Robert Nelson

  • Japan Campus

    Associate Professor, Temple University, Japan Campus

    Programs
    • Graduate College of Education

Robert Nelson was awarded a Ph.D. in ESL and Applied Linguistics by Purdue University in 2008. Previously, he was an Assistant Professor of ESL at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Murray State University in Kentucky. He has seventeen years of experience teaching ESL and second language writing, including five years in Japan. His research approaches language and language learning from a complex adaptive systems perspective, and employs a diverse array of methods, including statistical and neural network models and corpus analysis. His work has been published in Language Learning, the Modern Language Journal, Second Language Research, and the Mental Lexicon.

Recent publications:

  • Nelson, R. (2024). Groundhog Day is not a good model for corpus dispersion. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics.
    https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2024.2423415
     
  • Nelson, R. (2024). Using constructions to measure developmental language complexity. Cognitive Linguistics.
    https://doi.org/10.1515/cog-2023-0062
     
  • Nelson, R. (2024). Author’s Response to Gries (2024). Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. 31(2)
    https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2024.2344944
     
  • Nelson, R. (2023). Too Noisy at the Bottom: Why Gries’s (2008, 2021) dispersion measures cannot identify unbiased distributions of words. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics. 1-14,
    https://doi.org/10.1080/09296174.2023.2172711
     
  • Nelson, R. (2018). How Chunky is Language? Estimates Based on Sinclair’s Idiom Principle. Corpora, 13(3). 431-460.
     
  • Liu, D. & Nelson, R. (2017). Diversity in the Classroom. The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. J. I. Liontas (Ed.). Wiley
     
  • Liu, D. & Nelson, R. (2017). Country of Origin and Non-Native English Speaker Teachers. The TESOL Encyclopedia of English Language Teaching. J. I. Liontas (Ed.). Wiley
     
  • Liu, D. & Nelson, R. (2016). Teaching Language as a System. in The Routledge handbook of English language teaching. Routledge. Hall, G. (Ed.), 413-428.
     
  • Nelson, R. (2015). Issues with the Capture-Recapture Measure of Vocabulary Size. Mental Lexicon, 10(1). 152-163.
     
  • Nelson, R. (2015). Possible Measures of Asymmetry and Redundancy in Collocations.  Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science. 1(2), 191-212.
     
  • Nelson, R. (2014). Statistical properties of English text produced by Korean and Chinese authors. Journal of Research Design and Statistics in Linguistics and Communication Science, 1(1), 54-72.
     
  • Nelson, R. (2013). Expanding the Role of Connectionism in SLA Theory. Language Learning, 63(1), 1-33.
     
  • Nelson, R. (2012). Perceptual Filtering in L2 Lexical Memory: A Neural Network Approach to Second Language Acquisition. The Modern Language Journal, 96(3), 350-368.
     
  • Nelson, R. (2011). Vigilance, expectancy, and noise: Attention in second language lexical learning and memory, Second Language Research. 27(2), 153-171.
     
  • Nelson, R. (2007). Why Adult Language Learning is Harder: A Computational Model of the Consequences of Cultural Selection for Learnability. (2007). In D. S. McNamara & J. G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1337-1343). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Education
Ph.D., Purdue University