Lexical Representation and Processing

The predictability of a word modulates its acoustic duration. Such probabilistic effects can compete across linguistic domains (segments, syllables and adjacent-word contexts e.g., frequent words with infrequent syllables) and across local and aggregate contexts (e.g., a generally unpredictable word in a predictable context). This study aims to tease apart competing effects using Naive Discriminative Learning, which incorporates cue competition. The model was trained on English conversational speech from the Buckeye Corpus, using words as outcomes and segments, syllables, and adjacent words as cues. The connections between cues and outcomes were used to predict acoustic word duration. Results show that a word's duration is more strongly predicted by its syllables than its segments, and a word's predictability aggregated over all contexts is a stronger predictor than its specific local contexts. Our study presents a unified approach to modeling competition in probabilistic reduction.

This study compares probabilistic predictors based on information theory with Naive Discriminative Learning (NDL) predictors in modeling acoustic word duration, focusing on probabilistic reduction. We examine three models using the Buckeye corpus: one with NDL-derived predictors using informationtheoretic formulas, one with traditional NDL predictors, and one with N-gram probabilistic predictors. Results show that the N-gram model outperforms both NDL models, challenging the assumption that NDL is more effective due to its cognitive motivation. However, incorporating information-theoretic formulas into NDL improves model performance over the traditional model. This research highlights a) the need to incorporate not only frequency and contextual predictability but also average contextual predictability, and b) the importance of combining information-theoretic metrics of predictability and information derived from discriminative learning in modeling acoustic reduction.

This study presents a comprehensive linguistic analysis of AI prompt phraseology, focusing on the roles of synonymous prompt phrases and collocational prompt phrases in shaping the responses of large language models (LLMs). Using a dataset of 300 prompts tested across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the research investigates how subtle variations in wording influence the structure, tone, and effectiveness of AI-generated outputs. Results show that while synonymous phrases lead to stylistic and rhetorical variation, collocational phrases trigger more stable and structured responses due to their frequent appearance in training data. The study bridges applied linguistics and prompt engineering, providing theoretical insights and practical strategies for more precise and predictable human-AI interaction. Recommendations are offered for AI users, educators, and developers, emphasizing the strategic role of phraseological awareness in prompt design. The findings contribute to a growing interdisciplinary effort to optimize communication with AI systems through linguistically informed input strategies.

Knowledge of derivational affixes makes an important contribution to second language learners' success when reading. Yet while the effects of some learner variables (L2 proficiency, L1 background) have been investigated, there has been little research addressing the effects of varying characteristics of affixes on their acquisition. The goal of this study was to develop a range of metrics concerning the characteristics of derivational affixes with respect to their frequency of occurrence, semantic salience, and orthographic and phonological form. The study presents 19 metrics (58 when including variants) for 38 derivational affixes (12 prefixes; 26 suffixes) with a range of frequencies. Each metric is calculated across progressively larger vocabulary size levels in recognition of the fact that as learners' vocabulary knowledge develops, their exposure to and knowledge of words including derivational affixes grows. Examples of a selection of metrics for one affix are provided (the full data set being available online; https://osf.io/2vcg9/) as well as some global observations on the data set. It is hoped that these metrics will allow future analyses that provide insights into the process of L2 derivational affix acquisition (by exploring which metrics and to what degree the metrics contribute to acquisition) as well as insights into the order in which affixes are learnt and at what stage in L2 development different affixes are acquired.

This paper investigates the role of semantic transparency for the mental representation of derived words in Standard Modern Greek. Specifically, we seek to examine whether semantic transparency affects morphological representation and whether any potential effect is dichotomous or graded. To this end, we conducted a lexical decision task employing the immediate cross-modal priming paradigm, which is considered to tap into an abstract, modality independent level of representation in the core of the mental lexicon. Forty-eight university students, native speakers of Standard Modern Greek, participated in the experiment. Ninety prime–target pairs, each comprising a derived (or pseudo-derived) word as auditory prime and its (real or putative) noun-base as visual target, were equally distributed in 3 critical semantic transparency conditions (opaque, e.g., tsiγarízo–tsiγáro ‘to frizzle’–‘cigarette’; semitransparent, e.g., piθikízo–píθikos ‘to imitate’–‘ape’; transparent, e.g., psiθirízo–psíθiros ‘to whisper’–‘whisper’), according to their mean scores from 3 semantic relatedness rating pretests. The analyses of the behavioral data (i.e., reaction times, error rates) revealed statistically significant and equivalent priming in the transparent and semitransparent condition but no priming in the opaque condition. This dichotomous pattern of priming implies morphologically structured lexical representations for the transparent and semitransparent derived stems on the one hand, while holistic, morphologically unstructured lexical representations for the opaque derived and pseudo-derived stems on the other hand. Therefore, we suggest a semantically constrained dual-route account of morphological representation rather than a full-decomposition or a graded (distributed connectionist, discriminative learning) account. To conclude, our experimental findings point that the mental representation of derived words is crucially influenced by semantic transparency in Standard Modern Greek, as is the case with many other Indo-European languages (e.g., English, French, Italian, Spanish, Bulgarian, Serbian, Croatian, Polish, Russian) and in contrast to Semitic languages (e.g., Arabic, Hebrew, Maltese).

