The  present  meta-analysis  was  conducted  to  provide  a  quantitative  measure  of  the overall effects of task complexity on Chinese EFL learners’ language  production.  Based  on  the strict inclusion criteria, 12 primary  studies  were synthesized according to key  features.  Eleven of them  were  meta-analyzed  to  investigate  effects  of  raising  the  resource-directing  task  comple...

Across 3 different word recognition tasks, distributional analyses were used to examine the joint effects of stimulus quality and word frequency on underlying response time distributions. Consistent with the extant literature, stimulus quality and word frequency produced additive effects in lexical decision, not only in the means but also in the shape of the response time distributions, support...

Lexical sophistication is an important component of writing proficiency. New lexical indices related to range, n-gram frequency, psycholinguistic word information, academic language, polysemy, and hypernymy have yielded new insights into the construct of lexical sophistication and its relationship with second language (L2) acquisition and writing. For example, recent studies have suggested that...

We present our experiments on integrating and evaluating distributional semantics with the recognising textual entailment task (RTE). We consider entailment as semantic similarity between text and hypothesis coupled with additional heuristic, which can be either selecting the top scoring hypothesis or a pre-defined threshold. We show that a distributional model is particularly good at detecting...

Intonation, when used in a narrow sense, refers to fundamental frequency (henceforth F0) patterns in speech that convey information beyond lexical meanings. In a broader sense, intonation also includes other suprasegmental patterns such as duration, intensity and voice quality, etc., that also convey non-lexical meanings. This article will focus mainly on the former, because, as will be seen, F...

The present study aims at investigating the effect of different levels of lexical collocational density on EFL learners’ reading comprehension. Eighty sophomore students with different levels of proficiency studying at  Zand Institute of Higher Education in Shiraz, Iran were chosen from among eighty five learners based on their score distribution on a reduced TOEFL test constructed by Education...

: This study aims to explore the relationship between syntactic and lexical complexity and also the relationship between different aspects of lexical complexity. To this end, speech monologs of 35 Iranian high-intermediate learners of English on three different tasks (i.e. argumentation, description, and narration) were analyzed for correlations between one measure of sy...

Results from empirical studies in bilingual research demonstrate that “code-switching” in bilinguals, i.e., the change from one language to another, comes at a cost. What is still unclear is the exact nature of the cost. In this paper, we develop a connectionist model of Green’s Inhibitory Control (IC) hypothesis for a bilingual lexical decision task (Green, 1998, 74), which hypothesizes that t...

We present preliminary results concerning the use of lexical clustering algorithms to acquire the kind of lexical knowledge needed to resolve definite descriptions, and in particular what we call ’inferential’ descriptions. We tested the hypothesis that the antecedent of an inferential description is primarily identified on the basis of its semantic distance from the description; we also tested...