Erlam & Ellis (2018) published, in "Canadian Modern Language Review", an experimental study that investigated the effect of input-based tasks on the acquisition of vocabulary and markers of plurality by adolescent near-beginner learners of L2 (second language) French. The present paper reports an approximate replication of the…

This paper examines how causality is related to coreferential and reciprocal structures, looking at how they are conceived and expressed in Ewe. It deals with one particular type of causative constructions, namely the periphrastic causative construction, where the CAUSER is coreferential with the CAUSEE. This is the case where the CAUSER and the…

The present study aimed at developing a second language pragmatic aptitude test. To do so, the relevant literature was consulted, different components contributing to pragmatics aptitude were identified and tabulated and test items were developed for each component. The outcome was a test comprising four sections, i.e. memory for pragmatic rule…

This study aimed to investigate concerns of validity and reliability in subjective ratings of age-of-acquisition (AoA), through exploring characteristics of the individual rater. An additional aim was to validate the obtained AoA ratings against two corpora -- one of child speech and one of adult speech -- specifically exploring whether words…

Exploring the concept of virtuous humility helps to highlight paths of human flourishing. Yet humility is difficult to study because it is often stereotyped as shame or self-abasement, it tends to defy uniform conceptualization across contexts and cultures, definitions are difficult to justify, and operationalizing humility challenges standard…

This study evaluated second language (L2) phraseological development using a directional association measure (delta P) that assesses the directional formulaicity of recurrent multiword combinations. The study examined (a) whether learners develop their sensitivity to the distributional properties of recurrent multiword combinations as their…

For a QA system it's very important to have a notion of vocabulary used in questions and for building correct answers. Especially, when a word represents a concept, one can use related lexical instances to understand it and further extend the knowledge by using the associated information. In this work, we suggest a process of building a knowledge…

This article analyzes the application of Chinese speech recognition technology in a non-barrier education system, and studies the construction of bi-modal database for a barrier-free teaching system. Barrier-free teaching is a term used to define systems that are designed to assist deaf students, while bi-modal approaches use both audio and video…

An absence of a scale for measuring exposure to the English language, which has a significant effect on English achievement, was detected in the literature. For this reason, in this study, a six-dimensional scale was developed to detect the level of English language exposure and its construct validity was tested. The factor structure of the scale…

The launching of The Journal for the Psychology of Language Learning is a signal achievement. I begin this commentary by speculating on why it is that the Psychology of Language Learning (PLL) has enjoyed such vigor of late. I expect that one reason is the coming together of a critical mass of researchers and strong leaders over their shared…

To account for natural variability in cognitive processing, it is standard practice to optimize a model's parameters by fitting it to behavioral data. Although most language-related theories acknowledge a large role for experience in language processing, variability reflecting that knowledge is usually ignored when evaluating a model's fit to…

"Natural language understanding" (NLU) of text is a fundamental challenge in AI, and it has received significant attention throughout the history of NLP research. This primary goal has been studied under different tasks, such as Question Answering (QA) and Textual Entailment (TE). In this thesis, we investigate the NLU problem through…

This article responds to a call for applied linguistics and bilingualism research from a spatial repertoires perspective informed by new materialism. It focuses on the ways international faculty members carry out instructional interactions in STEM using English as an additional language. Using video data, the analysis demonstrates how visual…

Unidimensionality is an important assumption of measurement but it is violated very often. Most of the time, tests are deliberately constructed to be multidimensional to cover all aspects of the intended construct. In such situations, the application of unidimensional item response theory (IRT) models is not justifieddue to poor model fit and…

While primary studies on technology-mediated informal foreign language (FL) learning are increasingly popular, research synthesis on self-directed FL learning in incidental, out-of-class contexts are scarce. Therefore, this article seeks to address this gap in the literature through a qualitative research synthesis (QRS) on language learning in…