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A tension exists between rationalists and empiricists regarding the nature of knowledge: innate then activated/discovered (rationalists) or constructed then invented (empiricists). The assumption is that, to a certain extent, basic knowledge seems to be innate in our mind and develops through experience by thinking processes to construct meanings. This meaning construction (thinking), mainly using language, is to make sense of and interpret the world. Meanings should be the primary motivation underlying linguistic constructions at all levels. This paper investigates meaning constructions at the lexical level of affixation by focusing on semantic behaviours of verbs in a complex word formation as an attempt: 1) to find out the semantic patterns of verb-based complex word formation, 2) to reveal if there is an iconic relationship of a sign (signifier) and its meaning (signified), and 3) to suggest for its teaching. Using semantic classes of verbs, based on situation types in deriving complex words, this study attempts to find out semantic patterns of such complex word formation and the possibility of revealing its iconicity. Using Antconc software, this study scrutinized linguistic expressions involving related verbs of state, event, and action in a corpus to reveal meaning construction at that level. The findings show several semantic patterns of verb-based complex word formation and an indication of the iconicity of signs. The paper also offers suggestions for teaching affixation.

Finite complement clauses (FCCs) are an understudied syntactic structure of L2 advanced academic writing. The present study cross-investigated FCCs in qualitative (QUALI) and quantitative (QUANTI) research articles written by Filipino academic writers (FAWs) in Applied Linguistics (APPLING), Communication (COMM), and Measurement and Evaluation (MEEV). Specifically, it determined the FCCs with the most occurrences across five disciplinary research article sub-registers and identified whether these FCCs differ significantly in terms of frequencies of use. With Hernandez's (2021) framework adapted from Biber and Gray's (2016) study, this research analyzed five FCCs in 42 disciplinary research articles. Major results revealed that verb-controlled that-clauses (with 33.69 as normalized frequency count) outnumbered other FCCs in research article sub-registers across disciplines. They were more recurrent in QUALI and QUANTI APPLING research articles (7.91 and 7.54, respectively) and QUANTI and QUALI COMM research articles (7.34 and 6.96, respectively) than in QUANTI MEEV research articles (3.94). In addition, a significant difference exists between them and other FCCs at the p<0.05 level in terms of frequencies of use. In view of these findings, it can be concluded that verb-controlled that-clauses are the most useful FCCs in APPLING, COMM, and MEEV research articles. Likewise, FAWs across the three disciplines write more informally as signposted by their repeated use of that complementizer with these FCCs controlled by verbs. The study draws its implications for academic writing instruction.

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However, notwithstanding that this change has been fairly widely documented for well over half a century, the present paper has been motivated by the desire to capture the root cause of this change in writing and to establish the linguistic conditions that have enabled it to occur. This is not so much a reductionist venture, negatively conceived, as a quest to determine the primary factors involved in what can seem at times to be a most peculiar phenomenon. The method employed to delimit these causal factors proceeds by a process of elimination, while the provision of evidence adopts the traditional, tried-and-tested method of 'observation and collection'. The stative-specific research papers that examine the current variation constituting the focus of this paper are all from the present century.

The study examined the types of language errors made by learners in the English narrative essays. It also assessed the feedback techniques employed by teachers of English in the handling of language errors in the English narrative essays. A descriptive research design was employed to examine errors of English narrative essays of 181 form two learners obtained through stratified random sampling and simple random sampling techniques. The eight teachers of English selected through purposive and simple random sampling completed interview schedules. Qualitative data generated from the essays of the learners was analyzed using Error Analysis and Content Analysis. The findings reveal that a total of seven categories of language errors which include: word order, verb tense and form, subject -- verb agreement, spelling, plurality, word choice, and capital letter errors were made by the learners in their English narrative essays. The most preferred corrective technique was to involve the learners actively by encouraging them to read extensively and write severally on various narratives in the target language. The findings will provide reliable feedback to teachers of English because it will guide on the development of teaching methods and evaluative measures to narrative essays. The study will also be useful to curriculum developers in designing materials for teaching English language in secondary schools. It will also be of invaluable benefit to learners of English as it will guide on the way narrative essays need to be written.