Word knowledge is essential in any aspect of second language acquisition (e.g., Nation, 2001). Despite such importance, even advanced L2 learners continually use L2 words inappropriately (Sonaiya, 1991). The present study attempted to shed more light on successful L2 word meaning knowledge development, which was investigated through an experiment called the semantic judgment test with English near-synonyms. Non-native speakers (NNS) and native speakers (NS) participated in the experiment. All NNS participants were homogeneous EFL learners (n = 20) who were enrolled in a four-year program at a university in Japan at the time of investigation. All NS participants (n = 20) were those who were working at a military base overseas or freshmen at a university in U.S. To examine NNS participants' (L2 learners) possible acquisition of L2 specific word-senses, the semantic judgment test was adapted from Jiang (2002, 2004a). This was a paper-pencil type of task where participants were asked to judge whether presented English word pairs (n = 79) were related in meaning as quickly as possible.

Substantial research has been undertaken to understand the relationship between spelling and sound, but we know little about the relationship between spelling and meaning in alphabetic writing systems. We present a computational analysis of English writing in which we develop new constructs to describe this relationship. Diagnosticity captures the amount of meaningful information in a given spelling, whereas specificity estimates the degree of dispersion of this meaning across different spellings for a particular sound sequence. Using these two constructs, we demonstrate that particular suffix spellings tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. We then show across three paradigms (nonword classification, spelling, and eye tracking during sentence reading) that this form of regularity between spelling and meaning influences the behaviour of skilled readers, and that the degree of this behavioural sensitivity mirrors the strength of spelling-to-meaning regularities in the writing system. We close by arguing that English spelling may have become fractionated such that the high degree of spelling-sound inconsistency maximises the transmission of meaningful information. 1. Introduction One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky, 1871/1983 Recent research has uncovered substantial patterns of non-arbitrariness in language (see Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015, for review). Corpus studies reveal subtle phonological differences between words that mean different things: for example, words referring to objects are composed of different sounds and are stressed in different positions than words referring to actions (Cassidy & Kelly, 1991; Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014). These phonological cues play an important role in language acquisition (Fitneva, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2009) and aid syntactic processing in adulthood (Farmer, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2006; Monaghan, Christiansen, Farmer, & Fitneva, 2012). These findings go against the traditional perspective that the links between phonological forms and concepts are arbitrary (De Saussure, 1983). In this article, we investigate the nature of statistical regularities between the written forms of English words and their meanings, focusing on derivational suffixation. These units capture the commonality between known words that are related in meaning (e.g. as in 'actress', 'waitress') and provide a basis for language productivity, allowing us to label new concepts and phenomena in the ever-changing world (e.g. 'Trumpists' and 'Brexiteers'; see Algeo, 1991). We present a computational analysis of English writing in which we develop new constructs to describe the relationship between spelling and meaning. This analysis demonstrates that particular suffix spellings tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. We then show across three paradigms that skilled readers are highly sensitive to this form of regularity, and that this sensitivity mirrors the strength of spelling-to-meaning regularities in the writing system. We close by arguing that English spelling may have become fractionated in such a way that the high degree of spelling-sound inconsistency maximises the transmission of meaningful information in the service of skilled reading. 1.1. Phonological cues to lexical categories This paper focuses on one aspect of word meaning, specifically, lexical category (e.g. noun, adjective, verb; see Baayen, Milin, Durdevic, Hendrix, & Marelli, 2011, for a similar conceptualisation of "meaning"). There is a growing body of research suggesting that statistical information about lexical category is encoded in spoken word forms. This research begins with Kelly's (1992) seminal work demonstrating that stress, syllable number, word duration, voicing, and vowel type provide probabilistic cues to lexical category. For example, in English, nouns tend to have more syllables than verbs and fewer consonants per syllable. Further, bisyllabic nouns are likely to have stress

SummaryWe have shown how an experimental technique borrowed from cognitive psychology, the Lexical Decision Task, can be used to study morphology. In particular, we have shown that native speakers of English respond positively more often to novel words of the form Xiveness than they do to words of the form Xivity, a result which was predicted from the greater productivity of the former pattern, as determined by techniques of linguistic analysis. Our finding holds true under a variety of instructions. While the result of our study is not particularly surprising, we hope that in demonstrating that the Lexical Decision Task is a reliable tool in the study of morphology we will encourage further research along the lines that we have developed.

Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due to limited research on L1 influence on L2 learners’ development of receptive and productive knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study is an attempt to address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize and use congruent English adjective + noun collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates in a Vietnamese university who completed three collocational tests: the Receptive Knowledge Test, the Productive Knowledge Test, and the paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, in contrast to language transfer theory, congruent collocations posed considerably more problems for the students in identifying the well-formed lexical combinations and using them accurately in writing. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incong...

Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners’ language proficiency. Due to limited research on L1 influence on L2 learners’ development of receptive and productive knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study is an attempt to address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize and use congruent English adjective + noun collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates in a Vietnamese university who completed three collocational tests: the Receptive Knowledge Test, the Productive Knowledge Test, and the paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, in contrast to language transfer theory, congruent collocations posed considerably more problems for the students in identifying the well-formed lexical combinations and using them accurately in writing. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incong...

