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The main objective of the current study is to carry out a critical stylistic analysis of Al Jazeera's online news reports of the 2017 Gulf crisis. The study specifically examines the linguistic strategies employed by Al Jazeera newsmakers in order to effectively communicate their ideological perspectives. The research employs Jeffries's critical stylistic framework (2010) and corpus methodologies to examine a corpus obtained from Al Jazeera English, which covers the first month of the crisis. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methodologies has been employed to analyze the ideological implications embedded within the narrative of the platform, focusing specifically on the strategies of naming, describing, equating, and contrasting. The study discloses that Al Jazeera has used specific nouns and phrases to portray the measures against Qatar as deliberate, violent, unjustifiable, and retaliatory, blaming the Saudi leadership. Complex noun phrases and evaluative adjectives have been utilized to intensify this description, while nominalization conceals agency and creates skepticism. The narrative has subtly portrayed Qatar as a passive victim of negative actions, using equating strategies to criticize the Saudi leadership's policies and the blockade. Contrasting strategies have presented contradictory actions, questioned their credibility and legitimacy, and encouraged cohesion among Gulf nations.

The intricate and tricky case of semantic analysis, especially of the enigmatic realm of nouns, the red thread of linguistics and literary exploration. This academic research explores the rich sphere of Russian literature in-depth to determine connections between function and the embodiment of theme through proper names. This research is aiming at studying the role of proper nouns in the literary masterpieces by focusing on the ideas of character development, thematic cohesiveness, and the narrative flow. This papers deals with profound significance of proper nouns as linguistics pointers that take you beyond their literal meaning to different levels of connotative value. It takes most of its ideas from the late linguistics and literary critique. This research gets down to serious business by cherry-picking and analysing a set of Russian masterpieces. An intensive method of semantic analysis was used by the study to properly identify and categorize all the structural features of proper nouns. Also, it conducts an examination of the usage of language by these instrumentalities so as to discover their common features and themes which lead to the invention of the main narrative. The results of this study add to our comprehension of proper noun semantics in Russian literature and provide us with a stepping-stone to broader discussions on the linguistic theory and literary studies. This cognitive effort exceeds the linguistic borders, as it takes into consideration the cultural and historical value of the proper nouns being presented. The report shows why it is necessary to reconsider the theoretical design to account for the distinctive linguistic and particular cultural features of the Russian literary heritage. This research is a step toward unravelling noun semantics' mystery and adds to the already existing linguistic aesthetics and cultural semiotics debates.

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) which represent varieties of English usage across different cultures (American and British). This study analyzed the top 20 noun collocates with Mutual Information (MI) scores value of at least three. The corpus data from COCA and BNC explored some shared characteristics and contrastive features. The findings discovered that the two adjectives have the same core meaning and degree of formality since their highest frequency in academic texts whereas frequencies are the lowest in informal genres i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. In certain conditions, these synonyms are different in terms of noun collocation due to the fact that these synonyms co-occur with particular noun collocates. Interestingly, the findings also confirm two adjectives are near synonyms as they share only two similar theme of semantic preference. In consequence, the two synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. Moreover, it was found that the corpora provide some useful details that are deficient in the dictionary.

Through consultations with the online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study focuses on distinguishing between the two synonymous verbs "restrict" and "constrain," both part of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, in terms of formality and collocations. The COCA-informed findings revealed that both near-synonyms are most prevalent in academic genres, sharing an equally high level of formality, and exhibit six overlapping groups of noun collocates. Interestingly, the target synonyms, along with their left- and right-sided noun collocates, form context-specific clusters. The verb "restrict" is associated with terms related to governance and rights (i.e., "laws and regulations restrict liberties") while "constrain" with governance and commerce (i.e., "rules constrain spending"). The two are also characterized by unique patterns of collocating with nouns that have opposite morphological meanings: "restrict" pairs with noun collocates containing morphemes representing inbound activities (e.g., "acc"- in "access," as in "restrict access"), while "constrain" with those indicating outbound directions (e.g., "ex"- in "expansion," as in "constrain expansion").

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and nonEnglish programs, emphasizing natural occurrences in academic settings. Participants were directed to record audio and video during collaborative activities with peers and lecturers inside and outside the classroom. Through Conversation Analysis, findings revealed a significant divergence in the phonological and lexicogrammatical features of ELF participants compared to speakers of standard British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). Specifically, nonstandard lexicogrammatical features concerning verb, noun, article, word choice, tense, and preposition emerged predominantly. Furthermore, common phonological deviations included omission of final consonant sounds, mispronunciation of the schwa sound, confusion in pronouncing the article 'the,' mispronunciation of words ending with '-ine,' and substitution of /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/ with /[open-mid back rounded vowel]/. The data suggests widespread use of non-standard English norms, indicating linguistic adaptation beyond traditional boundaries in various environments. Significantly, this study contributes by highlighting how ELF participants reshape language for effective communication, prioritizing intelligibility over nativelike proficiency, with insights extending beyond the Thai context, valuable for educators, linguists, and intercultural communication practitioners.

To learn the meaning of a new word, or to recognize the meaning of a known one, both children and adults benefit from surrounding words, or the sentential context. Most of the evidence from children is based on their accuracy and efficiency when listening to speech in their familiar native accent: they successfully use the words they know to identify other words' referents. Here, we assess how accurately and efficiently 4-year-old children use sentential context to identify referents of known and novel nouns in unfamiliar-accented speech, as compared to familiar-accented speech. In a looking-while-listening task, children showed considerable success in processing unfamiliar-accented speech. Children robustly mapped known nouns produced in an unfamiliar accent to their target referents rather than novel competitors, and they used informative surrounding verbs (e.g., "You can eat the dax") to identify the referents of both known and novel nouns--although there was a processing cost for unfamiliar-accented speech in some cases. This demonstrates that 4-year-olds successfully and rapidly process unfamiliar-accented speech by recruiting the same strategies available to them in familiar-accented speech, revealing impressive flexibility in word recognition and word learning across diverse linguistic environments.

