Idiomatics--the scientific study of idiomatic language and figurative language--is a pervasive theme in global literature, yet its precise terminology often lacks clear definition. This article addresses this challenge directly by delving into the etymology, significance, and universality of idiomatics. It emphasizes the pivotal role of idiomatics…

Decades of psycholinguistics research have shown that human sentence processing is highly incremental and predictive. This has provided evidence for expectation-based theories of sentence processing, which posit that the processing difficulty of linguistic material is modulated by its probability in context. However, these theories do not make…

This study investigated the use of metadiscourse tools by Saudi and British authors in Applied Linguistics discipline. In particular, the study tried to identify the kinds of metadiscourse markers used by Saudi and English authors in ALRAs and to determine the most and least frequent metadiscourse makers. In order to achieve these goals, (10)…

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.…

While developmental dyslexia has been extensively studied in children, research on adults is still rather limited. This paper aims to bridge the gap in existing research by presenting the findings of a study that examined the reading and spelling skills of adults with dyslexia and assessed the effectiveness of a linguistic intervention designed to…

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational…

This paper explores the processes underlying verb metaphoric extension. Work on metaphor processing has largely focused on noun metaphor, despite evidence that verb metaphor is more common. Across three experiments, we collected paraphrases of simple intransitive sentences varying in semantic strain--for example, "The motor complained"…

This article presents a series of three experiments investigating the processing of nested epistemic expressions, utterances containing two epistemic modals in one clause, such as "he 'certainly may' have forgotten." While some linguists claim that in a nested epistemic expression one modal is semantically embedded within the scope of…

The incorporation of empirical and theoretical knowledge from the language acquisition literature into formal diachronic syntax has been largely exiguous despite the growth of the latter as a subfield in formal linguistics over the past thirty years. In this dissertation, it is shown that a greater knowledge of diachronic phenomena, particularly…

Semantic variables enable L2 researchers and materials creators to quantify and control the effects of meaning on cognition. However, in recent years, many variables have been normed and published. Parsing the methods employed in norming this myriad of variables and which disparate theories informed their creation can be an opaque and arduous…

This study revisits the term 'communicative competence' and delves into its details. It presents briefly various models of communicative competence to show what has been written on this term, and then it introduces the term 'communication proficiency' as a broader term that includes all competencies and skills required for communication. It…

Young children can exploit the syntactic context of a novel word to narrow down its probable meaning. This is "syntactic bootstrapping." A learner that uses syntactic bootstrapping to foster lexical acquisition must first have identified the semantic information that a syntactic context provides. Based on the "semantic seed…

Statistical learning, the ability to extract regularities from input (e.g., in language), is likely supported by learners' prior expectations about how component units co-occur. In this study, we investigated how adults' prior experience with sublexical regularities in their native language influences performance on an empirical language learning…

This article traces the intellectual roots and developments of the notion of competence in second language (L2) teaching and research. Since L2 teaching and research invariably concern competence of some sort (linguistic, communicative, interactional, or otherwise), there have been countless attempts to define competence from diverse theoretical…

Why do infants learn some words earlier than others? Many theories of early word learning focus on explaining how infants map labels onto concrete objects. However, words that are more abstract than object nouns, such as "uh-oh," "hi," "more," "up," and "all-gone," are typically among the first to…