This study intended to explore the different types of phraseological units in IELTS academic writing task 2 and probe into the IELTS candidates’ perceptions of phraseological competence. To this end, a corpus entailing 100 essays (26,423 words) written for IELTS writing task 2 was scrutinized, through which phraseological units were extracted and their types were identified based on Moon’s (Phraseology: Theory, analysis, and application, 1998) typology. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine IELTS candidates. The results indicated that simple formulae were the most commonly used phraseological units in IELTS writing task 2. The interview data, using inductive thematic and summative content analyses, also demonstrated that IELTS candidates have had varying perceptions of phraseological competence, wherein higher band score candidates appeared to have a deeper and more accurate understanding of the concept. As for the candidates’ perceived phraseological comp...

In English, nasal place assimilation occurs across word boundaries, such as ten bucks pronounced as te[m] bucks. Assimilation can be viewed as a reduction or loss of the assimilation target's place cue (/n/ in ten), and simultaneously as an enhancement of the assimilation trigger's place cue (/b/ in bucks) by spreading its place cue earlier in the signal. A message-oriented phonological approach predicts that assimilation is sensitive to the relative contextual inferrability of both the target and trigger words: More assimilation should be observed for more contextually predictable target words, while less assimilation should be observed for contextually more predictable trigger words. These predictions deviate from accounts that view assimilation solely as reduction. To test these predictions, sequences which license assimilation were extracted from a conversational speech corpus. Both categorical assimilation (based on close phonetic transcription) and gradient acoustic assimilation (based on F2) were analyzed. As predicted, assimilation was more likely both when a target like ten was high in predictability and when its trigger bucks was low in predictability. Assimilation thus serves as both reduction and enhancement, and can be used to manage redundancy in the speech signal. More broadly, this constitutes evidence for the influence of communicative pressures on phonology.

Speakers adapt their speech to increase clarity in the presence of background noise (Lombard speech) [1, 2]. However, they also modify their speech to be efficient by shortening word duration in more predictable contexts [3]. To meet these two communicative functions, speakers will attempt to resolve any conflicting communicative demands. The present study focuses on how this can be resolved in the acoustic domain. A total of 1520 target CV syllables were annotated and analysed from 38 German speakers in 2 white-noise (no noise vs. -10 dB SNR) and 2 surprisal (H vs. L) contexts. Median fundamental frequency (F0), intensity range, and syllable duration were extracted. Our results revealed effects of both noise and surprisal on syllable duration and intensity range, but only an effect of noise on F0. This might suggest redundant (multi-dimensional) acoustic coding in Lombard speech modification, but not so in surprisal modification.

This study investigates the major difficulties experienced and perceived by students of Chinese as an additional language (CAL), as well as the coping strategies they employed. It is a qualitative, 8-week case study that attempts to provide descriptions and analyses of a particular group of learners' learning difficulties ana their coping strategiaL specific contexts. Data include classroom observations, tape recordings, questionnaires, and formal interviews with students. Major questions addressed are twofold: What are the major difficulties in learning CAL, and how do difficulties differ among the learners? How do learners cope with their difficulties and how varied are the strategies among them? It is concluded that depending on the number of variables, different students may experience a variety of difficulties in learning CAL and adopt different coping strategies for the same difficulty. An awareness of this may help the teacher diagnose the students' language learning difficulties more effectively and accordingly provide more effective instruction. Two research questions arise from this study: What are the real obstacles that prevent students from overcoming difficulties no matter how hard they try? Are there any strategies in addition to the ones adopted by the students in this study that can help others overcome their difficulties more efficiently? Thirty-five references and two appendices (the student questionnaire and interview guidelines) are included. (KFT) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.

The following paper explores the link between production difficulty and grammatical variability. Using a sub-sample of the Switchboard Corpus of American English (285 transcripts, 34 speakers), this paper shows that the presence of variable contexts does not positively correlate with two metrics of production difficulty, namely filled pauses (umanduh) and unfilled pauses (speech planning time). When 20 morphosyntactic variables are considered collectively (N=6,268), there is no positive effect. In other words, variable contexts do not correlate with measurable production difficulties. These results challenge the view that grammatical variability is somehow sub-optimal for speakers, with additional burdensome cognitive planning.

The present study investigated cross-language influences in the processing of binomial expressions (knife and fork), from a first language (L1) to a second language (L2) and from L2 to L1. Two groups of unbalanced bilinguals (Chinese/L1-English/L2 and English/L1-Chinese/L2) and a control group of English monolinguals performed a visual lexical decision task that incorporated unmasked priming. To assess cross-language influences, we used three types of expressions: congruent binomials (English binomials that have translation equivalents in Chinese), English-only binomials, and Chinese-only binomials translated into English. Lexical decision latencies to the last word (fork) in a binomial (knife and fork) were compared with response latencies to the same word in a matched control phrase (spoon and fork). We found that (1) Chinese-English bilinguals showed a significant priming effect for congruent binomials but no facilitation for English-only binomials, (2) English-Chinese bilinguals showed a trend toward priming for congruent binomials, which did not reach statistical significance, and no priming for English-only binomials, (3) English monolinguals showed comparable priming for congruent and English-only binomials. With respect to the Chinese-only binomials, none of the three participant groups showed priming for translated Chinese-only binomials over controls. These findings suggest that L1 influences the processing of L2 binomials, and that there may be some cross-linguistic influence in the opposite direction, i.e., from L2 to L1, although to a lesser extent.

