Multiword units play an important role in language learning and use. It was proposed that learning from such units can facilitate mastery of certain grammatical relations, and that children and adults differ in their use of multiword units during learning, contributing to their varying language-learning trajectories. Accordingly, adults learn…

The aim of the study was to investigate the effectiveness of mind mapping on Ethiopian secondary school students' English collocation learning. The study specifically tried to check the effectiveness of mind mapping on adjective-preposition and verb-noun combination collocations. A sample of 110 grade 12 students who were learning in two sections…

Recent research has shown that knowledge of second language (L2) collocations is important to learners for improving their language processing and production but also that acquiring L2-specific collocations is a very burdensome task for learners. Thus, bootstrapping knowledge of L2 collocations through generalization is highly desirable, but this…

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused…

The study explored the correlation between teaching lexical bundles and improving writing skills in English composition courses. The study addressed two research questions. First, to what extent can the explicit teaching of lexical bundles facilitate greater comprehension and retention of the elements of the bundles? Second, the study investigated…

Structural priming refers to the tendency of speakers to repeat syntactic structures across sentences. We investigated the extent to which structural priming persists with age and whether the effect depends upon highly abstract syntactic representations that only encompass the global sentence structure or whether representations are specified for…

Natural language is highly complex and can be challenging for some learners, yet the contribution of complexity to individual differences in language learning remains poorly understood. This poor understanding appears due to both a lack of consensus among researchers regarding what complexity is, and to on-line language research often employing…

By replicating Cho (2017), this article investigates how second language (L2) learners with an article-less first language acquire two types of English definiteness, anaphoric and nonanaphoric. Mandarin Chinese, as an article-less language, has a demonstrative determiner that shares the same feature set as the English definite article…

This study investigates whether congruency (+/- literal translation equivalent), collocate-node relationship (adjective-noun, verb-noun, phrasal-verb-noun collocations), and word length influence the learning burden of EFL learners' learning collocations at the initial stage of form-meaning mapping. Eighteen collocations were selected on the basis…

In this article I examine the collocational behaviour of groups of semantically related verbs (e.g., "head, run, manage") and nouns (e.g., "issue, factor, aspect") from the domain of business English. The results of this corpus-based study show that much of the collocational behaviour exhibited by these lexical items can be explained by examining…

Mandarin Chinese allows pervasive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in discourse, which casts doubt concerning child learners' use of syntax in verb learning. This study investigated whether Mandarin learning children would nonetheless extend verb meanings based on the number of NPs in sentences. Forty-one Mandarin-speaking two- and three-year-olds…

Reports four experiments examining subject-verb agreement errors in Spanish and English. Discusses cross-linguistic differences within the framework of the computational model of grammatical encoding proposed by Kempen and Hoenkamp. Suggests that languages differ in the extent to which the selection of the verb is controlled by features on the…