Purpose: The present study evaluated the applicability of the sentence-focused framework to Mandarin-speaking children with cochlear implants (CIs) by examining the relative contribution of receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes to later grammatical complexity. Method: Participants were 51 Mandarin-speaking children who received cochlear implantation before 30 months of age. At 12 months after CI activation, parents were asked to endorse words that their child could understand only or understand and say using the infant version of the Early Vocabulary Inventory. At 24 months after CI activation, parents were asked to endorse the grammatical structures that their children were able to say using the Grammatical Complexity subtest in the Mandarin Communicative Development Inventory--Taiwan. Children's receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes and grammatical complexity scores were computed from these parent checklists. Results: Correlational analyses showed that children's receptive/expressive noun and verb lexicon sizes at 12 months after CI activation were all highly correlated with their grammatical complexity scores at 24 months after CI activation ([rho]s = 0.52-0.63, ps < 0.001). Regression analyses further revealed that verb lexicon sizes at 12 months after CI activation outweighed noun lexicon sizes in accounting for grammatical complexity at 24 months after CI activation. Conclusions: Our findings supported the prediction of the sentence-focused framework. Emphasizing the role of verbs in early intervention has the potential to enhance grammatical outcomes in Mandarin-speaking children with CIs.

Purpose: There is limited research on the writing of young Spanish-English bilinguals and their writing in both languages. In the current study, we addressed whether written syntax features differed by language (English and Spanish) and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program (dual or English immersion). We also examined whether Spanish and English syntax features were related cross-linguistically and related to writing quality within languages and whether these relations to writing quality were moderated by grade level, English learner status, and instructional program. Method: We examined written syntax features of Spanish and English essays by simultaneous and emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 in either Spanish-English dual immersion or English immersion instruction in the United States (N = 278). Essays were scored for quality and evaluated for mean length of T-units, number of verbs, number of noun agreement words, and number of subject agreement words accurately conjugated. Results: Written syntax features significantly differed by language and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program. Grades 2 and 3 wrote longer utterances, more verbs, and greater noun agreement accuracy than Grade 1. Syntax features were related to writing quality within languages, but Spanish relations were weaker for English learners than non-English learners and for dual immersion students than English immersion students. Conclusion: Our findings suggest written syntax features may be useful for evaluation of English-Spanish simultaneous and emergent bilinguals' writing.

Purpose: There is limited research on the writing of young Spanish-English bilinguals and their writing in both languages. In the current study, we addressed whether written syntax features differed by language (English and Spanish) and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program (dual or English immersion). We also examined whether Spanish and English syntax features were related cross-linguistically and related to writing quality within languages and whether these relations to writing quality were moderated by grade level, English learner status, and instructional program. Method: We examined written syntax features of Spanish and English essays by simultaneous and emergent bilinguals in Grades 1, 2, and 3 in either Spanish-English dual immersion or English immersion instruction in the United States (N = 278). Essays were scored for quality and evaluated for mean length of T-units, number of verbs, number of noun agreement words, and number of subject agreement words accurately conjugated. Results: Written syntax features significantly differed by language and varied as a function of grade level, English learner status, and instructional program. Grades 2 and 3 wrote longer utterances, more verbs, and greater noun agreement accuracy than Grade 1. Syntax features were related to writing quality within languages, but Spanish relations were weaker for English learners than non-English learners and for dual immersion students than English immersion students. Conclusion: Our findings suggest written syntax features may be useful for evaluation of English-Spanish simultaneous and emergent bilinguals' writing.

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms are interpreted when they appear as sentence subjects in structures that are temporarily syntactically ambiguous versus unambiguous (e.g., "The hospital [that was] requested by the doctor…"). If comprehenders have a bias to interpret metonyms in subject position as agents (Fishbein & Harris, 2014), they should initially access the figurative (institutional) sense of the metonym. This interpretation is rendered incorrect at the disambiguating by-phrase, which should lead to reanalysis (i.e., garden-path effects). In Experiment 1, larger garden-path effects were observed for metonyms compared to inanimate control nouns that did not have a figurative sense. In Experiment 2, garden-path effects were equivalent for metonyms and animate sentence subjects. In addition, there was some evidence that readers exhibited initial difficulty at the verb (e.g., "requested") when it immediately followed the metonym compared to the inanimate control nouns in Experiment 1. Overall, the results suggest that the subject-as-agent heuristic is a powerful cue during sentence processing, which can prompt the comprehender to access a figurative interpretation of a metonym.

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and (2) background factors associated with input. To assess the role of CLI and input we compared two groups of adult heritage speakers of Russian (n = 66) with two typologically distinct societal languages (SLs), Hebrew and American English. Their production was evaluated for three morphosyntactic phenomena: adjective-noun agreement, accusative case morphology, and numerical phrases. Using self-rating and baseline vocabulary tasks as proficiency measures, we conducted controlled experiments to assess mastery of the target phenomena. Our results show that, while CLI is the main mechanism behind HL grammar maintenance, increased input and proficiency can modulate performance in the absence of grammatical similarities between the HL and SL. An analysis of non-target responses revealed systematic patterns, including reliance on default, or unmarked, forms in both groups, in line with previous research. These findings contribute to the literature on the mechanisms of HL grammar formation and maintenance.

Purpose: Production of complex syntax is a hallmark of later language development; however, most of the research examining age-related changes has focused on adolescents or analyzed narrative language samples. Research documenting age-related changes in the production of complex syntax in elementary school-aged children in conversational language samples is limited. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to examine age-related changes in the production of coordinate and subordinate clauses in children between 5 and 10 years of age obtained from 50-utterance conversational language samples. Method: The analytic sample included 196 children with typical language development, who ranged in age from 5;0 to 10;11 (years;months; girls = 103; boys = 96; three cases were excluded). Fifty-utterance conversational language samples were examined for use of coordinate and subordinate clauses. Results: Results of regression analyses indicated that the production of coordinate and subordinate clauses could be predicted from age. The proportion of utterances that included subordinate clauses increased 0.20% for every month increase in age (p < 0.001). Coordinate clauses also continued to grow, although at a slower rate (0.10% increase for every month increase in age, p < 0.001). Finally, the proportion of simple utterances (i.e., utterances without coordinate or subordinate clauses) decreased with age (0.40% decrease for every month increase in age, p < 0.001). Conclusions: This study indicated that as children's age increased, they used fewer, simple, one-clause sentences and more utterances that included subordinate clauses, with or without coordinate clauses. These results were obtained from 50-utterance language samples, further supporting use of language sampling to develop intervention goals and monitor progress in therapy.