This paper presents a unified Arabic version of the English action verbs mentioned in Bloom's taxonomy (1956) that has been checked for validity and reliability by a panel of education experts. Methodologically, the Bloom's list of action verbs was first translated into Arabic by an expert professor of translation. Then, using a mixed-method approach the Arabic list was validated by three bilingual education experts working at universities in Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates. As part of the process, the paper established a single Bloom's taxonomy list of action verbs, based on the data provided by two reputable educational institutions that were cross-checked with a well-referenced textbook. A contextualized Arabic translation of the list was then produced and was subjected to rigorous checks by a panel of reviewers who were the education experts. The paper presents the challenges faced in translating the list into Arabic and the solutions we have adopted as well as the validity and reliability checks. The implication of this paper is in offering teacher preparation programs across the Arab world an Arabic Bloom's taxonomy list that can be used by in-service and pre-service teachers. Moreover, it contributes to teacher literacy in the correct use of Bloom's action verbs in the Arabic language.

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.

Critical thinking, creativity, communication, teamwork, emotional intelligence, problem-solving, empathy, resilience, ambition, grit, and innovation (Heckman & Kautz, 2012). These skills, often referred to as 'soft' skills, are considered a requirement for employment and advancement for the 21st-century graduate (Carnevale & Smith, 2013). Within a Western Canadian School of Business, in an environment highly regarded for technical skill achievement in diploma and degree graduates, faculty set out to investigate the absence or inclusion of human skills in curriculum outcomes as an initial phase of investigation. There is an institutional presumption that human skill development is innately a part of the programs. The intention is that human skills (LeBusque, 2020) or power skills (PMI, 2022) naturally occur during course delivery, creating a commonality across foundational courses to reinforce the skill sets identified, developed, and refined as students complete their credentials. However, industry reports (Lapointe & Turner, 2020; RBC, 2019) and the authors' own institutional data collected from new graduates and employers indicated room for improvement in these skills. To gain a better understanding, the authors undertook an examination via document analysis of all common core courses that form the program foundation. Through the lens of dynamic skill theory (Mascolo, 2020), this evaluation involved 24 common courses, comprised of 1,442 course objectives, resulting in a range of 134 Bloom's Taxonomy verbs. In this paper, the authors begin the exploratory first phase of a broader comprehensive study with a focus on course foundations for learner development. Through this analysis, the authors present a draft framework to better understand and strengthen the learning foundations, to proceed with considerations for realignment and strategic scaffolding of both technical and human skills from entry through graduation.

Internationally, the trend of student-centered learning in higher education has emphasized the importance of aligning student learning outcomes with corresponding assessment methods. This study is conducted at a university in Vietnam by investigating 32 sets of syllabi and test specifications varied from English Language programs to English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) courses. The findings reveal that a lack of precision in verb usage within learning outcomes can introduce ambiguity, potentially hindering the effectiveness of both teaching and assessment. The study also highlights the significance of balancing the quantities of requirements within a single learning outcome to foster a positive and manageable learning experience. As a result, it is believed that a careful selection of verbs in writing learning outcomes, coupled with a balanced approach to requirements, can contribute to a more coherent and effective curriculum within linguistic programs.

This study investigates the influences of early and intense L2 exposure on children's L1 causative verb production, assessed by an experimental causative verb production task. Turkish expresses causality by morphological and lexical means, whereas English does so by periphrastic and lexical means. Learning L2 English might enhance L1 Turkish causative verb production by highlighting the parallels and contrasts in causal expressions between the languages, which may result in an enriched L1 causative use. Five-, 7 -, and 9-year-old L1-Turkish L2-English bilingual (n = 80) and L1-Turkish monolingual (n = 80) children participated in the study in L1-Turkish. Results indicated that language group differences only emerged for the use of morphological causative verbs in favor of 5-year-old bilinguals compared with monolingual peers. Age group differences occurred only for the monolingual group and only for morphological verbs. Specifically, monolingual 7- and 9-year-olds performed better than monolingual 5-year-olds. Causative verb-type differences were only seen for 5-year-old monolinguals, who performed better for lexical than morphological verbs; in contrast, 5-year-old bilinguals performed equally well on the two types of causatives, and better than 5-year-old monolinguals on morphological causatives. Overall, these findings indicate that learning an L2 with structural similarities and differences compared with L1 might enhance children's awareness and correct use of causal linguistic structures.