In English, nasal place assimilation occurs across word boundaries, such as ten bucks pronounced as te[m] bucks. Assimilation can be viewed as a reduction or loss of the assimilation target's place cue (/n/ in ten), and simultaneously as an enhancement of the assimilation trigger's place cue (/b/ in bucks) by spreading its place cue earlier in the signal. A message-oriented phonological approach predicts that assimilation is sensitive to the relative contextual inferrability of both the target and trigger words: More assimilation should be observed for more contextually predictable target words, while less assimilation should be observed for contextually more predictable trigger words. These predictions deviate from accounts that view assimilation solely as reduction. To test these predictions, sequences which license assimilation were extracted from a conversational speech corpus. Both categorical assimilation (based on close phonetic transcription) and gradient acoustic assimilation (based on F2) were analyzed. As predicted, assimilation was more likely both when a target like ten was high in predictability and when its trigger bucks was low in predictability. Assimilation thus serves as both reduction and enhancement, and can be used to manage redundancy in the speech signal. More broadly, this constitutes evidence for the influence of communicative pressures on phonology.

Exposure to statistical patterns of language use affects language production and comprehension. In this longitudinal study of English language learner (ELL) university students, we examined the interplay between language experience and language statistics as a window into the formation and stability of morphological representations in memory. We hypothesized that within-participant change in sensitivity to distributional properties of complex words on written production would reflect changes in morphological knowledge. At two timepoints, separated by 8 months of language exposure, a sample of ELLs (n = 196) completed a written suffix completion task. The largest gains in production accuracy were observed for derived words ending in less productive suffixes. In addition, across both timepoints we found a consistent effect of derivational family entropy, such that derived words belonging to morphological families with equally dominant members were less accurately produced. Both effects indicate that ELLs exploit distributional cues to morphological structure and shed light on two aspects of morphological knowledge in ELLs. First, knowledge of suffixes becomes more entrenched in memory, independently of knowledge of the full forms of derived words. Second, ELLs draw upon interlexical connections between morphological family members during written word production.

The following article derives from the author's doctoral dissertation concerning teaching Chinese as a foreign language (ChFL). It aims at investigating and assessing the challenges Chinese teachers encounter in the process of ChFL teaching to the beginner students. First, the theoretical background of ChFL teaching is provided, with emphasis on the specificity of Chinese. Then, the issues and challenges of ChFL teaching are examined, especially in terms of the syllabus and coursebook choice and teaching methods. In the final part of the article, the teaching and learning implications are presented.

Collocational competence is of critical importance to EFL learners' language proficiency. Due to limited research on L1 influence on L2 learners' development of receptive and productive knowledge of adjective + noun collocations, especially in the context of Vietnam, this study is an attempt to address these gaps by investigating whether Vietnamese learners could recognize and use congruent English adjective + noun collocations more accurately than incongruent ones. Data were collected from 72 English-major undergraduates in a Vietnamese university who completed three types of collocational tests: the Receptive Knowledge Test, the Productive Knowledge Test, and the paragraph-writing test. Results showed that, in contrast to language transfer theory, congruent collocations posed considerably more problems for the students in identifying the well-formed lexical combinations and using them accurately in writing. These findings highlight the importance of explicitly teaching congruent and incongruent collocations in EFL classrooms.

Conventional expressions, a subset of multiword units, are the target of the current study, which aims to address questions concerning native and nonnative speakers' knowledge and processing of a set of such strings. To this end, 13 expressions identified as conventional in the Southwest of France were tested in an online contextualized naturalness judgment task, which was administered to 20 French natives, 20 long-stay Anglophone nonnative speakers of French (i.e., >1 year in the Southwest of France), and 20 short-stay Anglophones (i.e., 4-6 months in the same region). The naturalness judgments provided by the participants revealed that all groups judged the conventional expressions similarly and significantly differently from the matched conditions, which involved grammatical but not conventional strings. The reaction time results suggested that conventional expressions have a mental correlate for both natives and nonnatives, although the processing patterns recorded differed for the two groups. The reaction time results are argued to be most consistent with a pragmatic competence model of conventional expression processing. Most (if not all) language learners will have had the experience of being told that an utterance-although perfectly grammatical and comprehensible-is unacceptable because one simply does not say it like that in the language in question. Recourse to this type of response generally indicates that the string uttered by the nonnative speaker (NNS) is phraseologically odd and that the student and teacher have stumbled onto the vast expanse of what can very generally be referred to as multiword units. A multiword unit is just that: a single unit composed of more than one word, or, to put it another way, a string whose co-occurrence restrictions are arbitrary

This study investigated learner knowledge of the figurative meanings of 30 collocations that can be both literal and figurative. One hundred and seven Chilean Spanish-speaking university students of English were asked to complete a meaning-recall collocation test in which the target items were embedded in non-defining sentences. Results showed limited collocation knowledge, with a mean score of 33% correct. The study also examined the effects of frequency, semantic transparency, year at university, and everyday engagement with the second language (L2) outside the classroom on this collocation knowledge. Mixed-effects modelling indicated that there was no relationship between frequency and semantic transparency and the knowledge of the figurative meanings. However, a positive relationship was found between this knowledge and year at university, time spent in an English-speaking country, and time spent reading.

