Collocations are words that have a tendency to co-occur within a few words' spans, e.g., "drink coffee" and "dark chocolate" in English. Growing empirical evidence suggests that both native (L1) speakers and advanced second language (L2) learners process two-word collocations faster than unconnected word pairs, and that…

University classrooms are increasingly populated by students with diverse nationalities and native languages (L1). The growing number of students in English-led classrooms who speak English as a second or lower language (L2) may face added difficulties in understanding the specific task objectives or directions, as explained by native-…

Legal language is characterized by its specialized lexicology, often formed through derivational processes such as affixation, nominalization, and semantic derivation, making legal texts more challenging to understand. This research examined how university students majoring in legal English linguistics recognize, interpret, and manage the…

Incorporating Vygotsky's concepts of scaffolding and Zone of Proximal Development, this paper presents a qualitative study examining student roles in dialogic peer feedback learning, focusing on Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students in mixed translation proficiency triads within an English-Chinese translation course. During feedback…

This mixed-methods study investigated the impact of musical lyrics and working memory capacities on second language (L2) English reading comprehension among adult Chinese native speakers. Participants were 57 adult ESL learners with advanced L2 proficiency, divided into high and low working memory capacity groups based on a pre-test. They…

This article explores how principles from cognitive psychology, particularly transfer-appropriate processing (TAP) and skill acquisition theory, can inform the design of grammar practice in second language (L2) instruction. While grammar instruction often emphasizes declarative knowledge, enabling learners to use grammatical forms accurately and…

This article investigates the connection between multilingual experiences and creative metaphoric competence. As multilingualism has been shown to bring cognitive advantages in creative thinking, this article explores whether the ability to interpret creative metaphors differs in participants with less versus more multilingual experience. The…

It is widely acknowledged that fixed expressions such as idioms have a processing advantage over non-idiomatic language. While many idioms are metaphoric, metonymic, or even literal, the effect of varying nonliteralness in their processing has not been much researched yet. Theoretical and empirical findings suggest that metonymies are easier to…

Lexical inference refers to the ability to make informed guesses about the meaning of an unknown word. This inferencing ability is affected by learner-related (i.e., morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge) and language-related (i.e., word semantic transparency) factors. Previous studies have shown that these factors play independent…

Background: Although there is a growing body of literature on cognitive and language processing in bilingual children with developmental language disorder (DLD), there is a major gap in the evidence for language intervention. Critically, speech-language therapists are often required to make clinical decisions for language intervention on specific…

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…

This article revisits Lee and Mok (2018) and examines how the Cantonese learners in the study produced second language (L2) Japanese short vs. long consonants which are absent in their first language (L1). Specifically, our goal is to find out whether these learners were substituting real geminates (i.e. long consonants) with the improvised…

The paper discusses the implications of recent advances in artificial intelligence for knowledge workers, focusing on possible complementarities and substitution between machine translation tools and language professionals. The emergence of machine translation tools could enhance social welfare through enhanced opportunities for inter-language…

Ethnic stereotype is a culture-determined portrayal of a society, culture or a nation. A comprehensive worldview of an ethnic group tends to form stereotypes, and its analysis makes it possible to identify an ethnic group's cultural identity and characteristics. This study examined ethnic stereotypes in humorous discourse as portrayed in jokes of…

Instrumental competence is universally considered a compulsory competence for translators. Given its significance, this study investigated the instrumental competence of novice translators in translating from and into a foreign language. To this end, an experiment was conducted with a group of 31 Thai EFL learners who had taken English-Thai…