The objective of this study was to examine the development of derivational morphological structures in the productive language of Kuwaiti Arabic (KA)-speaking children. Participants were 512 typically developing Kuwaiti children aged 3;0 years to 7;11 years (243 boys and 269 girls). Five age groups at 1-year intervals were tested; each group was divided into four sub-groups at 3-month intervals. The children were examined using a tool designed to assess structures specific to the KA dialect, and they were assessed by trained research assistants at their nurseries and public schools. There were clear developmental trajectories in the derivational morphological structures studied in KA-speaking children across the five age groups. Results showed that KA-speaking children have not reached mastery level in most of the structures examined in this study. Among the two types of derivations examined, nominal derivations emerged later than verb derivations. Error analysis showed that most errors were morphological, affecting mainly the root. The results of this study enhance our knowledge of early language development in Arabic by showing that nominal derivations develop later than verb derivations. The results are discussed in light of previous cross-linguistic studies, which also found a similar trajectory in terms of morphological development. Further, Arabic morphological theory, as well as implications for practice and the need for further research, is discussed.

A growing number of studies have probed the effectiveness of certain exercise formats in the learning of multi-word expressions (MWEs) in classroom settings. However, a number of important variables, such as MWE retention over an extended period of time and the role of repetition, have so far not been considered. Furthermore, studies have focused primarily on university level learners, with young L2 learners being almost entirely disregarded. The present study sought to address these gaps with 148 high school students who were randomly assigned one of three fill-in-the-gap exercises: (1) word-format, where participants selected the appropriate verb from a list provided; (2) letter-format, where the first-letter of the missing verb was provided as a clue; and (3) phrase-format, where participants chose an appropriate intact phrase from a list. Participants did the exercise once, twice or three times. The study investigated the effects of exercise format and repetition on the learning of 20 verb-noun collocations, one and eight weeks following the treatment. Results from generalized linear mixed-effects modeling showed that both exercise and repetition had significant impact on the learnability of the target MWEs, but the format had a smaller effect size than repetition. Rasch analysis was also used to examine the potential difference in the difficulty of MWEs, and how this difficulty may interact with the exercise format. The findings largely support previous research, but also underline the importance of repetition and suggest that exercise format does not uniformly interact with the learnability of MWEs.

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.

Differences in the sequence with which children pass the tasks in Wellman and Liu's (2004) theory of mind (ToM) battery is increasingly bringing into question the universal and cultural specifics of children's developing understanding of others' minds. Children from China, Iran, and Turkey pass the knowledge access (KA) task of the battery earlier than they pass the diverse beliefs (DB) task (e.g., Selcuk et al., 2018). This pattern is the reverse of what has been documented with children from Australia and the US (e.g., Peterson et al., 2005). This paper presents three studies with Turkish samples that explore the possible reasons for developmental sequence and performance differences in the ToM battery. Study 1 investigated Turkish-speaking adults' judgments of appropriateness for different epistemic verbs as used in the DB and false belief (FB) tasks. Study 2 investigated whether adults' performance (i.e., accuracy, reaction time) on FB tasks were affected by culturally preferred uses of these verbs. Collectively these studies showed that adults found different epistemic language ("guess," "think," and the Turkish-specific "falsely think") to be appropriate for different belief-based tasks. However, there was no difference in adults' performance based on epistemic language. In Study 3, Turkish-speaking preschoolers' performance in belief-related tasks based on variations in epistemic language and epistemic features (i.e., presence of evidence) was investigated. Among five modifications, Turkish children benefited only from a modification that involved the manipulation of the epistemological basis for ambiguous beliefs (i.e., visual evidence for belief).

Verb-marking errors such as "she play football" and "daddy singing" are a hallmark feature of English-speaking children's speech. We investigated the proposal that these errors are input-driven errors of commission arising from the high relative frequency of subject + unmarked verb sequences in well-formed child-directed speech. We tested this proposal via a preregistered corpus analysis and asked at what level the effects occur: Is it the relative frequency of specific subject + unmarked verb sequences in the input that is important, or is it simply that verbs become entrenched, such that their frequency of appearance with any third person singular subject accounts for errors? We found that the best predictor of children's verb-marking errors is the relative frequency of unmarked forms of specific subject + verb sequences. Our results supported the proposal that children's apparent omissions of certain grammatical morphemes are in fact input-driven errors of commission and provided insight into the mechanisms by which this occurs.

