This study compared the five-word lexical bundles (LBs) expressing gratitude in acknowledgments of dissertations written by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics. Two corpora were built: (1) The Chinese University Dissertation Acknowledgments Collection (CUC) which contained 700 acknowledgments with a total of 300,686 tokens, and (2)…

The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the linguistic content of the Spanish HINT and the Spanish AzBio sentence tests. The results revealed that the Spanish AzBio is linguistically more complex as compared with the Spanish HINT in terms of sentence length, complexity, and grammatical structure.

We examined how noun frequency and the typicality of surrounding linguistic context contribute to children's real-time comprehension. Monolingual English-learning toddlers viewed pairs of pictures while hearing sentences with typical or atypical sentence frames ("Look at the…" vs. "Examine the…"), followed by nouns that were…

The purpose of this current study was to (1) investigate the text coverage that the BNC/COCA Word Family Lists (Nation, 2017) and the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000) provided in the first-year undergraduate economics textbooks, and (2) estimate the vocabulary size required to read the textbooks. A corpus of 1,343,493 words from the economics…

This study examines lexical and phonological factors that influence word production and pronunciation. Specifically, we investigate whether phonological production (measured by percent consonants correct) contributes to word production and pronunciation over and above the properties of the target words (e.g., word frequency, neighborhood density,…

Researchers have studied children's exposure to television and the impact it has on children's academic development, and have discovered that educational television programs may positively influence children's vocabulary growth (Fuenzalida, 2017; Heintz & Wartella, 2012; Larson & Rhan, 2015; Linebarger, Moses, Liebeskind, & McMenamin,…

We report findings from a corpus-based investigation of three young children growing up in German-English bilingual environments (M = 3;0, Range = 2;3-3;11). Based on 2,146,179 single words and two-word combinations in naturalistic child speech (CS) and child-directed speech (CDS), we assessed the degree to which the frequency distribution of CDS…

Background/purpose: Traditional language instruction in Saudi EFL classrooms often limits learners' exposure to authentic language, reducing communicative competence. This review article explores how corpus-based approaches, particularly using the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), can bridge this gap and foster pedagogical…

Tiered vocabulary is a pervasive concept in academic scholarship, education policy, and schools. It involves placing individual words into hierarchically arranged tiers, based on their apparent simplicity, sophistication, utility, and complexity, with these categorisations used to determine which words carry value in the classroom. In this article…

This study explores lexical bundles in vehicular accident news with the goal to provide a lexical bundle list for students learning to write this genre of news in English. A corpus of accident news is constructed from vehicular news articles from four English news sources over a period of one year. The lexical bundles are extracted from using the…

With only about a third of students in US public schools achieving the NAEP Proficient level, many educators believe students are not getting enough reading practice. However, how much reading practice is enough? This study quantifies the relationship between the amount of book reading and the expected number of words learned. We collected 45…

Several studies have examined the content of Japanese junior high school textbooks in relation to various frequency-based word lists such as the New General Service List (NGSL) (Browne et al., 2013) (e.g, Nakayama, 2022a,b) and the British National Corpus (BNC) (e.g, Wongsarnpigoon, 2018), and have identified potential issues in terms of lexical…

In assessment contexts, the domain definition inference requires accurate documentation of linguistic demands in a specific target domain for precise measurement. The present study examines several aspects of repetitions in academic lecture settings to offer the domain definition inference for academic listening tests. To do this, I analyzed the…

How does the relation between two words create humor? In this article, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local…

The mirror effect is the finding that in recognition tests, a manipulation that increases the hit rate also decreases the false alarm rate. For example, low frequency words have a higher hit rate and a lower false alarm rate than high frequency words. Because the mirror effect is held to be a regularity of memory, it has had a pronounced influence…