Event concepts of common verbs (e.g. "eat," "sleep") can be broadly shared across languages, but a given language's rules for subcategorization are largely arbitrary and vary substantially across languages. When subcategorization information does not match between first language (L1) and second language (L2), how does this…

Language proficiency diagnosis is essential to extract fine-grained information about the linguistic knowledge states and skill mastery levels of test takers based on their performance on language tests. Different from comprehensive standardized tests, many language learning apps often revolve around word-level questions. Therefore, knowledge…

There are grounds for believing that prompting language learners to infer the meaning of new lexical items is beneficial because inferring the meaning of lexical items and verifying one's inferences invites more cognitive investment than simply being presented with the meanings. However, concerns have been raised over the risk that wrong…

This paper explores recent advancements and implications of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, with a specific focus on Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT 3.5, within the realm of higher education. Through a comprehensive review of the academic literature, this paper highlights the unprecedented growth of these models and their…

This phenomenological research delves into the complex reasons behind Chinese translation graduates' reluctance or decision to leave the translation industry, despite the field's growth and critical global role. It aims to untangle the intricate factors influencing these career trajectories, drawing on the lived experiences of graduates from their…

With artificial intelligence (AI) now producing human-quality text in seconds via natural language generation, urgent questions arise about the nature and purpose of the teaching of writing in English. Humans have already been co-composing with digital tools for decades, in the form of spelling and grammar checkers built into word processing…

Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) is purportedly the only L2 pedagogy rooted in SLA theory and research and is unique in its psycholinguistic, ecological and pedagogical validity. Theoretical entities such as Processability Theory (Pienemann & Lenzing, 2020), the cognitive-interactionist approach (Gass & Mackey, 2020), and emergentism…

In this commentary, I suggest that it may be helpful to think about the formidable problem space that Westergaard's (2021) Linguistic Proximity Model seeks to address at the three levels of analysis that Marr (1982) famously proposed are needed to understand any complex cognitive system. I argue that at the computational level of analysis, where…

This study discusses how textbook educational approaches concerning Le Châtelier's principle (LCP) may hinder student comprehension and prediction of chemical equilibrium disturbances. Firstly, after summarising students' LCP erroneous assertions/explanations, a categorisation of the potential barriers that may originate student misunderstandings…

While monolingual speakers can use contrastive pitch accents to predict upcoming referents, bilingual speakers do not always use this cue predictively in their L2. The current study examines the role of recent exposure for predictive processing in native German (L1) second language learners of English (L2). In Experiment 1, participants followed…

Negative sentences are hard to process when they are presented out of context. When embedded in a context of plausible denial their processing difficulty decreases or is completely eliminated. We investigated in six behavioral experiments whether the processing of negation is eased in a denial context triggered by discourse markers (e.g.…

Language production ultimately aims to convey meaning. Yet words differ widely in the richness and density of their semantic representations, and these differences impact conceptual and lexical processes during speech planning. Here, we replicated the recent finding that semantic richness, measured as the number of associated semantic features…

Experimental studies show that children have greater difficulty with "wh"-extraction from object position than subject position, arguably an intervention effect (e.g., Relativized Minimality). In this study we provide additional evidence of a S/O asymmetry in A'-dependencies from a novel source--sluicing. The results of our first…

Sentiment Analysis is a field of Natural Language Processing which aims at classifying the author's sentiment in text. This paper first describes a sentiment analysis model for students' comments about professor performance. The model achieved impressive results for comments collected from student surveys conducted at a private university in…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is a digital communication method that transforms spoken discourse into written text. This rapidly evolving technology is used in email, text messaging, or live video captioning. Current ASR systems operate in conjunction with Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to transform speech into text that people…