We investigated the role of cue weighting, second language (L2) proficiency, and L2 daily exposure in L2 learning of suprasegmentals different from the first language (L1), using eye-tracking. Spanish monolinguals, English-Spanish learners, and Mandarin--Spanish learners saw a paroxytone and an oxytone verb (e.g., "FIRma-firMÓ" "s/he signs-signed"), listened to a sentence containing one of the verbs, and chose the one that they heard. The three languages have contrastive lexical stress, but suprasegmentals have a greater functional load in Mandarin than in English. Monolinguals predicted suffixes accurately with both stress conditions and favored oxytones, but learners predicted suffixes accurately only with oxytones, the condition activating fewer lexical competitors. Monolinguals predicted suffixes accurately sooner but at a slower rate than did learners. L2 proficiency, but not L1 or L2 exposure, facilitated L2 predictions. In conclusion, learners of a contrastive-stress L1 rely on L2 suprasegmentals to the same extent as monolinguals, regardless of their L1. Lower L2 proficiency and higher cognitive load (more lexical competitors) reduce learners' reliance on suprasegmentals.

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social context is less understood. We report on the results of an innovative experimental battery designed to test how learning variation is affected by a variable's social indexicality. Hungarian native speakers played a co-operative game involving verb nonwords. These were built on existing inflectional variation in Hungarian. Participant behavior shifted in response to an automated co-player's preferences, and this reflected a change in the overall lexical patterns of the players, affected by the particular verbs introduced by the co-player. Patterns persisted in subsequent testing. Learning was similar for variables with or without social meaning. Results show that participants can learn and retain a range of variable morphological patterns in a simulated interaction. Participants seem to have equal capacity to pick up variables with and without social meaning. This suggests that the social meaning of a pattern does not clearly constrain learning morphological variation and becomes relevant downstream in learning.

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.

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.

Greek and Spanish are two languages that display a similar subject distribution with unergative/unaccusative verbs, but different word orders with focused subjects (SV in Greek and VS in Spanish). Here we consider subject-verb word order in second language (L2) Greek and L2 Spanish in order to test the Interface Hypothesis (IH). To this end, we report a word-order selection task, with a Greek and a Spanish version. The two versions of the task were administered to L2 intermediate and advanced learners and native speakers of Greek and Spanish. The results show that the first language (L1) Spanish learners of Greek approximated more closely native word orders than the L1 Greek learners of Spanish. For the Spanish learners of Greek, the advanced group performed at ceiling, while the intermediate group performed native-like only with unergatives in neutral and direct interrogative subject-focused contexts. On the other hand, for the Greek learners of Spanish, the intermediate group failed in all contexts, while the advanced group performed native-like with unaccusatives in neutral contexts. This asymmetry between L2 Greek and L2 Spanish reveals that the L1-L2 combination determines the learners' performance, and this is unexpected under the IH.

Purpose: This longitudinal study investigated the trajectory of Spanish article accuracy in Spanish-English dual language learners (DLLs) from preschool to first grade, addressing the need for longitudinal data on the variability of Spanish grammatical skills in DLLs in English immersion classrooms. Method: Language sample analysis was conducted on 336 Spanish and English narrative retells elicited from 31 Spanish-English DLLs (range: 45-85 months). Growth curve models captured within- and between-individual change in article accuracy from the beginning of preschool to the end of first grade. Results: As a group, DLLs did not exhibit significant positive or negative growth in Spanish article accuracy over time. On average, article accuracy remained stable at 76% from preschool throughout first grade. Participants exhibited significant variability in article accuracy that was partly explained by changes in Spanish proficiency. Spanish article accuracy was lower for DLLs with lower Spanish proficiency indexed by measures from the Spanish language samples, while English proficiency indexed by the English language samples did not affect Spanish article accuracy. Conclusions: These findings suggest that expectations for Spanish grammatical performance in DLLs need to be adjusted to account for the possible impact of not receiving Spanish support in English immersion school settings. DLLs in these instructional programs do not exhibit article accuracy at a level expected for monolingual Spanish speakers. Significant individual differences in both individual status and growth rates of Spanish article accuracy highlight the broad variability in Spanish language skills of DLLs in the United States.

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.

