Despite the growing interest in AI for language assessment, there remains a significant research gap regarding its usefulness for assessing less proficient language skills, particularly those of learners of English as a second or foreign language (S/FL). AI models often prioritize proficient writing, neglecting the intricacies of learner language.…

Two laboratories have reported that children with ASD are less likely than their typical peers to fill pauses with "um" but their use of "uh" is unaffected (Irvine et al., J Autism Dev Disord 46(3):1061-1070, 2016; Gorman et al., Autism Res 9(8):854-865, 2016). In this brief report, we replicated this finding by comparing the…

The current study aimed to gain insight into the nuanced challenges that Vietnamese learners encountered due to the interference of their native linguistic structures and norms. This qualitative study explored the experiences of Vietnamese learners in acquiring English, focusing on the influence of negative L1 transfer. This study focused on the…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

The present investigation examines the impact of Mobile-Assisted Language Learning (MALL) on the enhancement of EFL learners' idiom learning through "WhatsApp" during the COVID-19 pandemic. Three complete classes with 60 intermediate female learners (20 per class) were selected and randomly assigned into two experimental and one control…

The research purpose is examining the poems in Turkish textbooks for 1st-8th grade in terms of figurative language usage. The data source used in this qualitative study was gathered from the Turkish textbooks for the 1st-8th grade which was published in 2015-2016. The data were collected through document analysis and analysed via content analysis.…

Completing a postgraduate dissertation requires various types of support, whether it be academic, moral, or financial. One way to express gratitude towards those who contribute is through the acknowledgement section. However, the guidelines provided by universities appear to be inadequate to support students, which poses challenges for those who…

Iterated learning models of language evolution have typically been used to study the emergence of language, rather than historical language change. We use iterated learning models to investigate historical change in the accent classes of two Korean dialects. Simulations reveal that many of the patterns of historical change can be explained as…

Evidence of sensitivity to graphotactic and morphological patterns in English spelling has been extensively examined in monolinguals. Comparatively few studies have examined bilinguals' sensitivity to spelling regularities. The present study compared late Chinese-English bilinguals and English monolinguals on their sensitivity to systematic…

Despite OT's success, opaque alternations prove difficult to capture with constraints, and some violate the theory's formal restrictions. Here, I propose a novel account of opacity drawing upon developments in psychology. Rather than one grammar, I propose a dual-system model with implicit and explicit mechanisms, a domain-specific OT-like system…

Word stress is frequently afforded secondary importance in English teaching as stress placement rules are complex and because stress can be learnt along with each new word. However, training learners to pay more attention to word stress cues can support them in predicting the stress patterns of new vocabulary. Also, for speakers of fixed stress…

Purpose: This study investigated the efficacy of ultrasound biofeedback compared to a traditional acoustic input-only method in the second-language (L2) production training of English tense-lax vowel contrasts (/i-[near-close near-front unrounded vowel]/ and /e-[open-mid front unrounded vowel]/). The relationship between the degrees of production…

This paper analyses disfluencies and ungrammatical expressions in the speech of 11-13-year-old Finnish-speaking boys with ASD (N = 5) and with neurotypical development (N = 6). The ASD data were from authentic group therapy sessions and neurotypical data from teacher-led group discussions. The proportion of disfluencies and ungrammatical…

This dissertation investigates the soft typology of phonological patterns. By studying the types of patterns observed in the world's languages, we can do more than determine what is attested and what is unattested, or what is possible and what is impossible, but discover a wide range of more gradient phenomena. Phonological patterns range from…

Exploring the longitudinal development of second language (L2) lexical use has been one of the important topics in L2 vocabulary research. One approach to examining longitudinal changes in L2 lexical use is to capture changes in lexical features as found in learner production, such as L2 writing, over time. To further facilitate this approach, the…