It is now clear that vocabulary typically behaves not as single words which are held together by syntax, but rather has a strong tendency to occur in multiword phraseological units. Formulaic language is very common in language overall, in both spoken and written modes. For example, Erman and Warren (2000) calculated that 52-8% of the language they analyzed was formulaic, and Foster (2001) came up with a fi gure of 32% using different procedures and criteria. Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999) found that around 30% of the words in their conversation corpus consisted of lexical bundles, and about 21% of their academic prose corpus. Howarth (1998) looked at frequent verbs in a social science/academic corpus and found that they occurred in either restricted collocations or in idioms in 31-40% of the cases. This research convincingly shows that formulaic language is no mere peripheral feature of language, but rather is a ubiquitous and essential feature of how it is used.

The following article derives from the author's doctoral dissertation concerning teaching Chinese as a foreign language (ChFL). It aims at investigating and assessing the challenges Chinese teachers encounter in the process of ChFL teaching to the beginner students. First, the theoretical background of ChFL teaching is provided, with emphasis on the specificity of Chinese. Then, the issues and challenges of ChFL teaching are examined, especially in terms of the syllabus and coursebook choice and teaching methods. In the final part of the article, the teaching and learning implications are presented.

In this article we focus on ‘false cognates’, lexical items that have overlapping orthographic/phonological properties but little or no semantic overlap. False-cognate pairs were created from French (second language or L2) and English (first language or L1) items by manipulating the levels of morphological correspondence between them. Our aim was to test whether mismatches in morphological structure affected success on a low-frequency backward lexical translation task. Fifty-eight participants, divided into four groups (A-level; degree level; adult learners; bilinguals) were tested on monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose morphological structure in French exceeded that of their English counterpart (mismatch), and control items. Translation success rate followed a uniform pattern: control > mismatch > simplex > complex. With respect to the false-friend effect, participant responses were also uniform: complex > simplex > mismatch. It ...

Three profoundly deaf individuals undertook a low-frequency backward lexical translation task (French/English), where morphological structure was manipulated and orthographic distance between test items was measured. Conditions included monomorphemic items (simplex), polymorphemic items (complex), items whose French morphological structure exceeded their English counterpart (mismatch), and a control. Order of translation success was uniform: control > mismatch > simplex > complex, as was order for false-cognate errors: complex > simplex > mismatch, patterning precisely with hearing participants (Janke and Kolokonte, 2014). We discuss how these results highlight a route for future studies to disentangle phonology and orthography further from morphology in first-language interference.

Multi-word units (MWUs) are defined as two or more words that commonly co-occur. There is evidence that knowledge of high-frequency MWUs is essential to language fluency, leading to growing research identifying valuable MWUs to learn and the impact of L1-L2 congruency and semantic transparency on the learning burden of MWUs. Therefore, there needs to be more research on which MWUs should be selected with these criteria. This article highlights an investigation of the role of congruency and semantic transparency using a corpus-based list that offers a sizable sample of MWUs that appear in general English. In this study, we analysed a list of 11,212 high-frequency MWUs created using a lemmatised concgramming approach to examine the role of semantic transparency and L1-L2 congruency. The list was translated into Persian, and L1-L2 congruency ratings were given to each item. The list was also classified based on Grant and Bauer's (2004) taxonomy to explore the role of semantic transparency to determine the extent to which these two factors play a role in the learning burden of the MWUs. The results showed that 85% of items were literal, and a low number of opaque items were found in the high L1-L2 congruency rating, suggesting a positive relationship between congruency and transparency. The current research then discusses the implications of these two criteria for teaching English as a

Substantial research has been undertaken to understand the relationship between spelling and sound, but we know little about the relationship between spelling and meaning in alphabetic writing systems. We present a computational analysis of English writing in which we develop new constructs to describe this relationship. Diagnosticity captures the amount of meaningful information in a given spelling, whereas specificity estimates the degree of dispersion of this meaning across different spellings for a particular sound sequence. Using these two constructs, we demonstrate that particular suffix spellings tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. We then show across three paradigms (nonword classification, spelling, and eye tracking during sentence reading) that this form of regularity between spelling and meaning influences the behaviour of skilled readers, and that the degree of this behavioural sensitivity mirrors the strength of spelling-to-meaning regularities in the writing system. We close by arguing that English spelling may have become fractionated such that the high degree of spelling-sound inconsistency maximises the transmission of meaningful information. 1. Introduction One, two! One, two! And through and through The vorpal blade went snicker-snack! Lewis Carroll, Jabberwocky, 1871/1983 Recent research has uncovered substantial patterns of non-arbitrariness in language (see Dingemanse, Blasi, Lupyan, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2015, for review). Corpus studies reveal subtle phonological differences between words that mean different things: for example, words referring to objects are composed of different sounds and are stressed in different positions than words referring to actions (Cassidy & Kelly, 1991; Monaghan, Shillcock, Christiansen, & Kirby, 2014). These phonological cues play an important role in language acquisition (Fitneva, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2009) and aid syntactic processing in adulthood (Farmer, Christiansen, & Monaghan, 2006; Monaghan, Christiansen, Farmer, & Fitneva, 2012). These findings go against the traditional perspective that the links between phonological forms and concepts are arbitrary (De Saussure, 1983). In this article, we investigate the nature of statistical regularities between the written forms of English words and their meanings, focusing on derivational suffixation. These units capture the commonality between known words that are related in meaning (e.g. as in 'actress', 'waitress') and provide a basis for language productivity, allowing us to label new concepts and phenomena in the ever-changing world (e.g. 'Trumpists' and 'Brexiteers'; see Algeo, 1991). We present a computational analysis of English writing in which we develop new constructs to describe the relationship between spelling and meaning. This analysis demonstrates that particular suffix spellings tend to be reserved for particular meaningful functions. We then show across three paradigms that skilled readers are highly sensitive to this form of regularity, and that this sensitivity mirrors the strength of spelling-to-meaning regularities in the writing system. We close by arguing that English spelling may have become fractionated in such a way that the high degree of spelling-sound inconsistency maximises the transmission of meaningful information in the service of skilled reading. 1.1. Phonological cues to lexical categories This paper focuses on one aspect of word meaning, specifically, lexical category (e.g. noun, adjective, verb; see Baayen, Milin, Durdevic, Hendrix, & Marelli, 2011, for a similar conceptualisation of "meaning"). There is a growing body of research suggesting that statistical information about lexical category is encoded in spoken word forms. This research begins with Kelly's (1992) seminal work demonstrating that stress, syllable number, word duration, voicing, and vowel type provide probabilistic cues to lexical category. For example, in English, nouns tend to have more syllables than verbs and fewer consonants per syllable. Further, bisyllabic nouns are likely to have stress