Words that describe sensory perception give insight into how language mediates human experience, and the acquisition of these words is one way to examine how we learn to categorize and communicate sensation. We examine the differential predictions of the typological prevalence hypothesis and embodiment hypothesis regarding the acquisition of perception verbs. Studies 1 and 2 examine the acquisition trajectories of perception verbs across 12 languages using parent questionnaire responses, while Study 3 examines their relative frequencies in English corpus data. We find the vision verbs see and look are acquired first, consistent with the typological prevalence hypothesis. However, for children at 12-23 months, touch - not audition - verbs take precedence in terms of their age of acquisition, frequency in child-produced speech, and frequency in child-directed speech, consistent with the embodiment hypothesis. Later at 24-35 months old, frequency rates are observably different and audition begins to align with what has previously been reported in adult English data. It seems the initial orientation to verbalizing touch over audition in child-caregiver interaction is especially related to the control of physically and socially appropriate behaviors. Taken together, the results indicate children's acquisition of perception verbs arises from the complex interplay of embodiment, language-specific input, and child-directed socialization routines.

This study investigated the feasibility of a vocabulary-based teacher intervention to increase preschool teachers' production of complement clauses (e.g. "I wonder if we can put the monkey in the tree") in teacher-children play interactions. Using a multiple baseline across participants design we measured the impact of an intervention that promoted preschool teachers' production of four complement clause verbs (CCVs)--"figure out," "notice," "remember," "wonder." Based on visual analysis we established a functional relation between the teacher intervention and the teachers' production of the target CCVs produced with a complement clause. Asking teachers to increase their use of CCVs in verbal interactions with children is a promising approach to increase teacher complex syntax input in the preschool classroom.

In recent years, there has been considerable interest in how to maximize learners' retention of multiword expressions. One technique that has been shown to be highly effective is the use of exercises such as those found in mainstream English as a second language textbooks. In the present study, we investigated how the execution of a gap-fill exercise impacts the learning of phrasal verbs with 118 learners studying English as a foreign language. Participants completed a gap-fill exercise by referring to the answer key, or they received the answer key only after completing the exercise. The effects of the learning conditions were assessed with tests for measuring productive and receptive knowledge at two retention intervals. The results from mixed-effects logistic regression modeling showed that both executions of the gap-fill exercise led to similar rates of retention. The findings largely challenge previous research. We also explored how to minimize proactive interference when participants make errors in gap-fill exercises by asking them to recollect their initial guesses during the posttests. The results showed that when the initial guess was produced, correct recall of the target phrasal verbs was much greater than when the guess was not recollected. The finding indicates that memory for the initial guess may play a vital role in how participants learn from their errors. The pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed, and future areas of research are proposed.

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.

Purpose: Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) tend to interpret noncanonical sentences like passives using event probability (EP) information regardless of structure (e.g., by interpreting "The dog was chased by the squirrel" as "The dog chased the squirrel"). Verbs are a major source of EP information in adults and children with typical development (TD), who know that "chase" implies an unequal relationship among participants. Individuals with DLD have poor verb knowledge and verb-based sentence processing. Yet, they also appear to rely more on EP information than their peers. This paradox raises two questions: (a) How do children with DLD use verb-based EP information alongside other information in online passive sentence interpretation? (b) How does verb vocabulary knowledge support EP information use? Method: We created novel EP biases by showing animations of agents with consistent action tendencies (e.g., clumsy vs. helpful actions). We then used eye tracking to examine how this EP information was used during online passive sentence processing. Participants were 4- to 5-year-old children with DLD (n = 20) and same-age peers with TD (n = 20). Results: In Experiment 1, children with DLD quickly integrated verb-based EP information with morphosyntax close to the verb but failed to do so with distant morphosyntax. In Experiment 2, the quality of children's sentence-specific verb vocabulary knowledge was positively associated with the use of EP information in both groups. Conclusion: Depending on the morphosyntactic context, children with DLD and TD used EP information differently, but verb vocabulary knowledge aided its use.

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.

We evaluate the impact of gestures during the teaching of vocabulary in a foreign language (FL). Spanish speakers learned words in a FL in four gesture conditions according to the relationship between the meaning of the words and the gestures (congruent gestures, incongruent gestures, gestures without meaning, and no gestures). The participants learned the words by performing gestures ('do' teaching group) or by observing the gestures performed by others ('see' teaching group). Compared to the meaningless gesture condition, the processing of congruent gestures facilitated the recall of second language (L2) words in the 'see' and 'do' teaching groups. However, the interference effect associated with the processing of incongruent gestures was greater in the 'see' teaching group than in the 'do' teaching group. Thus, the performance of gestures seems to mitigate the negative impact that the use of gestures may have on the teaching of vocabulary in a foreign language.