Most of the previous studies focused on lexical and syntactic features in adapted texts while little attention has been paid to the structural complexity from the perspective of the amount of information. In this study, we intend to examine the differences in structural complexity in adapted texts from the perspective of the amount of information at the lexical and grammatical levels. We also aim to identify the lexical and grammatical features that contribute most to such differences. The data used in this study were reading texts from Newsela, that is, reading materials for English learners under the educational system of K-12 in the United States. This study yields several findings of interest. First, the adapted texts differ in the structural complexity at both lexical and grammatical levels in terms of their amount of information. Second, the differences display a decreasing trend. That is, the differences become smaller when the level of the text increases. Third, function words and part-of-speech trigrams with a preposition(s) and/or a noun(s) contribute most to the differences. The findings provide significant implications for the adaptation of language materials such as reading texts and test materials.

Knowledge of collocations facilitates second language (L2) learning by enhancing accuracy and fluency. However, acquiring L2 collocations is often challenging for learners. One factor contributing to this difficulty is incongruency between first and second languages (e.g., "draw distinctions" in English corresponds to do "distinctions" in Japanese). One possible solution is to facilitate semantic restructuring, where learners develop their understanding of L2 words' semantic possibilities. For the restructuring of semantic knowledge to occur, repeated exposure to multiple collocations containing the same node word may be necessary (e.g., "draw attention," "draw a conclusion"). However, how to facilitate semantic restructuring through repeated exposure is still unknown. Particularly, to what extent temporal distribution (i.e., spacing) of multiple collocations affects learning is an important issue to be examined. Based on recent research on collocation learning, the present article argues that a combination of massing and spacing can promote L2 collocation learning from the viewpoint of semantic restructuring. It also discusses some practical implications for effective L2 collocation learning.

This study examined structural priming during online second language (L2) comprehension. In two self-paced reading experiments, 64 intermediate to advanced Chinese learners of English as a foreign language read coordinated noun phrases where the conjuncts had either the same structure or different structures. Experiment 1 showed that the second conjunct was read faster when it had the same structure as the first. This effect occurred for the structurally marked adjective phrases (e.g., "a simple to grasp problem") but only showed a numerical trend for the less marked relative clauses (e.g., "a problem that was simple to grasp"). Experiment 2 compared unmarked adjective phrases and relative clauses (e.g., "a simple problem" vs. "a problem that was simple") and found significant priming for both. Together, the two experiments showed that L2 comprehension priming could occur without repetition of the lexical head. Moreover, this priming was susceptible to inverse frequency effects, with the less frequent structure exhibiting greater priming.

Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development, but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention as each individual dimension, especially in terms of productive knowledge. This study analyses lexis from mid-frequency lemmas in the K3--K9 frequency bands from the learner corpus PELIC (The University of Pittsburgh English Language Institute Corpus). Critically for learners, mastery of lexis in this frequency range is essential for achieving the English proficiency required for university study. From these mid-frequency items, a dataset of 7,554 tokens were collected from word families with multiple derivations and manually annotated. The findings showed high rates of collocational and derivational accuracy for the forms learners opted to use. However, compared to expert speaker texts in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), learners overused the verb forms and underused the noun forms of these lexical items. These patterns provide evidence of the interplay between breadth and depth in learners' productive vocabulary usage, suggesting that increased lexical depth will naturally lead to greater lexical breadth and vice versa. Pedagogical implications reaffirm the importance of developing learners' explicit morphological awareness and collocational accuracy. Suggestions for mid-frequency lexical items to prioritize in language learning are also provided, with a view to helping learners achieve academic readiness.

This case study describes the use of a syntax intervention with two deaf children who did not acquire a complete first language (L1) from birth. It looks specifically at their ability to produce subject-verb-object (SVO) sentence structure in American Sign Language (ASL) after receiving intervention. This was an exploratory case study in which investigators utilized an intervention that contained visuals to help teach SVO word order to young deaf children. Baseline data were collected over three sessions before implementation of a targeted syntax intervention and two follow-up sessions over 3-4 weeks. Both participants demonstrated improvements in their ability to produce SVO structure in ASL in 6-10 sessions. Visual analysis revealed a positive therapeutic trend that was maintained in follow-up sessions. These data provide preliminary evidence that a targeted intervention may help young deaf children with an incomplete L1 learn to produce basic word order in ASL. Results from this case study can help inform the practice of professionals working with signing deaf children who did not acquire a complete L1 from birth (e.g., speech-language pathologists, deaf mentors/coaches, ASL specialists, etc.). Future research should investigate the use of this intervention with a larger sample of deaf children.

Recent investigations on how people derive meaning from language have focused on task-dependent shifts between two cognitive systems. The symbolic (amodal) system represents meaning as the statistical relationships between words. The embodied (modal) system represents meaning through neurocognitive simulation of perceptual or sensorimotor systems associated with a word's referent. A primary finding of literature in this field is that the embodied system is only dominant when a task necessitates it, but in certain paradigms, this has only been demonstrated using nouns and adjectives. The purpose of this paper is to study whether similar effects hold with verbs. Experiment 1 evaluated a novel task in which participants rated a selection of verbs on their implied vertical movement. Ratings correlated well with distributional semantic models, establishing convergent validity, though some variance was unexplained by language statistics alone. Experiment 2 replicated previous noun-based location-cue congruency experimental paradigms with verbs and showed that the ratings obtained in Experiment 1 predicted reaction times more strongly than language statistics. Experiment 3 modified the location-cue paradigm by adding movement to create an animated, temporally decoupled, movement-verb judgment task designed to examine the relative influence of symbolic and embodied processing for verbs. Results were generally consistent with linguistic shortcut hypotheses of symbolic-embodied integrated language processing; location-cue congruence elicited processing facilitation in some conditions, and perceptual information accounted for reaction times and accuracy better than language statistics alone. These studies demonstrate novel ways in which embodied and linguistic information can be examined while using verbs as stimuli.

