Haiyang Ai

University of Cincinnati | UC · School of Education

Lexical complexity, generally understood as a multidimensional construct consisting of lexical density, sophistication, and diversity, has been recognized as an important construct in first language acquisition and second language acquisition. A large variety of lexical complexity measures have been proposed by researchers to study its relationship...

This study examined how the typological characteristics of the first language (L1) affect the motion-path formulation of motion events in English as a second language (L2) among native speakers of Chinese, Korean, and English, and discussed their pedagogical implications for multi-word verb use. Sixty-one university students participated in an elic...

Lexical bundles are frequently recurring word sequences (e.g. as can be seen) that function as building blocks of discourse. This corpus-based study examined the use of four-word lexical bundles in business emails written by three groups of writers: intermediate business English learners, advanced business English learners, and working professional...

To understand constructs underpinning L2 production, this study investigated how native speakers (mean age = 26.61) of Chinese (n = 29), Korean (n = 23), and English (n = 28) formulated spoken narratives in English and how functional factors were related to the linguistic richness of narratives under the framework of thinking for speaking. To ident...

Learners of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL) tend to swap the two characters within a coordinative compound word in verbal identification and written production. This mixed methods study not only investigated how CFL learners identified intercharacter orthographic and semantic relationships within two-morpheme coordinative compound words, but al...

This study examined the effects of the speaker's face and accent on second language (L2) speech perception. Forty-two Chinese speakers of English immersed in the L2 environment were instructed to perform a cross-modal semantic judgement task. They saw an Asian or Caucasian face on the screen and heard word pairs in L2 in a native English accent or...

The main purpose of this study is to investigate guessing in the Yes/No (YN) format vocabulary test. One-hundred-and-five university students took a YN test, a translation task and a multiple-choice vocabulary size test (MC VST). With matched lexical properties between the real words and the pseudowords, pseudowords could index guessing in the YN t...

The present study examines when second language (L2) learners read words in the L2, whether the orthography and/or phonology of the translation words in the first language (L1) is activated and whether the patterns would be modulated by the proficiency in the L2. In two experiments, two groups of Chinese learners of English immersed in the L1 envir...

Corrective feedback (CF), a response to linguistic errors made by second language (L2) learners, has received extensive scholarly attention in second language acquisition. While much of the previous research in the field has focused on whether CF facilitates or impedes L2 development, few studies have examined the efficacy of gradually modifying th...

This chapter investigates the lexis-grammar interface of Chinese English from a corpus linguistics perspective. Utilizing large-scale corpus data collected from an online discussion forum, we have focused on the prototypical ditransitive verb GIVE and examined its verb-complementation patterns, direct object slots collocates, the relationship betwe...

Recent research in world Englishes shows that the lexis-grammar interface, or lexicogrammar, constitutes an important area for investigating structural nativisation of local varieties of English (Schilk 2011). While most studies of lexicogrammar have focused on Inner Circle and Outer Circle varieties, the study presented in this paper focuses on an...

This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of syntactic complexity in NNS and NS university students' writing. We analysed 600 essays from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners and the Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays using 10 syntactic complexity measures to investigate whether and the extent to which NNS and NS university stu...

In this presentation, we introduced a web-based interface to the Dr. Xiaofei Lu's (2010) Lexical Complexity Analyzer that automate the measurement of 14 indices of The Lexical Complexity Analyzer (LCA), developed by Professor Xiaofei Lu at The Pennsylvania State University, is a tool that allows language teachers and researchers to analyze the le...