Usage-based theory has proposed that learning of linguistic constructions is facilitated by input that contains few high-frequency exemplars, in what is known as a skewed (or Zipfian) input distribution. Early empirical work provided support to this idea, but subsequent L2 research has provided mixed findings. However, previous approaches have not explored the impact that cognitive traits (e.g., working memory) have on the effectiveness of skewed or balanced input. The experiment reported here tested learners' ability to develop new L2 categories of adjectives that guide lexical selection in Spanish verbs of "becoming." The results showed that, when explicit rules are provided, low-working memory learners benefitted from reduced variability in skewed input, while high-working memory individuals benefitted from balanced input, which better allows for rule-based hypothesis testing. The findings help clarify the mixed findings in previous studies and suggest a way forward for optimizing the L2 input based on individual traits.

Professionalism in English phrases is an indispensable tool for the enhancement of fluency and accuracy in communication. However, English second language learners face redundancy challenges apropos an effective use of phrases. The research investigated strategic intervention for selected deviant English phrases at the University of Venda. A quantitative approach was adopted because data could be analysed mathematically and statistically. Using probability sampling, 35 Level Three English students registered in the 2022 academic year at this university were selected to participate in this research. Further, a convenience technique was employed to select the respondents who were readily approachable and had been studying English for more than twelve years. A pre-test study was conducted on the respondents who were not part of the target group to plan and modify the main research. After a treatment process was followed, the research revealed that respondents were incompetent in the use of English phrases. Nonetheless, post-test results established that respondents performed preternaturally after the utilisation of the 'language shadowing methods'. Frequent practice in the use of this technique, therefore, cannot be ignored if one wishes to improve not only the art of public oration but also the image of the person's academic literacy.

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.

This study addressed the critical gap in research on the academic English vocabulary knowledge of deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students at the college level, with a specific focus on academic English verbs. An English vocabulary test was developed to assess knowledge of academic verbs at three distinct corpus-defined lexical frequency ranges. The test was administered to the DHH students along with two comparison groups of college peers--students of English as an Additional Language (EAL) and hearing native-English-speaking students. Results revealed near-ceiling performance by hearing native speakers but significant vocabulary challenges in the DHH and EAL learner groups, who exhibited parallel lexical knowledge. Learner group performance increased as verb frequency range increased and as overall English proficiency level increased. The findings demonstrate that lexical frequency effects guide English verb acquisition in the targeted populations.

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.

As Chinese shows both satellite- and verb-framed properties (Slobin, 2004; Talmy, 2012, 2016), it provides a unique lens through which to observe the extent of first-language (L1) typological influence in second language (L2) acquisition of motion expressions. This study has dual purposes. First, it extends Wu's (2016) investigation on motion expressions produced by 80 L1 satellite-framed English learners of L2 Chinese to include newly collected data produced by L1 verb-framed speakers, a sample comprised of 41 L1 Japanese learners of Chinese and 40 Japanese native speakers. Second, it synthesizes the data from both studies and comprehensively examines factors that have been proposed to affect development of L2 thinking-for-speaking (TFS) patterns. The results show that development of L2 TFS is best predicted by learners' L1 type, but the effect is mitigated by L2 proficiency. While the L1 English learners outperform L1 Japanese learners in their development of target-like L2 Chinese TFS, learners with limited L2 proficiency in both groups tend to adopt verb-framed strategies to express only the core path information of a motion event and leave out the manner details. Analysis of L1 Japanese learners' oral narratives in L1 Japanese and L2 Chinese also shows that reverse L2-to-L1 transfer is less likely to happen when learning a typologically closer L2 that requires minimal restructuring of their L1 TFS.

This study draws on the strengths of both corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis approaches to investigate the issues of power and ideology of teachers evident in their language use in the discussions on Ajarn.com. Data collection involved constructing a corpus from the discussions on the website, with the discussion threads dated from 2012 to 2022, in the "Thai students" tag. Altogether, the corpus, named Discussion corpus, covered over 80 articles with more than 160,000 words. Utilising Wmatrix software to generate semantic tags of the words in the corpus, an analysis of thematic categorisations revealed that issues related to education were central to the teachers' discussions. In addition, an analysis of verb collocates of "students" using AntConc software confirmed that teachers expressed their dominance over the students in different ways. Interestingly, it was also found that teachers felt that they could become powerless in a specific context in a bureaucratic system. Overall, this study, acknowledging that power is a fundamental part of social relations, suggests that teachers should exercise their power in a healthy way that benefits students' learning.

