There is a long-standing argument about whether words or character morphemes are the functional units in reading Chinese. We propose a Character-Word Dual Function (CWDF) model of reading Chinese in which both characters and words are functional units that contribute differentially to orthographic and meaning processes in reading Chinese. Two…

Concreteness and abstraction are key in educational research in mathematics, both when discussing the nature of mathematics in itself, but also when exploring how to learn and teach mathematics. However, while the terms "concrete" and "abstract" are often used in the field, they are not always used with the same meaning. For…

Purpose: Speech disfluencies are common in individuals who do not stutter, with estimates suggesting a typical rate of six per 100 words. Factors such as language ability, processing load, planning difficulty, and communication strategy influence disfluency. Recent work has indicated that bilinguals may produce more disfluencies than monolinguals,…

Given the importance of specialized vocabulary in scientific communication and academic discourse, there is a growing need to create wordlists to address the vocabulary-learning needs of university students and researchers in different subject areas. The current study analyzed a corpus of chemistry research articles (with 278 million running…

Ten beginning- and intermediate-level French textbooks were examined to determine which factors most influence authors' selection of vocabulary to be learned explicitly. Word frequency, imageability, concreteness, and use of lexical sets were examined, as these factors were shown in previous research to either facilitate or inhibit lexical…

Background/purpose: The persistent risk of semantic anachronism challenges both literary interpretation and pedagogy, as modern readers frequently impose contemporary meanings onto historically charged vocabulary. This study introduces the Contextual Diachronic Semantic Framework (CDSF), a five-layered analytical model designed to trace the…

Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's…

The drama fever has been riding high with consumer usage of over-the-top (OTT) streaming services on the rise and the prevalence of mobile devices with Internet connectivity. The researcher-teacher sometimes overhears her students chatting about the drama series they binge-watch. Given this binge-watching phenomenon on college campuses in Taiwan,…

Around twenty thousand adult learners enrol onto Welsh language classes each year, but many do not progress beyond "Mynediad level" (= Entry, CEFR A1). The study reported here explored techniques to maintain early learning momentum, maximise learners' returns for their learning efforts, and accelerate initial vocabulary acquisition.…

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., "mind control," "carbon dioxide"; N =…

Gratitude writing exercises are a common tool used to promote gratitude. However, understanding of the specific writing features that are associated with written expressions of gratitude is limited. In this study, we investigated how fundamental characteristics (words, punctuation marks) of early elementary student's writing relate to their…

This study aims to shed light on the contribution of universal versus language specific factors on reading. We examined eye movements of Arabic readers and analyzed effects specific to Arabic such as perceptual complexity, diglossia and morphology, in addition to universal factors such as word length and frequency. Twenty native Arabic speakers…

The ongoing tonogenetic sound change in Seoul Korean involves transphonologization in phrase initial position, where the fundamental frequency (F0) of the vowel following aspirated or lenis stops becomes associated with the aspirated-lenis stop contrast (phonologization), while the originally contrastive Voice Onset Time (VOT) values merge…

When displaying text on a page or a screen, only a finite number of characters can be presented on a single line. If the text exceeds that finite value, then text wrapping occurs. Often this process results in longer, more difficult to process words being positioned at the start of a line. We conducted an eye movement study to examine how this…

The present study complemented the extant second language (L2) Age of Acquisition (AoA) normative database by providing over 3500 English L2 words on objective AoA and over 2600 English L2 words on subjective AoA. The correlation between the objective and subjective L2 AoA confirmed the validity of the present database. The objective L2 AoA was…