For English language learners, mastering the use of near-synonyms can be challenging. Despite the semantic similarities of English synonyms, they are not interchangeable in all contexts. The objectives of this corpus-based study are to examine differences between the near-synonymous adjectives "blank," "empty" and "vacant" based on the degree of formality from their distribution across genres and to analyze the noun collocates in relation to semantic preference drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings indicate that these synonyms are uncommon in formal English, i.e., academic texts and they tend to have quite different occurrences and distributions across genres (i.e., "blank" and "empty" most frequently occur in fiction whereas "vacant" mostly occurs in newspaper) despite a similar degree of formality. For the noun collocates and semantic preference, these three adjectives have a weak near-synonymous status as they share only one noun collocate and one similar theme of semantic preference. Thus, despite their similarity in meanings, these synonyms co-occur with specific noun collocates in a particular context.

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British National Corpus (BNC) of 100 million words as our corpus. Using the "Sketch Engine" Tool, we examined their frequency, subject and object noun collocations, adverb collocations, and syntactic behavioural profiles. The results demonstrate that both words collocate with subject and object nouns. However, on their top ten subject collocation lists, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns related to finance and economy, whereas "rise" collocates with three different kinds of abstract nouns related to finance/economy, the human entity, and the natural environment, and one concrete noun related to natural environment. In addition, they only have two collocates in common on their top subject noun collocates list. In terms of object noun collocations, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns connected to finance/economy and the natural environment, but "rise" collocates with abstract and concrete nouns on their top list. They also only have three adverb collocations in common on the top list. "Rise" has 17 distinct syntactic patterns, whereas "increase" has 15 different syntactic patterns. In teaching near-synonyms, we propose using corpus-based reference resources.

The present study sets out to measure Turkish EFL learners' receptive affix knowledge and productive derivative vocabulary knowledge. More specifically, the extent to which Turkish EFL learners recognize written form of affixes, know the meaning of affixes and determine the part of speech of the derivatives produced by means of affixes and how good such learners are at producing derivatives have been investigated. Sasao and Webb's (2017) Word Part Levels Test (WPLT) to diagnose learners' receptive affix knowledge and the Contextualized Derivative Recall Test developed by Iwaizumi and Webb (2021) to measure EFL learners' productive derivative vocabulary knowledge have been used. The findings regarding EFL learners' receptive affix knowledge reveal that EFL learners have problems with affixes with the difficulty levels of medium and hard. The further results devoted to EFL learners' productive derivative knowledge indicate that they manage to produce almost seventy-one percent of the total number of the derivatives tested. Further analysis of correct derivatives produced in terms of their grammatical class shows that nouns and verbs are the least challenging derivatives to produce for EFL learners. Last, the highest number of correctly derived forms are among the derivatives at 3K-5K word frequency bands.

This study explored the role of written languaging (WL) in response to automated written corrective feedback (AWCF) in L2 accuracy improvement in English classrooms at a university in China. A total of 254 freshmen enrolled in intermediate composition classes participated, and they wrote 4 essays and received AWCF. A half of them engaged in WL after receiving correction, while the other half did not. To measure whether WL could contribute to L2 accuracy improvement, error correction tests were conducted three times. AWCF targeted all types of errors, but the study focused on investigating six language features (nouns, conjunctions, subject-verb agreement, sentence constituents, articles, and prepositions) known as the most frequent errors intermediate students make. The results proved that WL had a positive effect on accuracy improvement overall. However, when individual language features were considered separately, the effects were not the same. The inherent complexity of the features along with L1 influence appeared to affect the effects of WL for accuracy improvement.

The language features of the second language (L2) English academic texts written by Indonesian graduate students enrolled in Hungarian higher education are employed in the present study. The study focuses on the level of abstraction and informational density in student assignments in particular. Seven high-stakes essays were collected from seven Indonesian graduate students registered in the faculty of Social Sciences at three different Hungarian universities. Coh-Metrix, a corpus-based computational tool, was used in this study to examine indices of content words and abstraction. As for the comparison between higher and lower proficiency level students, parametric statistics were used to conduct a quantitative analysis of the selected linguistic features, including nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, pronouns, and concreteness and abstraction. The results show that C1 English proficiency level students outnumber B2 students in terms of informational density. Their texts are more abstract than those of B2 students.

The purpose of this study is to examine the vocabulary included in listening texts in the textbooks used in teaching Turkish to foreigners according to their types. The study was limited to New Istanbul Turkish For International Students Course Book-A1 level. Accordingly, a total of eighteen listening texts in six units were analyzed. The document analysis method was used in the study. For this purpose, the words in the listening texts were analyzed as nouns, verbs, and phrases according to the distinction in the word list in the source of the study. In the analysis of the texts, the word types in the listening texts were compared with the word list shared with the reader at the end of each unit, and this ratio was reflected in the word types of tables with numerical values. Accordingly, a total of 592 words were included in eighteen listening texts. Of these, 429 are nouns, 129 are verbs and 34 are phrases. While a total of 957-word types are included in the word lists given in the book, 754 of them are nouns, 179 of them are verbs and 24 of them are phrases. When the word types within the listening texts in the book were analyzed, it was found that 149 out of 592-word types were used again. Another comparison is related to common uses. The word types in the listening texts were compared with the word lists in the textbook and 137 common word types were found. When at the distribution of word type preferences in the listening texts from the first unit to the last unit, it is observed that nouns, verbs, and phrases are partially distributed in a balanced way.

This research investigates disciplinary variations using syntactic features in Pakistani academic writing (AW). The corpus of this research is developed from 160 dissertations across four disciplinary divisions and analyzed through AntConc. Results reveal heterogeneous and homogenous use of the said features. Heterogeneity is seen in relation to the frequency of different types of clausal, intermediate, and phrasal features. Regarding the homogeneity, results reveal that the highest and lowest used features were similar across the four disciplinary divisions. That is, clausal coordinating conjunctions and WH complement clauses (highest and lowest used clausal features), nouns and prepositional phrases (highest and lowest used phrasal features), and adverbs and noun+to-clauses (highest and lowest used intermediate features) are observed to remain the same across the four disciplinary divisions. These results conclude that Pakistani AW does not reflect disciplinary variation. The practice is contrary to the expert convention. Therefore, Pakistani academic writers are suggested to appropriately use the syntactic features as per the expert conventions in their disciplines.

