The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created…

A Korean particle "-(n)un" is widely known as a topic and/or contrast marker. Despite this seemingly well-established view on the meaning/function of "-(n)un," however, its exact nature is far from clearly understood. The main purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the meaning of "-(n)un," by looking at it…

This study investigates the adaptation of word prosody in loanword phonology. First, it explicates several influential loanword theories and reviews some representative cases of prosodic adaptation from different languages. Then, it turns to the focus on the prosodic adaptation of Japanese borrowings into Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM or Taiwanese).…

In this dissertation, the robustness of the relationship between the lexical frequency of phonotactic patterns and word-acceptability is examined for words of Amharic, an understudied Semitic language. The patterns under investigation span the whole verb root and include both under-represented and over-represented consonant distributions in the…

The goal of this dissertation is to determine the best way to train a statistical machine translation system. I first develop a state-of-the-art machine translation system called Phrasal and then use it to examine a wide variety of potential learning algorithms and optimization criteria and arrive at two very surprising results. First, despite the…

The present study examined the use and effectiveness of a large corpus--the Corpus del Español (Davies, 2002)--in a 300-level Spanish grammar university course. Students conducted hands-on corpus searches with the goal of finding concordances containing particular types of collocations (combinations of words that tend to co-occur) and tokens (any…

This paper examines the impact of L1/L2 form-meaning differences in the domain of aspect to investigate whether L2 learners are able to acquire properties of the L2 that are different from the L1. Oral data were collected from English- and German-speaking university learners of French L2 (n = 75) at two different levels of proficiency. The results…

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector "thus" in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary…

To better understand the promising effects of data-driven learning (DDL) on language learning processes and outcomes, this study explored DDL learning events enabled by the Research Writing Tutor (RWT), a web-based platform containing an English language corpus annotated to enhance rhetorical input, a concordancer that was searchable for…

This paper examines the different types of writing errors performed by 16 international postgraduate students undertaking an intensive English course at a public university in Malaysia. It was mandatory for international postgraduate students who obtained less than IELTS Band 6 to undertake an Intensive English Course (IEC) offered by the…

This study aims to further the understanding of first language (L1) lexical transfer within the context of L1 Chinese learners of English. Previous transfer research has often focused on a small subset of grammar errors, without examining how lexical choices, especially in collocations and multi-word units (MWU), might have been influenced by L1…

Second language (L2) learners of tone languages do not perceive and produce the different tones of the target language with equal ease. The most common explanation for these asymmetries is that acoustically salient tones are the easiest to learn. An alternative explanation is that tones are easiest to learn when they are highly frequent in the…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

Our paper aims to present students' interactions in a teletandem--that is, tandem through desktop videoconference [Telles, J., ed. 2009. "Teletandem. Um contexto virtual, autônomo, colaborativo para aprendizagem das linguas estrangeiras no século XXI". Campinas, SP: Pontes Editores]--telecollaborative project between third-year…

Corpus linguistics identifies the qualitative difference in the characteristics of spoken discourse vs. written academic discourse. Whereas spoken discourse makes greater use of finite dependent clauses functioning as constituents in other clauses, written academic discourse incorporates noun phrase constituents and complex phrases. This claim can…