This study investigates the effectiveness of a computer-assisted pronunciation training (CAPT) system on second language learners' acquisition of three grammatical features. It presents a CAPT system on top of a phoneme-based, fine-tuned speech recognition model, and is intended to deliver explicit, corrective feedback on the pronunciation of the…

This corpus-based study investigates lexical bundles of keywords found in online news articles, aiming to equip high school students in Thailand with the linguistic tools necessary for English admission exams. The primary objectives of this investigation are twofold: (1) to compile a list of 100 essential exam preparation keywords from the…

Whereas a growing bulk of work has demonstrated that both adults and children are sensitive to frequently occurring word sequences, little is known about the potential role of meaning in the processing of such multiword chunks. Here, we take a first step toward assessing the contribution of meaningfulness in the processing of multiword sequences,…

Research suggests that certain characteristics of survey items may impact participants' responses. In this study we investigated the impact of several of these characteristics: vague wording, question-versus-statement phrasing, and full-versus-partial labeling of response options. We manipulated survey items per these characteristics and randomly…

The present study focuses on long distance scrambling and operator movement from embedded clauses to sentence initial position in Turkish. It proposes that the scrambling of the arguments out of the complement clauses is possible due to the fact that such phrases move cyclically through phases in Turkish. It is also asserted that the adjuncts that…

Purpose: The results of automatic machine scoring of the Index of Productive Syntax from the Computerized Language ANalysis (CLAN) tools of the Child Language Data Exchange System of TalkBank (MacWhinney, 2000) were compared to manual scoring to determine the accuracy of the machine-scored method. Method: Twenty transcripts of 10 children from…

This study aims to identify the cementing devices used in the Holy Qur'an, Al-Qasas Surah, in particular. Specific cementing devices appear to connect the phrases and clauses contextualized in the verses of this Surah. Three exegeses and three different translations of the meaning of the Holy Qur'an were referred to in this study for data…

Purpose: The purpose of the study was to evaluate implicit learning in children with developmental language disorder (DLD) by employing a visual artificial grammar learning task. Method: Thirteen children with DLD and 24 children with typical language development between the ages of 8 and 12 years completed a visual artificial grammar learning…

This study investigates how aspects of collocational proficiency affect the ratings that expert examiners give to second language (L2) English learner essays. Lexical proficiency is a multi-faceted phenomenon and certain aspects of it are particularly impactful on human judgements, including lexical sophistication and accuracy. However, the…

The third and latest (2022) edition of this dictionary and thesaurus of contemporary figurative language and metaphor has been updated to better reflect the language of groups, social media, and social change. The work seeks to identify language used figuratively in everyday contemporary English, along with its distinguishing collocates. The first…

Conflicting ways to understand the nature of paragraphs, including their purpose and structure, have been central to composition theory for many decades. Yet English teachers across countries are experiencing ongoing pressures to mandate a specific paragraph template. This article traces the contentious, binary history of paragraph theory and…

Through a structured examination of four English causal discourse connectives, our article tackles a gap in the existing research, which focuses mainly on written language production, and entirely lacks attests on English spoken discourse. Given the alleged general nature of English connectives commonly emphasized in the literature, the underlying…

Although a large literature demonstrates that object-extracted relative clauses (ORCs) are harder to process than subject-extracted relative clauses (SRCs), there is less agreement regarding where during processing this difficulty emerges, as well as how best to explain these effects. An eye-tracking study by Staub, Dillon, and Clifton (2017)…

The paper reports on two experiments that investigate whether polarity, clause order and incentive influence derivation of Conditional Perfection in two types of inducements (promises and threats). Both experiments are designed as inference tasks, additionally measuring reaction times to inferences. The paper shows that the derivation of…

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…