This study aims to investigate the distribution across genres and the collocation of three synonymous verbs "cease," "halt," and "stop." Data were drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results from the distribution across genres shed light on the degree of formality of each verb. The verb "stop" appears to have a low degree of formality since it occurs most frequently in the TV and movie subtitles genre, an informal genre and occurs least frequently in formal contexts, i.e., the genre of academic texts. The verbs "cease" and "halt," in contrast, appear to have a higher degree formality as they occur least frequently in informal contexts, i.e., the spoken genre. Furthermore, it was found that the three verbs share certain collocates and themes, confirming their status as synonyms. However, despite these similarities, there are collocates and themes that are not shared. Hence, the synonymous verbs can be differentiated from each other based on the degree of formality and the collocation. Due to the difference in usage, they cannot be substitutable in all contexts.

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 study compares English dependent prepositions of the verbs agree, apply, and die shown in English language coursebooks and a corpus. It also suggests English prepositional verbs and their dependent prepositions that are suitable for teaching to L1 Thai learners and a method that should be employed for the instruction. The data were collected from four English language students' books used by many upper secondary schools in Thailand and the British National Corpus. The findings demonstrate that the coursebooks offer nearly all of the most frequent dependent prepositions of the verbs with scant sentence examples and collocations, while the corpus reveals more dependent prepositions with numerous sentence examples and collocations. Further, the corpus data provide many noun collocates that can be arranged into themes according to their semantic preferences. It is advisable that the coursebooks and corpus data should be used in Thai EFL class to complement each other. The most frequent constructions should also be taught as phraseology through indirect access to data-driven learning, with suggested inductive activities and examples of simplified key word in context concordances.

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 examined Thai senior high school EFL learners' receptive and productive knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs. The research employed the framework developed by Garnier and Schmitt (2015), which is the most widely acknowledged and functional concept of English polysemous phrasal verb knowledge. A battery of tests measuring the participants' receptive and productive knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs and vocabulary size were administered. The results indicated that Thai EFL high school learners had an intermediate understanding of polysemous English phrasal verbs. On the receptive knowledge test, participants scored higher than on the controlled and uncontrolled productive knowledge assessments. In addition, the results demonstrated a positive correlation between vocabulary size and receptive / productive knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs. The correlation analysis also revealed that a number of English polysemous phrasal verb knowledge dimensions were interrelated. This study provides empirical evidence that Thai EFL learners' knowledge of English polysemous phrasal verbs develops along a continuum from receptive to productive use. This research also suggests that polysemous phrasal verbs are multidimensional and progressive. Longitudinal experiments with varying L1 and education levels would be beneficial for future research.

Although numerous studies show that intelligence, measured by various tests, is a significant predictor of school achievement, this cognitive variable can only explain about 50% of the variance. It is also known that communicative language ability represents an important basis for learning subject content in the early period of formal education. One of the most comprehensive models of language ability (Bahman, Palmer, 1996), in addition to strategic knowledge, includes language knowledge that includes organizational language knowledge (grammatical and textual) and pragmatic language knowledge. Although the non-cognitive factors de facto participate in the explanation of school success, the aim of the research presented in this paper was to determine the predictive influence of intelligence and communicative language ability, i.e. organizational and pragmatic language knowledge on differences in school achievement in Serbian, English and Mathematics at the end of the first half of the fifth grade. The research was conducted on the sample of 197 fifth-grade students (51% girls, average age 11.5 months) in elementary schools in Loznica. The authors of the paper applied an adapted form of the test of communicative language abilities that was applied in research in a bilingual context (Šimonji-Cernak, 2005). Revisk was used to test verbal and manipulative intelligence (Biro, 1997). We started from the assumption that organizational language knowledge, has a more significant predictive influence on differences in school performance in the above-mentioned subjects than intelligence. Hierarchical regression analysis model determined that the predictor variables of organizational language knowledge explain 36.8%-49.4% of the variance in school achievement, while the intelligence variables are related to the achievements in Serbian and Mathematics and explain 0.6%-3% of the variance. A significant partial contribution of pragmatic knowledge and knowledge of verbs as an element of grammatical language knowledge were determined in all three subjects, as well as the contribution of knowledge of grammatical rules only in the Serbian language.The results confirm the hypothesis and indicate that for success in the mother tongue, foreign language and mathematics it is important to develop grammatical knowledge, and pay special attention to the importance and strategies of developing pragmatic language function in the period of early formal education.

