Second language acquisition (SLA) research offers valuable insight on how languages are learned and how they coexist and influence each other. Sign language learners offer unique perspectives on SLA, allowing researchers to test theories that are otherwise constrained by access to only one modality. Current literature on sign language learning…

The lives of Kala people are deeply intertwined with marine and riparian environments on which their livelihoods depend. To document linguistic and environmental knowledge in these communities, as part of our community-based, collaborative language documentation project, we utilized three main interdisciplinary documentation methods: (1) River…

The effect of first language transfer on second language acquisition and learning has been a major theoretical concept in second language research and pedagogy since the 1950s. In order to give a historical perspective, the authors offer a brief presentation of some of the major topics from the broad spectrum of issues that have been examined by…

This study proposes "grounding" as a theoretical approach to studying linguistic landscape (LL). Grounding is the positioning or sequencing of languages in a multilingual 'text' to reveal the languages' relevance or a community's association with the languages. The study explores language grounding in church names which constitute part…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

Usage-based theory has proposed that learning of linguistic constructions is facilitated by input that contains few high-frequency exemplars, in what is known as a skewed (or Zipfian) input distribution. Early empirical work provided support to this idea, but subsequent L2 research has provided mixed findings. However, previous approaches have not…

This article highlights the need for a new type of corpus that will combine both a learner and a pedagogic corpus. The need for such a type of corpus is underlined by the interaction between input and output and the expected impact of the former on the latter within all instructional settings. Such a corpus will allow us to collect data, including…

One of the fundamental questions in the field of language acquisition is a learnability problem, which considers how learners acquire certain aspects of language which are not directly provided in the input or whose referents are not readily observable. This dissertation investigates Japanese children's acquisition of various linguistic phenomena,…

Language is one of the hallmarks of intelligence, demanding explanation in a theory of human cognition. However, language presents unique practical challenges for quantitative empirical research, making many linguistic theories difficult to test at naturalistic scales. Artificial neural network language models (LMs) provide a new tool for studying…

This plenary speech provides an overview of applications of corpus research in several core areas of applied linguistics, including second language acquisition and language assessment. It does this by showcasing a number of recent studies carried out by or with involvement of the author. These studies all focus on phraseological aspects of…

Applied linguists and Communication scholars have mainly adopted different yet complementary approaches to research on language and health communication. Using discourse-analytic (DA) approaches such as conversation analysis and corpus analysis, applied linguists tend to focus on describing and explicating health messaging techniques in naturally…

How early do children produce multiword utterances? Do children's early utterances reflect abstract syntactic knowledge or are they the result of data-driven learning? We examine this issue through corpus analysis, computational modeling, and adult simulation experiments. Chapter 1 investigates when children start producing multiword utterances;…

Globally classrooms are increasingly linguistically diverse. Research often oversimplifies lived linguistic heterogeneity as binary variables: native versus non-native. Linguistic distance (LD) measures allow a fine-grained operationalization of linguistic diversity in foreign language education. This study investigated associations of cognate LDs…

If maximal exposure were the key to success in language learning, then adult learners at the university level would be doomed to fail. Not only are they presumably too old to learn additional languages effectively, but target language (TL) input appears to be insufficient, especially when other languages are allowed in class. Nevertheless,…

Paremiology is a branch of linguistics that studies proverbs and idioms, with their structural, semantic and pragmatic features. The purpose of the study was to distinguish ethnocultural and linguo-cognitive features inherent in Paremiology. For this purpose, the study analyzed family traditions related to weddings in Kazakh, English and Chinese…