Given China's fast-growing economy, more people have been motivated to learn Mandarin; however, many encounter challenges in learning the complex characters and consequently abandon it. In view of South Africa's decision to introduce Mandarin as a second additional language in schools (by choice) and China having to cater for non-native Chinese learners in certain schools,

Despite the importance of mastering different types of formulaic sequences in a second language, little is known about the relative effect of different input modes on their acquisition. This study explores the learning of a particular type of formulaic language (binomials) in three input modes (reading-only, listening-only, and reading-while-listening) at different frequencies of exposure (2, 4, 5 and 6 occurrences). Arabic learners of English were presented with three stories, each in a different mode, that contained novel binomials (e.g., wires and pipes) and existing binomials (e.g., brother and sister). Two post-tests (multiple-choice and familiarity ratings) assessed learners’ knowledge of the binomials. Results showed that reading-only and reading-while-listening led to better performance on the tasks than listening-only. Frequency of exposure had an effect on the perceived familiarity of binomials.

This PhD thesis examines the role of semantic transparency (ST) for the representation and processing of derived words in Standard Modern Greek. The first part (Chapters 2–6) provides a critical literature review regarding (a) the concept of ST; (b) the models about the representation and processing of morphologically complex words; (c) the linguistic, cross-linguistic, extra-/socio-linguistic parameters and individual differences involved in morphological processing; (d) the experimental methodology of morphological priming; (e) the case of Standard Modern Greek. In the empirical part (Chapters 7–12), we first conducted three ST judgment pretests for 566 word pairs (each comprising a derived / pseudo-derived verb or adjective and its real / putative noun base, e.g., σκουπίζω-σκούπα ‘to sweep - broom’, δασικός-δάσος ‘forestial - forest’, λαχανιάζω-λάχανο ‘to pant - cabbage’) with 240 participants (typical adult native speakers, male and female students at AUTH) who rated the semantic relatedness between the members of each word pair by means of a seven-point Likert-type scale. Then, we experimentally explored whether ST affects morphological processing and whether any effect is dichotomous or graded by means of morphological priming lexical decision tasks. To this end, we selected 90 prime-target pairs from the pretests and distributed them in three critical ST conditions (opaque, e.g., σκαλίζω-σκαλί ‘to hoe - stairstep’; semitransparent, e.g., ψειρίζω-ψείρα ‘to split hairs - louse’; transparent, e.g., χτενίζω-χτένα ‘to comb - comb’). Next, we carried out three online lexical decision experiments with different priming protocols that tap into different stages / levels of the lexical representation and processing system: (a) forward masked visual priming for early / peripheral processing; (b) overt visual priming for late / central processing; (c) immediate cross-modal priming for modality-independent central lexical representation. In each experiment, participants were matched for sex (male, female) and faculty type (humanities and social sciences, natural sciences and engineering). Analyses of the behavioral data (reaction times, error rates) revealed that masked priming is statistically significant and equivalent in the opaque, semitransparent, and transparent condition (no ST effect). On the other hand, overt priming, as well as immediate cross-modal priming, is statistically significant and equivalent in the transparent and semitransparent condition, but absent in the opaque condition (dichotomous ST effect). Furthermore, sex and faculty type were not found to have a significant impact on morphological priming. Taken together, the experimental findings indicate that ST is not significantly involved in the early / peripheral stages of word recognition, but plays a determinant role in the late / central processing and representation of derived words, where morphemes appear to function as morpho-semantic units. In fact, the dichotomous pattern of ST effects observed in overt and cross-modal priming implies morphologically structured lexical representations for transparent and semitransparent derivatives on the one hand, yet morphologically unstructured lexical representations for opaque derivatives and pseudo-derivatives on the other hand. We discuss our results in terms of (a) the modeling of morphological processing and the mental lexicon; (b) the theoretical relationship between morphological structure and lexical meaning; (c) the conceptualization of ST; (d) the cross-linguistic and extra-/socio-linguistic variability in morphological processing.

