The current study examined whether readers encode the thoughts of story characters. Participants read narratives in which characters were described as either needing or not needing to remember a list of words. Across several experiments readers recalled more words in a free recall task when the story character was described as making an effort to…

To recall a list of items just after the end of the presentation, participants must encode both the items and the order in which they were presented. Despite a long history of studying item and order information, little is known regarding the relation between them. Here, we examined this issue with a novel task in which participants saw two 4- or…

The purpose of this study was to provide high frequency word lists for Mandarin-speaking children between 3 and 6 years of age and to explore the differences between each part of speech (POS) category among different age groups. Participants were 209 typically developing native Mandarin speakers aged between 3 and 6 years, born in Taiwan, and…

While the significance of corpus-based research in the teaching of foreign language and native language is increasing, the need for such studies is also increasing accordingly. The priority of the vocabulary taught in language education are identified through corpus-based studies in line with the international criteria set in the relevant field.…

Studies relating to the vocabulary items within EFL textbooks have revealed a divergence from well-researched wordlists such as the New General Service List (NGSL) (Browne et al., 2013), and the BNC/COCA wordlist (Nakayama, 2022; Sun and Dang, 2020). In Japan, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT) recently…

This research aimed to scrutinize and delineate the figures of speech manifesting in English hit songs. A selection of songs from Spotify's Top 30 Hit Songs List was chosen as the study material. The study employed a qualitative content analysis approach to classify the type and calculate the frequency of the figures of speech within the corpus of…

This study explored words in materials science research articles using New Academic Word List (NAWL) and New General Service List (NGSL) created by Browne at al. (2013) as reference lists. The objectives of this research were to explore the frequency and coverage of the NAWL and the NGSL in materials science research articles and identify…

Considerable research has been conducted on the advancement of mobile technologies to facilitate vocabulary learning and acquisition in a second language (L2). However, whether mobile platforms lead to a comprehensive mastery of both receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge has seldom been addressed in previous literature. This study…

Published work on vocabulary assessment has grown substantially in the last 10 years, but it is still somewhat outside the mainstream of the field. There has been a recent call for those developing vocabulary tests to apply professional standards to their work, especially in validating their instruments for specified purposes before releasing them…

Research has observed that monitoring one's own learning modifies memory for some materials but not for others. Specifically, making judgments of learning (JOLs) while learning word pairs improves subsequent cued-recall memory performance for related word pairs but not for unrelated word pairs. Theories that have attempted to explain this pattern…

This article explores how leading textbook authors select and instruct vocabulary in beginner and intermediate Chinese textbooks used in the United States. Leading textbook authors were approached; subsequently; four authors completed interviews with pre-designed questions. Grounded theory methodology was used to analyse the interviews, and their…

We removed a key uncertainty in the Deese/Roediger/McDermott (DRM) illusion. The mean backward associative strength (MBAS) of DRM lists is the best-known predictor of this illusion, but it is confounded with semantic relations between lists and critical distractors. Thus, it is unclear whether associative relations, semantic relations, or both…

The development of subject-specific word lists to assist EFL learners is becoming popular, as is the utilization of CLIL to teach English in academic areas of science. The purpose of this research was to investigate the effects of the instruction of English Science Textbooks Word Lists (ESTWL) and the CLIL approach on the Science Vocabulary…

This study aimed to investigate the lexical competence of English-major EFL students. The learner corpus comprised 552 pieces of writing by sophomore English majors during five academic years between 2017 and 2021, containing 190,506words in total. The results from Vocab Profile program showed that these students used words contained in the…

For more than a half-century, lists of words have served as the memoranda of choice in studies of human memory. To better understand why some words and lists are easier to recall than others, we estimated multivariate models of word and list recall. In each of the 23 sessions, subjects (N = 98) studied and recalled the same set of 576 words,…