This study investigated L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause (N + RC)" based on Structural Priming (SP)(Bock,1986; Bock & Griffin, 2000) and Lexical Residual Activation (LRA)(Cleland, 2003). It was hypothesized that, based on SP, when L1 Chinese learners were primed by the English "N + RC," when the priming and the target structures shared different head nouns, they would produce more "N + RC" than when they were primed by the English "Adj + Noun (Adj + N)," and the priming effect was significant. Also, based on SP and LRA, when the priming and the target structures shared the same head noun, the increasing priming effect would be enhanced. The participants were 90 first year non-English major Chinese students attending Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, and 10 native English speakers. A picture description task was used to elicit data. The results confirmed the hypotheses. The study also found that there were different SP and LRA effects for L1 speakers and L2 speakers in that, while L2 speakers were significantly affected, L1 speakers were not. A long-term priming effect was found indirectly after the priming "Simple Sentence." The study contributed to Second Language Acquisition in that SP and LRA would facilitate L1 Chinese learners' acquisition of the English "Noun + Relative Clause," although this structure is nonexistent in the learners' L1. The study also gave pedagogical implications in that the application of SP and LRA would facilitate the acquisition of the L2 structures.

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational knowledge learned into their writing. Forty students who were inexperienced in DDL in one intact class at a private university in southern Thailand participated in this study. The participants learned through scaffolded paper-based DDL and autonomous computer-based DDL for a total of 10 weeks in an English for Communication course, which aims to develop their communicative abilities. Pre- and post-writing tests, a stimulated recall interview, and a semi-structured interview were employed as the data collection instruments. The writing test results indicate that the participants' collocational knowledge significantly improved in all patterns (p = 0.00), with a large overall effect size (d = 1.26). The interview results uncover that most participants could accurately: 1) classify the types of the target collocational patterns; 2) identify the hidden usage of the content words with varying prepositions; and 3) elucidate some key considerations when using collocations for their written communication. The results also suggest that the participants have acquired several collocations other than those targeted in DDL. The study concludes with pedagogical implications for DDL implementation and limitations in conducting DDL lessons.

The Kafoa language is one of the indigenous languages in Indonesia so that needs to preserve it to be in existed category and reveal it as language assets in Indonesia and local culture identity. Revealing the Kafoa Language vitality can be conducted through many perspectives, one of them is through the use of basic cultural vocabulary mastery by native speakers. Therefore, this study aimed to reveal the Kafoa language vitality through the basic cultural vocabulary mastery by the native speakers in Bawah Sub-Village, Probur Utara Village, Southwest Alor District, Alor Regency, East Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia. The study was a qualitative applying case study method. Data were the answer of 40 native speakers of the Kafoa language as respondents. In collecting data, questionnaire and interview guidance is used as instruments which involves the 451 basic cultural vocabularies in nine domains of body parts; pronouns, greetings, and references; kinship; village and community life; house and its parts; equipment and tools; foods and beverages; plants and trees; and animals. The data were then analysed through Miles and Huberman steps of data analysis. The study result showed that 190 (42%) vocabularies are still mastered by the native speakers of Kafoa language, while 261(58%) vocabularies are not longer mastered. It indicates that the tendency to master the basic cultural vocabulary by native speakers of the Kafoa language tends to decrease so that its vitality is getting low. To maintain the vitality or life power of the Kafoa language, a policy from the Government is needed and teaching it in the schools is considered.

Three modes of deliberate vocabulary study were investigated to determine how well they assisted learners' recall of the meaning of target concrete nouns. Two modes of tablet-based augmented reality, one context-independent (AR1) and one context-dependent (AR2), were compared with each other and with paper-based word cards (WC) in the deliberate study of three sets of nonwords representative of concrete nouns. An orthogonal Latin square design was used to counterbalance 39 participants. We hypothesized that both AR conditions would be more beneficial than word cards in terms of participants' ability to retain the meaning of the target words as demonstrated by performance on Yes/No and meaning-recall test items, and that AR2 conditions would be more beneficial as compared with AR1 conditions. Generalized linear mixed models revealed that both AR study modes significantly outperformed word cards. The context-dependent and context-independent augmented reality study modes did not significantly differ indicating that a visuospatial bootstrapping effect (VSB) was likely at play regardless of how dependent on or independent of their respective scenes the items studied were. These findings offer pedagogical implications of mobile-based AR use in vocabulary study and language learning in general.

The current study explores the effects of processing demands and proficiency on second language (L2) learners' acceptability judgment of wh-island sentences. A total of 65 adult Korean learners of English and ten native speakers (NSs) of English participated in an experiment that combined self-paced reading and acceptability judgment. They were presented with wh-island and non-island sentences that varied by whether the intervening nominal constituents inside the dependency were lexical noun phrases (NPs) or pronouns. The results showed that high-proficiency learners gave a higher rating to non-island sentences than to wh-island sentences, which is comparable to the NSs' rating pattern, whereas low proficiency learners showed a chance-level performance. The learners preferred the lexical condition to the pronoun condition, whereas the NSs exhibited the opposite preference. In the reading time (RT) analyses, both NSs and L2 learners slowed down in the lexical condition at regions where intervening NPs occurred, indicating that lexical nouns incur higher processing costs compared with pronouns. The NSs slowed down at the embedded verb region in the pronoun condition, whereas L2 learners showed no RT difference between conditions. The findings suggest that L2 learners' acceptability judgment is affected by their proficiency, but not as much by processing costs in terms of RT.

This study investigated the relative ease or difficulty of grammar commonly taught in intermediate (second-year) German at the university level. Previous studies have investigated the ease or difficulty of specific grammar structures, factors that make it difficult to learn L2 grammar, and teachers' and learners' perceptions of difficult grammar. The aim of the present study was to provide an overview of a year's worth of grammar instruction to guide decisions about grammar sequencing, instructional approaches, and instructional time. Grammar was grouped into units consisting of a pre-test, an instructional sequence, and a post-test. Test data were gathered from 498 grammar pre- and post-tests over a 3-year period. The authors hypothesized that certain grammar topics (e.g., vowel-changing present-tense verbs; the perfect) would be relatively easy, while others (e.g., noun and pronoun case; pluperfect) would be relatively difficult. These hypotheses were only partially confirmed. Results showed the pluperfect, comparative and superlative, and preterite were relatively easily learned, whereas fixed prepositions, pronouns, relative clauses, dative verbs, and the passive were much more difficult to learn. The results suggest that instructors focus on easy and essential grammar, introduce difficult grammar without formal assessment, and use test data to sequence topics within and across course levels.