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 study investigated Thai EFL learners' acquisition of English dative constructions, i.e., Prepositional Dative (PD) and Double Object (DO) constructions employing Radford's (2004) Minimalist accounts as a framework and Acceptability Judgment as a task. Two hypotheses were formulated. Firstly, the English PD would be accepted more readily than the English DO, due to the availability of PDs in both languages and the absence of DOs, by English standards, in Thai. Secondly, if there was L1 transfer, English counterparts of Thai DO and Thai Serial Verb constructions (SVC) would be initially accepted at a greater rate than English DOs. At later stages, given access to UG and adequate L2 input, the English DO would be accepted more significantly than the Thai DO and Thai SVC. Participants consisted of three groups of Thai EFL learners (beginning, intermediate, and upper intermediate). Results largely confirm both hypotheses. Particularly, Thai DOs and SVCs were rejected substantially from the intermediate learners onwards. This shows that the initial transfer of Thai DO and SVCs did not occur. Therefore, this study does not support Full Transfer at the initial stage (contra Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996). This study suggests L2 learners' indecision on the target L2 structure at the early stage and progress to attainment at later stages, in line with Wakabayashi's Lexical Learning and Lexical Transfer hypothesis (2009), and accessibility to UG at large.

This study examined the effects of working memory (WM), structure, and salience on the processing of English relative clauses (RCs) and participial reduced relative clauses (PRRCs) by L1 Thai learners. Salience in this research is the phonological alterations required for irregular verbs to inflect into the past participial form. The study included two types of irregulars with different salience levels. Seventy advanced L1 Thai learners took a reading span task and a self-paced reading task to assess their WM level and processing of past participial forms. The hypotheses proposed that WM, structure, and salience would influence online processing (reading times) and offline processing (comprehension accuracy). However, the findings showed differences between the higher and lower WM groups in only their online processing. The asymmetrical WM effects may be due to different levels of resource demands of the two processing tasks. Effects of structure and salience were observed on the learners' processing. The learners read the PRRCs faster than the RCs due to greater processing resources required for considering grammatical issues in the latter. Additionally, the participants processed the less salient irregulars faster because of greater phonological similarities between their past tense and past participial forms. Future research could explore either different classes of past participles in the salience hierarchy or how WM and salience affect the PRRC processing among learners with diverse L1 backgrounds.

The objective of this study was to investigate the influence of the popular Duolingo App on learning English in Thailand. Parts of the Duolingo English course for Thai speakers were used in a classroom-based intervention with two sections of English for Professional Purposes courses at a Thai university (n = 128). The students were split into two groups of users (n = 70) and non-users (n = 58), and a pre-test/post-test assessment of verb tense knowledge was conducted. The results showed that the Duolingo users had a significantly higher mean improvement in verb tense knowledge. Multiple regression showed that frequency of Duolingo use, perceived achievement, and perceived enjoyment positively influenced performance among the user group. Moderation analysis also showed that prior use of Duolingo partially moderated the relationships of level completion and achievement on score improvement. The implication is that Duolingo is a potentially useful supplement to classroom learning although its effects may change over time as users become habituated.

It is well documented that exercise plays a critical role in maintaining physical health. More recently, a growing body of research has begun to focus on the mental benefits of exercise ranging from reducing depression to enhancing various cognitive abilities like memory and attention. These abilities are paramount for learning to occur, and thus, exercise has the potential to facilitate and enhance the learning experience. To further this line of research, a within-subject study was conducted that analyzed the effect a short bout of exercise before learning a set of English phrasal verbs (PVs) had on both short- and long-term memory retention. In addition, a Japanese version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) questionnaire was used to measure the effect exercise had on mood. Using a pre- post and delayed posttest design, participants (N = 37) took part in two different learning conditions, a sedentary condition (sitting and reading) and exercise condition (treadmill walking) before learning a set of PVs. Using a paired samples t-test, results show that exercise does not improve short-term memory of PVs, but has a small-to-medium positive effect on long-term memory of PVs. Moreover, exercise had a strong positive effect on mood. In sum, this study supports the view that exercise enhances the encoding of new information into long-term memory and improves the wellbeing of the individual.