Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development, but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention…

While semantic and syntactic properties of verb meaning can impact the success of verb learning at a single age, developmental changes in how these factors influence acquisition are largely unexplored. We ask whether the impact of syntactic and semantic properties on verb vocabulary development varies with age and language ability for toddlers…

When learning a language, typically-developing infants face the daunting task of learning both the sounds and the meanings of words. In this dissertation, we focus on a source of variability that complicates the one-to-one relationship between words and their meanings: wordform variability. In Chapter 1 we make a distinction between the micro…

This study investigates the use of high-frequency cognitive verbs - think and believe - in Turkish L2 learners' interlanguage, both in terms of their verb senses and complementation patterns. In line with this purpose, a Sentence Production Task consisting of context-independent items and a Sentence Completion Task consisting of context-dependent…

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference…

This study aims at specifying cultural words in teaching Turkish as a foreign language according to their proficiency levels (A1/2, B1/2, and C1/2) and analyzing the difference between the proficiency levels of these cultural words in terms of their frequency. For this purpose, a cultural corpus of 112.350 tokens in total has been created based on…

Phrasal verbs are a notoriously difficult feature of English for most second language and foreign language learners to master. Different sources, such as movies, music, games and books, can provide learners with exposure to the most common phrasal verbs in English. This study aims to investigate the degree to which music can play a role in…

The current study aims to explore the perceptions of 55 Turkish EFL student teachers towards using corpus-based materials in English phrasal-prepositional verb learning. It also explores gender-based differences and similarities towards using such materials in the learning of English phrasal-prepositional verbs. To do so, the study adopted a mixed…

Dictionary studies have suggested that nearly half of the English lexicon have multiple meanings. It is not yet clear, however, if second language learners reading English texts will encounter words with multiple meanings to the same degree. This study investigates the use of words with multiple meanings in an authentic English novel. Two samples…

This study investigated Vietnamese EFL learners' knowledge of verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations at the first three 1,000 word frequency levels, and the extent to which five factors (node word frequency, collocation frequency, mutual information score, congruency, and part of speech) predicted receptive knowledge of collocation. Knowledge…

This article reports the findings of a comparative analysis of two English teaching course book series which are widely used in school years 4-6 in Sweden: Good Stuff and New Champion. The analysis comprises comparisons of the vocabulary component in the teaching materials and examines the extent to which words -- adjectives, nouns and verbs --…

As researchers and practitioners are becoming more aware of the importance of multi-word items in English, there is little doubt that phrasal verbs deserve teaching attention in the classroom. However, there are thousands of phrasal verbs in English, and so the question for practitioners is which phrasal verbs to focus attention upon. Phrasal verb…

CHALLENGE is generally perceived as a negative word synonymous with "dispute," "defy," "confrontation," and "contest." However, when resorting to dictionary definitions, CHALLENGE has unexpectedly been found to possess positive senses such as "stimulating" and "arousing competitive…

Cognates have served as a useful tool for investigating the bilingual lexicon in many studies, but very little research has been carried out on different types of cognates, specifically, partial cognates and their role in cross-linguistic effect. The present study examines cognate effect in the speech production and acceptability judgment of two…