code-switched sentence, the current study explored the effect of similar and different syntactic structures on Chinese-English bilinguals' intra-sentential switching costs. L2 proficiency and switching directions as factors that potentially intervene in bilingual performance were…

Derivational suffixes are known to play a crucial role in assigning stress to multi-syllabic words among native English speakers. However, it is unclear whether second language (L2) learners of English can effectively use derivational suffixes as stress cues in written words. To address this gap, we studied if native Chinese-speaking adults…

This paper explores the number marking challenges faced by L2 learners of English whose L1 is one of the classifier languages Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Chinese) or Bahasa Indonesia (henceforth Indonesian). It examines whether these groups differ in their marking of English number, and how the speaker's level of proficiency, as well as…

English-medium instruction (EMI) has burgeoned alongside two decades of L2 self-regulated learning research. In both areas, listening remains under-researched, longitudinal designs are under-employed, and in-depth studies are necessary to unpack learner development. In a context believed to initiate self-regulated learning, the current study…

This study is aimed to identify the effects of task complexity on first language (L1) use and the functions it may serve when two groups of learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) work on collaborative tasks. Twenty-four pairs of Chinese EFL learners from two universities were assigned to a lower-proficiency and a higher-proficiency group,…

Challenges in reading Chinese as a foreign language involve the large proportion of two-character compound words which have complex intra-word morphological structures and scriptal distance between learner's native language (L1) and Chinese as a second or foreign language. This study extended a previous investigation on the processing of Chinese…

This project examined the acquisition of third person accusative clitics in Spanish by Chinese-speaking learners. Specifically, it focused on the role of cross-linguistic influence and patterns of language exposure and use in the acquisition of the syntactic and semantic properties constraining the production and intuition of overt and null…

The present study used a repetition priming paradigm to investigate the basic morphological units stored in mental lexicon for Chinese as second language learners (L2) and Chinese native speakers (L1). Meanwhile, the modulation of Chinese morpheme property (bound or free) in lexical processing was examined. The results revealed that for…

While English as the medium of instruction (EMI) is becoming a popular institutional practice across the globe, the bulk of research has yielded inconsistent findings regarding its effectiveness for students' content and language learning. Through a qualitative inquiry into students' EMI experiences in a Macau university, the study discovered that…

We investigated the role of cue weighting, second language (L2) proficiency, and L2 daily exposure in L2 learning of suprasegmentals different from the first language (L1), using eye-tracking. Spanish monolinguals, English-Spanish learners, and Mandarin--Spanish learners saw a paroxytone and an oxytone verb (e.g., "FIRma-firMÓ"…

This dissertation contributes new data to the debate on the source and manner of transfer in third language (L3) acquisition. The "L1 Status Factor" (L1SF, e.g., Hermas, 2010; Leung, 2002; Lozano-Pozo, 2003) maintains that the transfer source is the native language (L1), whereas the "L2 Status Factor" (L2SF, Bardel & Falk,…