Language comprehension involves cognitive abilities that are specific to language as well as cognitive abilities that are more general and involved in a wide range of behaviors. One set of domain-general abilities that support language comprehension are executive functions (EFs), also known as cognitive control. A diverse body of research has…

Synonyms can be problematic for EFL learners since each synonym has distinct meanings to be used in different context. The purposes of this corpus-based study are to investigate distinctions of the synonymous nouns purpose, goal and objective based on the distribution across genres in which the degree of formality is determined and to examine…

Some words have more than one translation across languages. Such translation-ambiguous words are harder to learn, recognize, and produce for individuals across the language learning spectrum. Past research demonstrates that learning both translations of translation-ambiguous words on consecutive trials confers an accuracy advantage relative to…

We investigate whether second language (L2) learners of English rely on first language (L1) transfer and atomicity in the acquisition of the count/mass distinction by examining L1-French and L1-Chinese learners of English. Atomicity encodes whether a noun contains 'atoms' or minimal elements that retain the property of the noun. As a semantic…

Previous research has uncovered that, despite the omnipresence of focus in utterances, children typically do not compute the exhaustivity inference associated with cleft(-like) syntactic focus constructions at adult-like levels before 7 years of age. Children's comparable limitations with lexically triggered scalar implicatures, inferences with an…

This study seeks to delve into the potential role of divergent thinking, a component of creativity, in second language learning. Specifically, we compare the use of lexical organization and production strategies of two groups of more and less creative EFL learners in year 12 through an automatic vectorial semantic analysis of their retrieval in…

It is commonly accepted that educators who prepare to teach materials to meet student needs should cover all skills in English, such as speaking, listening, reading, and writing with additional grammar and vocabulary according to the level of students. Because technology has developed rapidly, educators can design technologically friendly teaching…

This study analyzed semantic errors in the written compositions of first-year BSEd English students. 86 participants were asked to write a narrative essay and provide feedback on their writing difficulties and language learning needs. The collected data were statistically analyzed. Semantic errors were categorized into 8 types: code-switching,…

Individuals encounter problems daily wherein varying numbers of constraints require delimitation of memory to target goal-satisfying information. Multiply-constrained problems, such as the compound remote associates, are commonly used to study this type of problem solving. Since their development, multiply-constrained problems have been…

Social studies texts often pose a challenge for readers because of their complex linguistics features, which can cause comprehension issues. Drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study examines how authors create cohesive messages and meaning in an 11th-grade U.S. history textbook in relation to the history of diseases. Findings…

Word retrieval and lexical organization were explored in 16 Danish children with slight to severe hearing loss (HL), 11 children with developmental language disorder (DLD), and 25 typically developing (TD) children in the age range of 7 to 12 years. There is a special focus on children with HL with and without language difficulties compared with…

Teaching a homograph by using context clues is more effective than just teaching vocabulary separately. The goal of the study reported on here was to teach 12 homographs to d/Deaf and Hard of Hearing (d/Dhh) students in the sixth grade by applying metacognitive skills to understand the meanings and contexts in sentences. A single case design…

Metaphors are a common way to express creative language, yet the cognitive basis of figurative language production remains poorly understood. Previous studies found that higher creative individuals can better comprehend novel metaphors, potentially due to a more flexible semantic memory network structure conducive to remote conceptual combination.…

This study aimed to examine the effectiveness of the semantic concept map method in teaching the family concepts of life studies lessons to students with Autism Spectrum Disorder. A multiple probe model with probe phase between subjects, one of the single-subject research methods, was used. The subjects of the study are 10-year-old three boys…

The influence of language and situation structure on the difficulty of word problems has been investigated intensively in the field of mathematics education. However, instructional approaches to overcoming students' difficulties are still not widely available. This paper describes an intervention to develop second graders' skills in handling…