In a recent study, preschoolers adapted their syntactic expectations about a familiar phrase in French; this adaptation affected later word learning. In two experiments, we probed the generality of this finding by replicating the experiment and extending it to a different expression in English. We examined the ambiguous phrase "the…

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Research has shown that food metaphors play an important role in humans' conceptualization of various domains of experience. However, insufficient attention has been paid to the phraseology of food metaphors. This research aims to investigate food metaphors and their phraseology. Particularly, this paper focuses on the lemmas "consume"…

The paper discusses the interpretation of adversative clauses introduced by "pero" and concessive clauses introduced by "aunque" in Spanish. Specifically, the discussion centers around structures that exhibit the forms: (i) "A, pero B," (ii) "A, aunque B-INDICATIVE," and (iii) "A, aunque…

Technological advances have made the ability to translate no longer exclusively belong to humans. Today, machine translation has turned into a tool with superior performance to convert text between languages without the need for human intervention. One of the translation research foci is the studies of causative translation, especially from…

Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact…

To avoid plagiarism, students have to learn the appropriate and effective ways of source text use, such as paraphrasing, summarizing, and citation. However, few studies have investigated how learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) employ copy and paraphrase as source text use strategies in completing writing tasks involving reading…

Despite the widely used word lists in English as a second or foreign language learning, few attempts have been made to create an academic spoken collocation list, which holds significant potential for enhancing learners' aural and oral abilities in academic communication. This study created a list of the most frequently used and pedagogically…

When teaching Mandarin Chinese classifiers, teachers usually ask students to memorize 'classifier + noun', phrases as collocations. Given that Mandarin Chinese has a vast and complicated system of classifiers, the rote memorization of 'classifier + noun' collocations is challenging and monotonous. Therefore, the present study aims to improve that…

In second language (L2) vocabulary studies there is continuing interest in tests of depth of vocabulary knowledge, measuring various aspects of word knowledge other than just the form--meaning link that is the focus of breadth (or size) tests. This study aimed to explore new formats that could be used as diagnostic tools for assessing depth of…

The adjustment of syntactic and phraseological complexity is a key consideration in text adaptation. However, research on this topic in the context of Chinese as a second language (CSL) remains limited. Using 700 CSL reading texts graded following the newly issued Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education,…

This study examines the comprehension of verbal passives by children acquiring European Portuguese, in particular with respect to the predictions of the Universal Phase Requirement (UPR) and the Universal Freezing Hypothesis (UFH) regarding children's performance with different types of predicates. Both hypotheses entail the prediction that…

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…

"A Dictionary of Contemporary Figurative Language" is meant to be an appendix to an earlier, more comprehensive work: ED648945, "A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor 2024." This appendix simply updates the dictionary of that previous work to better reflect the language used during the 2024…

This study investigates how speakers of Mandarin interpret negative sentences with the conjunction ("he" 'and'). Our experiments test three predictions that follow from the proposal that the Mandarin conjunction is a positive polarity item (PPI) for both children and adults. On this account, the Mandarin conjunction should be interpreted…