Purpose: Children make spelling errors despite classroom instruction on phoneme-grapheme connections and spelling rules. We examined whether additional practice helps to decrease the number of spelling errors for a morphological spelling rule. We distinguished explicit practice in applying a spelling rule from implicit exposure to correct word forms. Method: After a dictation task, Dutch second graders (n = 139; 46.8% girls) were matched and randomly divided over explicit, implicit, and no-additional practice conditions. Additional practice was based on evidence-based exercises and encompassed five sessions. The dictation task included target words that were practiced, as well as transfer words that were not. Results: Both explicit and implicit practice resulted in better performance on target words (large effect) as well as transfer words (medium to large effect) compared to no-additional practice. There were no differences between implicit and explicit practice. Conclusion: These findings indicate that spelling performance can be improved by additional practice, both by telling and showing. Using evidence-based explicit or implicit exercises after classroom instruction has taken place can (further) improve children's spelling of rule-based words.

While known to influence visual lexical processing, the semantic information we associate with words has recently been found to influence auditory lexical processing as well. The present work explored the influence of "semantic richness" in auditory lexical decision. Study 1 recreated an experiment investigating semantic richness effects in concrete nouns (Goh et al., 2016). In Study 2, we expanded the stimulus set from 442 to 8,626 items, exploring the robustness of effects observed in Study 1 against a larger data set with increased diversity in both word class and other characteristics of interest. We also utilized generalized additive mixed models to investigate potential nonlinear effects. Results indicate that semantic richness effects become more nuanced and detectable when a wider set of items belonging to different parts of speech is examined. Findings are discussed in the context of models of spoken word recognition.

Comprehension of sentences with a center-embedded, object-gapped relative clause (ORC) is challenging for children as well as adults. Mismatching lexical and grammatical features of subject noun phrases (NPs) across the main clause and relative clause has been shown to facilitate comprehension. Adani et al. concluded that children's comprehension improved under conditions of NP number mismatch (e.g., singular main clause subject and plural relative clause subject) as compared with NP number match (e.g., both singular subjects). However, their stimuli provided number information on verb phrases (VPs) as well as NPs creating a confound for conclusions about facilitative effects of NP number mismatch. In this study, we isolated the contribution of NP number mismatch. Notably, 32 6-year-olds with typical language participated in a center-embedded, ORC sentence comprehension task with 4 types of stimuli: (a) NP number mismatch without VP number information (NP mismatch only), (b) NP number match without VP number information (NP match only), (c) NP number mismatch with VP number mismatch (NP + VP mismatch), and (d) NP number match with VP number match (NP + VP match). Children selected one of four pictures in an array to a verbally presented relative clause sentence; 56 sentences were presented. The within-subjects comparison for NP mismatch only and NP match only was not significant. However, the within-subjects comparison for NP mismatch only and NP + VP mismatch was significant. Children were more successful in NP + VP mismatch sentence comprehension (r[subscript C] = 0.70).

Inaudible syntactic markers are especially difficult to spell. This paper examines how 455 fourth graders spell silent French plural markers in a dictation with real and pseudowords after one year of formal French instruction (L2). The Generalized Linear Mixed Model analysis shows first that noun plural spelling (real and pseudo) is a strong predictor for verb and adjective plural spelling. Second, the performance on real verb plural is higher than the performance on real adjective plural. In contrast, the performance on pseudoadjective plural is higher than on pseudoverb plural. Our findings indicate the strong influence of semantics and frequency in instruction input on plural spelling: noun plural is semantically grounded, and nouns are most frequent in the curriculum. Verbs and verb plural are also frequent, and inflection is mostly taught by means of memorizing the verb inflection paradigm. Adjectives are taught least frequently. The findings are discussed in the context of French L2 instruction, as the extremely low results on adjectives and pseudoverbs seem to be a consequence of instruction methods.

Research has shown that learning a known-and-unknown word combination leads to greater learning than learning an unknown word alone (Kasahara, 2010, 2011). These studies found that attaching a known adjective to an unknown noun can help learners remember the unknown noun. Kasahara (2015) found that a known verb can serve as an effective cue to remember an unknown noun in a known-and-unknown combination. To examine useful cues to learn unknown verbs, this study compared verb (unknown) + noun (known) combinations to verb (unknown) + adverb (known) combinations. Additionally, we explored how learners' vocabulary size would affect the known-and-unknown two-word combination learning to deepen our understanding of the characteristics of students who benefit from combination learning. The participants in each group learned 18 two-word combinations consisting of the same unknown target verbs and different known cues (nouns or adverbs). The participants were provided with a five-minute learning phase and two immediate recall tests: a Single Word Test, to write down the L1 meanings of the targets, and a Combination Test, to write down the L1 meanings of the combinations. The same two tests were administered one week later. The results showed that known nouns were better cues for learning unknown verbs than known adverbs. It was also found that participants with a larger vocabulary size benefited more from two-word combination learning.

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23-59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP attachment sites in Russian. Using a self-paced reading task, reading times and noun phrase selection responses were collected. Results showed significantly shorter reading times at the disambiguating region and higher accuracy rate of selection in the high-attaching condition than in the middle- and low-attaching conditions. No significant differences were found between the middle- and low-attaching conditions. We argue that Predicate Proximity is a much stronger factor than Recency Preference in Russian.

Using a habituation paradigm with a three-switch design, the present study investigated whether 20-month-old French-learning infants use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially when both the agent and the action interpretations are possible. Of particular interest was whether infants' initial interpretation of novel nouns referring to novel animate objects in dynamic events includes not only the novel agents but also their actions. The following two contrastive hypotheses were specifically tested: (1) infants map novel verbs to the novel actions only and novel nouns to the novel agents only. Alternatively, (2) they map novel verbs to the novel actions only but novel nouns to both the novel agents and their actions. Infants watched dynamic events in which novel agents performed novel intransitive actions, while hearing novel words in a noun phrase or a verb sentence. When novel words were preceded by a pronoun "il", infants were able to map novel verbs to the actions but not to the agents. However, when novel words were preceded by a determiner "un", they mapped the novel nouns to both the agents and their actions. Two follow-up noun experiments showed that they mapped the novel nouns onto the agents and their actions, even when additional noun morphosyntactic cues were given. These findings demonstrate that 20-month-old infants are able to use noun and verb morphosyntactic cues to learn novel words in dynamic events differentially and provide some evidence to support that infants' initial representations of novel nouns referring to novel animate objects in dynamic events include both the agents and their actions.