The aim of the study reported in this thesis is twofold: to build a learner corpus of Nigerian English, and to investigate the production and use of collocations by Nigerian English learners. Computer learner corpora have offered us a new tool for better analysis and understanding of learner language enabling us to either reinforce or challenge some of our most-deeply rooted ideas about learner language. While learner corpus research has grown rapidly within its relatively short existence, there is no learner corpus of Nigerian English. This study built a half a million words Nigerian Learner Corpus of English (NILECORP) representing four proficiency levels (A2, B1, B2 and C1). While various studies have shown that learners have difficulties producing collocations, there has been a dearth of studies of collocations within the context of World Englishes. This study investigates the production and use of collocations by Yoruba-speaking Nigerian English learners not based on the notion...

Studies have indicated that formulaic sequences are processed significantly faster than newly created phrases; however, the source of this processing advantage has not been sufficiently investigated in the literature. The Holistic Approach justifies this processing advantage for formulaic sequences with the argument that they are processed and stored as single units without being decomposed into their constituents. On the contrary, Distributed Representation argues against holistic processing. It proposes instead that formulaic sequences are processed through their parts as in novel non-formulaic phrases. Their constituents form a mutual association in the sense that the mental activation of a component part activates the other, thus leading to faster processing. The present study reports findings from a masked priming experiment investigating Turkish speech formulas' online processing in native processing. Results show that speech formulas and their matched novel phrases are processed similarly, as evidenced by no significant difference in reaction times. These findings support Distributed Representation in the processing of formulaic sequences. Results also suggest that non-transparent formulas are processed more slowly than transparent ones.

Phonological knowledge is influenced by a variety of cues that reflect predictability (e.g. semantic predictability). Listeners utilize various aspects of predictability when determining what they have heard. In the present paper, we ask how aspects of the acoustic phonetic signal (e.g. speaking rate) interact with other knowledge reflecting predictability (e.g. lexical frequency and collocation strength) to influence how speech is perceived. Specifically, we examine perception of function words by native and non-native speakers. Our results suggest that both native and non-native speakers are sensitive to factors that influence the predictability of the signal, including speaking rate, frequency, and collocation strength, when listening to speech, and use these factors to predict the phonological structure of stretches of ambiguous speech. However, reliance on these cues differs as a function of their experience and proficiency with the target language. Non-native speakers are less...

The importance of collocations in L2 language development is well established, but it is also widely acknowledged that collocations are difficult for L2 learners to acquire. Several factors have been investigated that affect their learnability, such as their frequency and the influence of the learner’s first language. Nevertheless, the possible effect of the degree of semantic transparency of the collocation being learnt has not yet been sufficiently addressed. Furthermore, the few existing studies have failed to account for the effect of prior familiarity with the constituent words when assessing the learning of collocations. This thesis addresses these gaps by investigating whether the degree of semantic transparency of L2 collocations affects their learnability when prior familiarity is controlled for. Forty-four English verb-noun collocations were selected on the basis of rigorous criteria. Two types of semantic transparency measure were obtained for each collocation. First, hum...

This study intended to explore the different types of phraseological units in IELTS academic writing task 2 and probe into the IELTS candidates’ perceptions of phraseological competence. To this end, a corpus entailing 100 essays (26,423 words) written for IELTS writing task 2 was scrutinized, through which phraseological units were extracted and their types were identified based on Moon’s (Phraseology: Theory, analysis, and application, 1998) typology. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with nine IELTS candidates. The results indicated that simple formulae were the most commonly used phraseological units in IELTS writing task 2. The interview data, using inductive thematic and summative content analyses, also demonstrated that IELTS candidates have had varying perceptions of phraseological competence, wherein higher band score candidates appeared to have a deeper and more accurate understanding of the concept. As for the candidates’ perceived phraseological comp...

The importance of collocations in L2 language development is well established, but it is also widely acknowledged that collocations are difficult for L2 learners to acquire. Several factors have been investigated that affect their learnability, such as their frequency and the influence of the learner’s first language. Nevertheless, the possible effect of the degree of semantic transparency of the collocation being learnt has not yet been sufficiently addressed. Furthermore, the few existing studies have failed to account for the effect of prior familiarity with the constituent words when assessing the learning of collocations. This thesis addresses these gaps by investigating whether the degree of semantic transparency of L2 collocations affects their learnability when prior familiarity is controlled for. Forty-four English verb-noun collocations were selected on the basis of rigorous criteria. Two types of semantic transparency measure were obtained for each collocation. First, hum...

Semantic transparency is widely believed to affect the processing of compound words. It has been described as the degree to which the meaning of the constituent is retained in the meaning of the whole compound, but also as the degree to which the meaning of the compound is predictable from the meaning of the constituents. Furthermore, semantic transparency has been operationalized in various ways (e.g., Libben 2010; Libben et al. 2003; Sandra 1990). We describe a study in which transparency was measured based on: 1) linguistic criteria used by informed judges, 2) participant ratings of a) how predictable a compound’s meaning was from its parts, and b) the extent that each constituent retains its meaning in the compound, 3) Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA; Landauer & Dumais 1997) scores for the compound and each constituent. We used these measures to test the claim that meaning retention ratings reflect the semantic similarity between a compound’s meaning and the constituent meaning, w...

