The emergence of lexico-grammatical productivity has been a central issue in the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA). Ellis (2002) proposed that formulaic chunks of language are one resource for the learner to develop such productivity. This exploratory study sought to determine whether formulaic language chunks were observed in the oral production of three adult beginner learners of Eng...

Abstract Multiword units of language, known as formulaic sequences, are pervasive and essential in communication ( Wray, 2008 ). Although issues related to formulaicity have been under investigation a number research studies (e.g. Conklin & Schmitt, ; Wood, 2006 ), the present study is different investigating functions sequences oral language production young learners context English foreig...

This article revisits earlier proposals that language learning is, in essence, the learning of formulaic sequences and their interpretations; that this occurs at all levels of granularity from large to small; and that the language system emerges from the statistical abstraction of patterns latent within and across form and function in language usage. It considers recent research in individual d...

The human brain is a veritable hodgepodge of ad hoc assemblages of the old, the borrowed, and the new, gerrymandered in response to millennia of internal and external forces. It follows that human cognition has unfolded, over evolutionary time, out of disparate fragments: emotion, movement programs, very old instincts, multiple memory systems, visual patterning and many uses of sound, all in co...

There is an ongoing debate as to whether singing helps left-hemispheric stroke patients recover from non-fluent aphasia through stimulation of the right hemisphere. According to recent work, it may not be singing itself that aids speech production in non-fluent aphasic patients, but rhythm and lyric type. However, the long-term effects of melody and rhythm on speech recovery are largely unknown...