When we memorize multiple words simultaneously, semantic relatedness among those words assists memory. For example, the information about "apple", "banana," and "orange" will be connected via a common concept of "fruits" and become easy to retain and recall. Neural mechanisms underlying this semantic integration in verbal working memory remain unclear. Here I used electroencephalography (EEG) and investigated neural signals when healthy human participants memorized five nouns semantically related (Sem trial) or not (NonSem trial). The regularity of oscillatory signals (8-30 Hz) during the retention period was found to be lower in NonSem than Sem trials, indicating that memorizing words unrelated to each other induced a non-harmonic (irregular) waveform in the temporal cortex. These results suggest that (i) semantic features of a word are retained as a set of neural oscillations at specific frequencies and (ii) memorizing words sharing a common semantic feature produces harmonic brain responses through a resonance or integration (sharing) of the oscillatory signals.

We investigated the acquisition of Hindi split ergativity (zero or "-ne" marking) and Hindi differential object marking (DOM; zero or "-ko" marking) by L1 speakers of Dutch. Both grammatical phenomena are conditioned by multiple syntactic and semantic features. On a descriptive level, the study aims to examine when and how Dutch-speaking learners acquire and apply the conditional features associated with "-ne" and "-ko" marking in Hindi as a foreign language (HFL). A specific learner corpus was created based on a picture description task that elicited semi-spontaneous oral production data from 15 Dutch-speaking learners of Hindi, from four cross-sectional stages of the Hindi course trajectory. We annotated the corpus data for multiple features associated with "-ne" and "-ko" marking. Using a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we found an increase in the use and accuracy of each case marker over the different years of study, but individual learner profile analyses revealed considerable intersubject differences in learner behavior. We argue that the developmental stages for the emergence of "-ne" and "-ko" marking are in line with predictions based on Processability Theory. We additionally include mastery level analysis to account for a combined perspective on language development. Our findings reveal that HFL learners reach higher mastery levels for split ergativity than for DOM, even though DOM ("-ko" marking) emerges before split ergativity ("-ne" marking). We conclude that developmental stages and between-learner variation are not mutually exclusive.

Given the rich bound morphology of Spoken Arabic, an attempt was made here to construct a developmental measure corresponding to the mean length utterance (MLU) in English and to morpheme-per-utterance (MPU) in Hebrew. The adaptation to Arabic resulted in a new measurement termed Arabic-MPU, that was experimentally tested on a sample of 98 typically developing (TD) Arabic-speaking preschoolers aged 2;6 to 5;0. We report here on the internal consistency of Arabic-MPU against different types of elicitation procedures, and its external validity. We show that the new tool is developmentally sensitive and hence can be utilized for the assessment of the language growth in Spoken Arabic. This new tool should contribute to further research and development of measures for language assessment. In addition, it can be used for language screening in preschoolers for the purpose of identifying young speakers of Arabic who exhibit delays in early language development.

Purpose: Our goal is to understand how the different types of plural marking are understood and processed by children with cochlear implants (CIs): (a) how does salience affect the processing of plural marking, (b) how is this processing affected by the incomplete signal provided by the CIs, and (c) is it linked to individual factors such as chronological age, vocabulary development, and phonological working memory? Method: Sixteen children with CIs and 30 age-matched children with normal hearing (NH) participated in an eye-tracking study. Their task was to choose the corresponding picture to an auditorily presented singular or plural noun. Accuracy, reaction time, and gaze fixation were measured and analyzed with mixed-effect models. Results: Group differences were found in accuracy but not in reaction time or gaze fixation. Plural processing is qualitatively similar in children with CIs and children with NH, with more difficulties in processing plurals involving stem-vowel changes and less with those involving suffixes. Age effects indicate that processing abilities still evolve between 5 and 11 years, and processing is further linked to lexical development. Conclusions: Our results indicate that early implantation seems to be beneficial for the acquisition of plural as indicated by very small between-group differences in processing and comprehension. Processing is furthermore affected by the type of material (i.e., phonetic, phonological, or morphological) used to mark plural and less so by their segmental salience. Our study emphasizes the need to take into account the form of the linguistic material in future investigations at higher levels of processing.

Purpose: Assessing whether a book is relevant or suitable for use in teaching materials is not an easy and haphazard matter, various methods and theories have been offered by researchers in studying this matter. Taking a study of the context of textbooks, researchers found the urgency that textbooks are a foundation for education, socialization and transmission of knowledge and its construction. Researchers offer another approach, namely by using praxeology as a study tool so that the goals of the textbooks previously intended are fulfilled. Design/methodology/approach: The researcher uses a qualitative approach through grounded theory. Grounded theory procedures are designed to develop a well-integrated set of concepts that provide a thorough theoretical explanation of the social phenomena under study. A grounded theory must explain as well as describe. It may also implicitly provide some degree of predictability, but only with respect to certain conditions (Corbin and Strauss, 1990). Document analysis in conducting this research study. Document analysis itself examines systematic procedures for reviewing or evaluating documents, both printed and electronic materials. Findings: Two issues regarding gender acquisition have been investigated in L2 Arabic acquisition studies; the order in which L2 Arabic learners acquire certain grammatical features of the gender system and the effect of L1 on the acquisition of some grammatical features from L2 grammatical gender. Arabic has a two-gender system that classifies all nouns, animate and inanimate, as masculine or feminine. Verbs, nouns, adjectives, personal, demonstrative and relative pronouns related to nouns in the syntactic structure of sentences show gender agreement. Research limitations/implications: In practice, as a book intended for non-speakers, the book is presented using a general view of linguistic theory. In relation to the gender agreement, the presentation of the book begins and is inserted with the concepts of nouns and verbs. Returning to the praxeology context, First, The Know How (Praxis) explains practice (i.e. the tasks performed and the techniques used). Second, To Know Why or Knowledge (logos) which explains and justifies practice from a technological and theoretical point of view. Answering the first concept, the exercise presented in the book is a concept with three clusters explained at the beginning of the discussion. And the second concept, explained with a task design approach which includes word categorization by separating masculine and feminine word forms. Practical implications: Practically, this research obtains perspectives studied from a textbook, namely the Arabic gender agreement is presented with various examples of noun contexts; textbook authors present book concepts in a particular way with regard to curriculum features and this task design affects student performance, and which approach is more effective for developing student understanding. Empirically, the material is in line with the formulation of competency standards for non-Arabic speakers in Indonesia. Originality/value: With this computational search, the researcher found a novelty that was considered accurate by taking the praxeology context as a review in the analysis of non-speaking Arabic textbooks, especially in the year 2022 (last data collection in September) there has been no study on this context. So then, the researcher finds other interests in that praxeology can examine more broadly parts of the task of the contents of the book with the approach of relevant linguistic theories.