Previous studies suggest that writing helps reading development in Chinese in both first and second language settings by enabling higher-quality orthographic representation of the characters. This study investigated the comparative effectiveness of reading, animation, and writing in developing foreign language learners' orthographic knowledge of Chinese and found that, for learners with existing orthographic knowledge, the three learning conditions facilitated character learning in different ways: Writing and animation both led to better form recognition, while reading produced superior meaning and sound recalls. In addition, the effect of animation in meaning recall was also better than writing. In developing the skill of reproducing characters from memory, writing was superior. Implications for the teaching and learning of Chinese characters are offered.

Theories of Focus Projection claim that a single pitch accent on a verb's argument is sufficient to prosodically mark that verb as part of the focus, negating the need for a prenuclear accent on the verb itself. The present study employed online lexical processing to test this claim empirically. In three cross-modal associative priming experiments, listeners heard English SVO sentences with/without prenuclear accenting on the verb in both broad (VP) and narrow (object) focus contexts. Results showed that the absence of a prenuclear accent in broad focus contexts did not disrupt priming, but the presence of one in narrow focus contexts did. This disruption was found to be somewhat modulated by individual differences in "autistic traits". Overall, the findings are interpreted as supporting a model that includes both (a) a Focus Projection mechanism and (b) an information structural function for prenuclear accents, with the latter possibly subject to cross-listener variation.

This interlanguage study examines the L2 mental lexicon of Thai EFL learners with different degrees of language exposure-i.e., the high exposure group and the low exposure group. The scores from the English Language Exposure (ELE) Questionnaire were used to select the two groups of participants. To explore the lexical processing and the organization of the mental lexicon, two psycholinguistic tasks were employed: lexical decision task (LDT) and word association task (WAT). The LDT was used to investigate the semantic priming effect of the prime on the target words which in this study are the frequently cooccurring words or the lexical collocations of the verb + noun in the Thai learners of English with high and low exposure to English. The results exhibit that the collocational processing is faster than the noncollocation. However, the difference is not outstanding. The WAT (McNeill, 1966) was conducted to investigate the organization of L2 learner's mental lexicon or the association between the words prompted and their networks. The findings indicate that the L2 mental lexicon is mostly meaning-based. The majority of links between words in the mental lexicon engages meaning and concept. The results support the interlanguage phenomenon that the two groups of participants have different mental lexicon and different paths of lexical access. The learners with high degree of language exposure tend to have the stronger links between English words in the lexicon than the learners with low exposure. The high-exposure learners produce more meaningful responses than the low-exposure learners do. The production of phrases and chunks by the high-exposure learners is considered a characteristic of native speakers. On the other hand, the production of the low exposure group exhibits the L1 transfer found common in EFL learners.

This study examined the impact of access to word pronunciations on assessing Chinese learners' vocabulary knowledge. Chinese heritage learners (HLs) and foreign language learners (FLs) studying in American universities were administered a computer-based test in which they were to first select a picture that represented the meaning of a target word presented in characters, and then answer the same item presented in both characters and pinyin. Pinyin access substantially increased the test reliability for both groups of learners. The no-pinyin and pinyin conditions were less distinct for FLs than HLs. In the no-pinyin condition, the groups showed no significant score difference, whereas in the pinyin condition, HLs significantly outperformed FLs. HLs' proportion of cases who successfully corrected the original choices was also notably higher. These findings suggested that pinyin availability differentially impacted the two groups. Implications for vocabulary knowledge assessment for different types of Chinese learners are discussed.

Whilst there is an ever growing bulk of research focused solely on either single word items or idioms (formulaic sequences as they are usually known) through explicit instruction, this article contributes towards a somewhat severely under-researched field in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context: the importance of incidental learning of collocation knowledge in comprehending idiomatic expressions within an authentic classroom setting in Saudi Arabia. To test this assertion, the study comprised a sample of 34 Arabic-speaking learners of English taking summer BA English courses. Learners' familiarity of idiom was measured by a means of a background questionnaire which was administered at the beginning of the study. In addition, they were tested by examining the comprehension of the figurative meanings of 15 collocations and the non-compositionality meanings of 15 idiomatic expressions occurring in their EFL coursebook. Learners completed a cloze receptive task and an active recognition task in which each contained short texts composed of 15 collocations and 15 idiomatic expressions respectively. A closer examination of the data reveals that the learning of idiomatic expressions was significantly lower than that of collocations even when target idiomatic expressions were supplemented by contextualized information. It is argued that most learners' attitudes towards the identification of idioms indicated that they are not familiar with multiword items such as idioms. Interestingly, the results demonstrated that the knowledge of collocations was effective in the learning of idioms. The article concludes by a thorough discussion of these results in relation to their pedagogical implications.

While it is widely acknowledged that both predictive expectations and retrodictive integration influence language processing, the individual differences that affect these two processes and the best metrics for observing them have yet to be fully described. The present study aims to contribute to the debate by investigating the extent to which experienced-based variables modulate the processing of word pairs (bigrams). Specifically, we investigate how age and reading experience correlate with lexical anticipation and integration, and how this effect can be captured by the metrics of forward and backward transition probability (TP). Participants read more and less strongly associated bigrams, paired to control for known lexical covariates such as bigram frequency and meaning (i.e., absolute control, total control, absolute silence, total silence) in a self-paced reading (SPR) task. They additionally completed assessments of exposure to print text (Author Recognition Test, Shipley vocabulary assessment, Words that Go Together task) and provided their age. Results show that both older age and lesser reading experience individually correlate with stronger TP effects. Moreover, TP effects differ across the spillover region (the two words following the noun in the bigram).