Language learners need to map a continuous, multidimensional acoustic signal to discrete abstract speech categories. The complexity of this mapping poses a difficult learning problem, particularly for second language learners who struggle to acquire the speech sounds of a non-native language, and almost never reach native-like ability. A common…

Spontaneous motion is one of the most basic event types, but different languages use varying patterns to express it. For example, English usually encodes path information in prepositional phrases or adverbial particles, while Korean maps path information onto verbs (Talmy, 1985). This study predicts that this typological difference would affect…

Automating the classification of instructional strategies from a large-scale online tutorial dialogue corpus is indispensable to the design of dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems. Despite many existing studies employing supervised machine learning (ML) models to automate the classification process, they concluded that building a…

Making adults learn from larger linguistic units can facilitate learning article-noun agreement. Here we ask whether initial exposure to larger units improves learning by increasing the predictive associations between the article and noun. Using an artificial language learning paradigm, we taught 106 Hebrew-speaking participants novel article-noun…

Research shows that meaning-focused reading offers opportunities for incidental grammar acquisition. However, the number of such studies remains limited and none have examined the role of both in-text encounters with grammar structures and reading comprehension in this learning. The present study filled these gaps. Employing a between-group,…

This dissertation developed a new learner corpus of Japanese and introduced an error and linguistic annotation scheme specifically designed for Japanese particles. The corpus contains texts written by learners who are in the first year to fourth year university level Japanese courses. The texts in the corpus were tagged with part-of-speech and…

In contexts of first language (L1) acquisition, prediction and adaptation are often viewed as fundamental to the learning process (Rabagliati et al., 2016). One mechanism that has been proposed to specifically account for such adaptive behavior is error-based implicit learning (e.g., Chang et al., 2006). According to this account, speakers…

We present a proof-of-concept study that sketches the use of compression algorithms to assess Kolmogorov complexity, which is a text-based, quantitative, holistic, and global measure of structural surface redundancy. Kolmogorov complexity has been used to explore cross-linguistic complexity variation in linguistic typology research, but we are the…

Recently researchers have proposed using information from teachers and learners to supplement the information from corpora in the selection of the most useful words for foreign language learners. Yet the extent to which these data sets correlate to one another is unclear. This study explicitly investigated the relationships between (a) the lexical…

The acquisition of a second language (L2) may be challenging in adulthood, as the phonological system of the native language (L1) can sometimes limit the perception of phonological contrasts in L2. The present study aimed to (a) examine the influence of an L1 (Hebrew) that lacks a phonemic contrast for vowel length on the ability to discriminate…

Instructional Systems Design is the practice of creating of instructional experiences that make the acquisition of knowledge and skill more efficient, effective, and appealing [18]. Specifically in designing courses, an hour of training material can require between 30 to 500 hours of effort in sourcing and organizing reference data for use in just…

For the development of successful human-agent dialogue-based tutoring systems, it is essential to understand what makes a human-human tutorial dialogue successful. While there has been much research on dialogue-based intelligent tutoring systems, there have been comparatively fewer studies on analyzing large-scale datasets of human-human online…

Despite extensive use of online language learning during the pandemic of COVID, there is insufficient research on what factors influence students' foreign language achievements in online learning conditions. This article investigated the roles of language aptitude and online self-regulated learning in foreign language achievement in mainland…

Research consistently shows that adults engaged in tutored acquisition benefit from explicit instruction in several linguistic domains. For preschool children, it is often assumed that such explicit instruction does not make a difference. In the present study, we investigated whether explicit instruction affected young learners in acquiring a…

Emoji are commonly used in social media to convey attitudes and emotions. While popular, their use in educational contexts has been sparsely studied. This paper reports on the students' use of emoji in an online course forum in which students annotate and discuss course material in the margins of the online textbook. For this study, instructors…