While there are well-known demonstrations that children can use distributional information to acquire multiple components of language, the underpinnings of these achievements are unclear. In the current paper, we investigate the potential pre-requisites for a distributional learning model that can explain how children learn their first words. We review existing literature and then present the results of a series of computational simulations with Vector Space Models, a type of distributional semantic model used in Computational Linguistics, which we evaluate against vocabulary acquisition data from children. We focus on nouns and verbs, and we find that: (i) a model with flexibility to adjust for the frequency of events provides a better fit to the human data, (ii) the influence of context words is very local, especially for nouns, and (iii) words that share more contexts with other words are harder to learn.

Although previous research has observed a facilitative influence of the first language (L1) on the acquisition and processing of gender agreement in a second language (L2), particularly in language pairs with similar gender agreement marking, the question of whether knowledge of two languages with gender can confer an additional advantage for L3/Ln (third or additional language) learners has not yet been addressed. The present study aimed to fill this research gap by examining the processing of gender agreement in intermediate and advanced L3/Ln Swedish among two groups of Polish native speakers: 30 L2 English/L3 Swedish learners, and 30 L2 English/L3 German/L4 Swedish learners. Participants were tested by means of a speeded grammaticality judgment task, in which they judged the correctness of indefinite noun phrases that either agreed or did not agree in gender. They also completed an untimed gender assignment task to control for their lexical knowledge of gender. Accuracy and response time data were submitted to Generalized Linear Models. The analysis shows that L4 Swedish learners process noun phrases faster than L3 Swedish learners, but only at the intermediate proficiency level; however, the groups do not differ in their judgment accuracy. This advantage is interpreted in terms of a surface transfer of similar gender agreement marking, which helps the learners automatize gender agreement processes earlier, but does not increase their sensitivity to gender-agreement violations. Moreover, the results accord with previous L2 studies in showing that learners of Swedish as L3/Ln develop sensitivity to ungrammaticality with advancing proficiency and benefit substantially from their gender assignment knowledge in processing gender agreement. Crucially, the present study provides preliminary evidence of a multilingual advantage in processing morphosyntactic features in L3/Ln.

This article presents a cross-cultural comparison of the size and composition of the expressive vocabulary of young children speaking two dialectal varieties of South American Spanish. Ninety-one Peruvian and 91 Argentinian toddlers (mean age: 22.5 months), matched on gender, age and maternal education, were assessed through the respective adaptations of the "MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventories." Results revealed a vocabulary growth compatible with a spurt in both groups. A marginally significant country-by-gender interaction indicated that while Argentinian children exhibited an accelerated lexical growth before age 2;0 regardless of gender, only Peruvian girls did so; Peruvian boys presented a more gradual and later increase. We also found between-group qualitative differences in vocabulary composition: Argentinian toddlers with vocabularies of up to 100 words exhibited a significantly higher proportion of Nouns, while Peruvian children, especially those with a lexical mass under 50 words, had a higher percentage of Social words. Both findings are discussed in terms of possible cross-cultural differences linked to input quality and early interactions, and avenues for further research are proposed.

The purpose of this work is to determine how widely and in which semantic and morphologic categories, word associations are used by children. There is no study about word associations children use in the acquisition of Turkish as their mother tongue. Participants of the current research consisted of a total of 90 kids between 4.0 and 6.0 years of age in 3 different cities in Turkey based on easy accessibility. The data obtained by transferring oral language texts produced by children in their natural habitat to the computer environment was analyzed by evaluating according to their age brackets. Semantic categories are free-combinations, collocations (sub-categories; semi-restricted collocations, restricted collocations, figurative idioms and pure idioms) and co-creations. Morphologic categories are determined as rigid noun phrases, predicative relations, and phrasal templates. As a result, it was seen that the production of children in the participation group increases as age increases. Generally, it is seen that children in the 6.0 age group produce more complete word associations compared to lower age groups. Word association productions of 6.0-year-old children are more than the total word association productions of children in 4.0 and 5.0. It was determined that children perform productions in the free-combination category the most between semantic categories, and they make up predicative relations the most between morphologic categories. This result matches theories of development and acquisition and the characteristics of Turkish.

When acquiring the English plural, children correctly produce plural words long before they develop an understanding of morphological structure. When acquiring Sesotho noun prefixes, children are aware of the multiple constraints governing variation from a young age. Both of these cases raise questions about the Shin and Miller (2022) account of children's acquisition of morphosyntactic variation.

The present study attempts to identify difficulties that Japanese students encounter with metadiscursive nouns in writing second language (L2) argumentation essays. Metadiscursive nouns are abstract and unspecific nouns which can serve as cohesive markers by retrieving their meanings in the text where they occur. Using a selected number of nouns (i.e., "problem," "reason," "thing," "fact," "idea," "decision"), this study examines how the nouns, occurring in several syntactic patterns, expressed their meanings in the text and served as metadiscursive devices in L2 essays written by Japanese students, in comparison with essays by American students as a benchmark. The study also discusses the use of "problem" and "reason" in relation to rhetorical patterns such as cause-effect clauses and the Problem-Solution text pattern that occurred in the two corpora. A comparison of the ways in which the Japanese and American students use these nouns points to several difficulties the Japanese cohort faces in using metadiscursive nouns in argumentative essays: providing a focus in describing information, making an explicit meaning link, and using particular English rhetorical patterns. Suggestions are made for further inquiries which could broaden our understanding of the behavior of this class of nouns and inform the teaching of L2 argumentation essays.