SLA Faculty and Students Present at AAAL 2025 Conference in Denver

SLA faculty and students shared their research at the 2025 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference in Denver, showcasing studies on vocabulary, emotion, processing, and more.

Faculty and Ph.D. students from the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) program proudly represented the department at the 2025 American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) Conference in Denver, Colorado. Their presentations showcased the depth of research in applied linguistics, covering key areas such as vocabulary learning, affective factors in language learning, multimodal input and inhibitory control.

Presenters and their topics, listed in order of presentation:

• Ruirui Jia: Verifying the Lack of L2 Lexical Competition as a Consequence of Fuzzy Lexical Representation
• Jonathan Malone: Toward a Theory-Based Account of the Vocabulary Processing and Learning Benefits of Multimodal Input
• Wei Yi: Contextual and collocational probability effects on predictive sentence comprehension: A visual-world paradigm study
• Moning Lyu: Interplay of Emotions and Achievement in EFL Learning: Examining the Moderating Effect of Grit on L2 Emotion and Achievement
• Congyao Wu: Exploring Motivational Dispositions’ Effects on Vocabulary Learning: A Modified Replication of Papi (2018)
• Takehiro Iizuka: Does Modality Matter? Aural and Written Vocabulary in Second Language Listening and Reading Comprehension
• Zhiyi Wu, Ruirui Jia, and Bronson Hui: Can We Ever Measure Inhibitory Control Reliably? An Extension of Hui & Wu (2024) and Huensch (2024)
• Sanshiroh Ogawa: Facilitating Chinese Learners’ Perception of Japanese Voicing Contrasts Through HVPT: Role of Domain-General Auditory Processing
• Ekaterina Sudina: Self-citation attitudes and practices in applied linguistics: A mixed-methods study
• Bronson Hui: Is Reading-While-Listening Helpful for Comprehension? Not Really, Especially if One Assumes It Can Support Decoding

We celebrate the accomplishments of our SLA scholars and their  contributions to the global conversation on language learning and teaching. Congratulations to all presenters for sharing their work at one of the field’s most prestigious conferences.